Present Perfect

GStreamer

GStreamer is such a cool project to be a part of. This week I discovered EffecTV on Freshmeat. This guy has a project he uses himself as a VJ, where he applies video effects onto an incoming video feed from a V4L device which he then outputs again. He has a picture of his booth and it looks pretty cool... Anyway, while the effects are cool, the scope is limited. He explains how to chain effects using v4l-loopback devices.

So this is where GStreamer shines : take the core algorithms, wrap them into a plugin and you can apply the effect to any video pipeline. You can now also easily chain effects. A few samples of the result can be seen in the news blurb on the GStreamer web site. Wim Taymans coded the basic infrastructure for porting effecTV effects into the element in a few hours, and porting an effect is a matter of minutes ;) I particulary like the agingTV effect, which adds dust, noise and scratch lines to any video, making it look old. I can already imagine jerking friends around when watching TV or movies and pushing the secret "age" button and then pretending I don't see what they're seeing ... So all we need for that to happen is to write a simple TV watching application using GStreamer.

Next on the list is to discuss with the effecTV guys how we can make their effects into a shared library that can be used by anyone. GStreamer is a project that takes the usefulness of the GPL to new levels, IMO ...

The only sad thing about GStreamer is that not enough people realize it's potential. We'll have to bring out some of the basic applications ourselves to make people realize just how far-reaching the consequences can be.

I keep saying "we", and I suppose that's a good thing. GStreamer makes me feel part of a team, even though I don't do as much coding as I should. I hope the others don't mind when I gloss over that sometimes, I don't intend to take credit for stuff they do, in any case.

apt-rpm

Since looking at Connectiva's apt port for RPM for the first time, I find myself more and more drawn to it. I'm setting up RPM mirrors at home and at work for Red Hat and Ximian, and using apt-rpm for upgrades is on the whole a lot quicker and more satisfying than using Red Carpet. This is not meant to diss Red Carpet - it's just that I might just probably not be the ideal end user of it. I can see my sister using it to great advantage though. Me, I like to go below the hood a little. GStreamer and Red-Carpet

We're currently setting up a GStreamer Red-Carpet Preview channel. It is really cool of Ximian to invite us to do this. At the moment, everything is in a private channel, where we're testing our packaging. The goal is to use this channel to offer (unsupported) GStreamer-based software. The first really good example of this is RhythmBox. It's a really nice-looking project. The goal is to have end users click on rhythmbox and have everything installed.

This is not as easy as it sounds, since GStreamer by nature consists of lots of small packages, of which a lot depend on one other supporting package. So we find ourselves rethinking our packaging strategy. Together with dobey and Uraeus, we have over the last months improved a lot of the build and packaging issues.

Now I want to take this to the next step, and build all of GStreamer's packages in a true build root, together with the supporting libraries. Taking some inspiration from the GAR system (which is used for jdub's excellent Garnome), I wanted to build a system using make to easily set up a build root environment in which you can chroot and build packages. The first part is pretty much done. You use it by doing :

 cd dist/redhat-72-i386 make root 

and off it goes. It clears the root if it can, installs a base system, installs apt for rpm, and from then on apt can do the job of installing whatever's necessary for building. Part two is how to define how to actually build packages. The nice thing will be when you use the spec file to figure out the BuildRequires and have apt-get install those for you. This is an application where apt really shines - but I suppose you debian users already knew that...

The build system itself will be available if people care to use it (drop me a line). It can be easily adapted to any RPM-based distribution with little work. So this build system will be used by us to generate clean RPM packages for all distributions we care about (it is really easy to add other distributions to this build system). It is a little ironic to be using apt-rpm to generate packages for Red-Carpet.

Music

Went to see a terrific concert last week : Grant Lee Phillips, lead singer of Grant Lee Buffalo gone solo. I wasn't sure if I would go - I used to love Grant Lee Buffalo, but I'm not sure I really like his solo work. In any case, I went, and was rewarded with a gem of a concert. It was him, his guitar, and an extra violin player. The strange thing is, he played almost all of the second album of GLB, lots of the first, and only a handful of new songs. For me, this was a treat - it made me realize how much I used to love the "Fuzzy" and "Mighty Joe Moon" albums. And the acoustic solo treatment was a very nice touch. He is such a gifted singer and guitar player - go check him out !

And in the nearby future, lots of good concerts : Six by Seven (great new album), And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead (great new album), Arid ... Thinking of going to Ozzfest as well because of Tool. And looking forward to new work from Belgian bands Arid and Gorki.

GStreamer GStreamer is such a cool project to be a part of. This week I discovered EffecTV on Freshmeat. This guy has a project he uses himself as a VJ,...