Present Perfect

GStreamer

I converted the FAQ to Docbook so it's easier to add lots of entries to it locally, then update the website FAQ. Took some time to get the sed magic right to convert the generated html to our site layout, but everything is ok now. So if you have time look over the GStreamer FAQ and let me know what is missing and what questions you want answered ;)

Been busy working on the media info library in GStreamer - a library which is supposed to read media files and extract metadata, format stuff and so on in a generic way.

Was a bit of work, and took a bit of prodding Wim to help me define the concepts and how to extract them, and it seems to work very well now. I've mostly tested with ogg and mp3, but it seems to be blazingly fast. My original plan was to have the library cache all of the media info by default, but I might hold off a little more on that idea because it seems time is less of an issue then I used to think. I am impressed even more with GStreamer's architecture and forethought in these matters.

We need a little work on settling some of the issues if we want to go into Gnome 2.2 They are mostly boring things, like figuring out .so naming, header location, and so on, but pretty important to get right nonetheless.

nautilus-media

Now that the media info library is more or less working, I worked on nautilus-media some more. I converted it to use the new library. For now, I'm copying the code, because I don't want to make it depend on what could potentially be a moving target yet. Nautilus-media will be the proof of media-info in GStreamer for now, so it makes sense to duplicate code for now.

Anyway, now it's really easy to have media info in the view, and I'm going to add property pages next, which snorp has already given me some code for. Hope that will make it easier to do this ;)

Other than that, I should reply to the opinions jorn stated in his diary, where he didn't see the need for a view like this. First of all, I totally agree with extending the icon view to have better property information in the view itself, depending on the mime type. I don't care how many bytes my photos are, I do care about what resolution they're in. I don't care how many bytes my sound file is, I do care how many seconds it is. That's the sort of thing I hope to see in Nautilus in the future.

Second, I really am convinced that a view like this has a lot of uses. The key thing here is that it should try to be useful inside a file browser. What this means in practice is that it shouldn't act like a player, but act like a quick and easy way to browse through audio files in their native format. This means that it should allow you to quickly go through files in a directory, easily see relevant data about these files (tags, properties, format, ...), and quickly listen to or skip through the audio files.

In this light, I am against the original music view, which had code to arrange the tracks based on album position, tried to detect that the directory contained an album, and had a mechanism to detect an image file which it then thought to be the cover for the album and it set this as the background. I could be wrong about the specifics, because I went through the code, and didn't actually see it, but it does have album-specific stuff in it.

That is the domain of a music player and not a file browser. The features I'll be concentrating on here instead is

• have it play through the files
• have it report useful info about files
• make it easy to seek through files
• have a "sample" button that skips through the tracks and plays the middle part of a track

Other features might be more media-specific. I'm currently contemplating the option of allowing to drag out streams out of a media file, so that they get saved as a separate file. This would allow you to drag out the second logical stream out of an ogg file, or the audio part of a video file.

Some people might think these are crazy features, but when you work with audio they make sense. They make sense because these features work with your files and their contents, without manipulating them. The problem is that most people don't work much with audio at all, so it might seem hard to justify features like these. (I do not regard "handing 30 GB of songs to your music player as "working with audio", btw). But as computers get faster and hard disks get bigger, people will start moving around audio and video stuff a lot more than they do now. Your phone messages ? They'll be on your hard disk. Your camcorder recordings ? On your hard disk.

For basic previewing and scanning, having play stuff in your file browser makes sense, especially when it's not expensive at all, and optional. Launching a separate app to check out these files is unnecessary overhead. If you do not agree, then it is very simple - don't use it.

By the way, nautilus-media will contain a lot more than just the view. I'm working on property pages right now, and it also contains a video thumbnailer.

So I've been running the view to play my music for the last few days to stress-test it, and it works very well. Even, remarkably, seems to skip a lot less than xmms and rhythmbox. I also got a mail from someone who tried it out and told me it worked (apart from the few bugs I need to figure out, like lifecycle management). It's great to get mails from people telling you that your stuff works ;)

bitches

Someone is now using bitches to build RPM's on Yellow Dog Linux. That's great - hope I get some patches for that soon, I want to do a new release.

Fedora

Some people are thinking of setting up community-based repositories of RPM's for Red Hat. That would be a great initiative. FreshRPMS has always been a good source of extra packages for Red Hat, and the concept of expanding on this appeals a lot to me. I like Matthias's work a lot, but (for reasons I can understand) he only puts up packages he himself made.

Which reminds me - I still need to work with him to handle some of the clashes between our and his repository. Hm, just checked, and he seems to have put up packages of gstreamer and gstreamer-devel. That's too bad - first of all they're pretty useless to users on their own, and second, it's going to clash even more. I wonder why he did that.

DrWright

If you use Gnome 2, get this handy app. It locks your desktop after a given amount of time, forcing you to take a break. And it's sexy. It helps me to overcome the guilt of taking a break at work. I have it set at five minute breaks every 90 minutes.

Music

I saw five concerts in the last week. A slight case of overbombing, I think. Anyway, I'll keep it short and list them in order of appreciation.

• Spinvis gave the best concert. Spinvis is a Dutch "project", singing in Dutch. It's basically one guy of about fourty who recorded a pretty good album at home. I guess in Dutch it's called "huisvlijt". Anyway, he used a lot of samples on the album, and played everything himself, but on stage he brings along an 8-piece band with vibraphone, harp, some Turkish instrument I don't know, and so on. Half the band is over sixty, and his dad plays along as well. In any case, the music is even better live. You can sense that he has a meticulous eye for detail, and the nonchalance that is in the album music and the lyrics shows itself to be carefully constructed as being it. It's nice to be surprised by the fact that someone put real effort in the music he made when the music seemed to have that fleeting surreal quality that makes it seem so effortless.
  He even managed to play all my favourite tracks on his album, and the only drawback was the fact that, just under 55 minutes, the concert was too short.
• Coldplay gave a pretty stunning performance even though the venue is way too big (it can hold up to 8000 people) to get some sort of intimate feeling out of the music. It's trendy to like Coldplay, and it's even more trendy to hate them, but the fact of the matter is that he has a great voice and writes some great tunes. And I happen to like both. A really inspiring concert.
• The Tragically Hip have a great new album out, and they are almost always stunning to see live. Gordon Downie doesn't just sing, he acts the songs. He's constantly fighting with himself, making faces, acting out a play in his own world. Very mesmerizing to see. And it helps that the music is so damn good too. Very good set list, they did miss some of my favourites on the new album though. Biggest drawback was my friend coming with me getting sick after song 4 and having to miss most of the concert.
• The Cure are playing a set of Trilogy concerts, in which they play all of Pornography, Disintegration and Bloodflowers in their entirety and in order.

  If you feel that "this could get boring easily", you are half right. It is a bit boring to know the setlis in advance. They played the albums very well though, and he seemed to be enjoying himself. The concert lasted for just about four hours (breaks included). We had arrived late because Peter (which is the big Cure fan in our house) managed to miss the train - and the three next trains that could have taken him to my work.

  Of the three albums, Bloodflowers ended up being the best to hear live. A lot more consistent and well-rounded. But still it was great to hear very well-done versions of a strange day, love song, fascination street, lullaby, disintegration, and so on.

• Manic Street Preachers are doing a Greatest Hits Tour. This has the potential to be amazing, but somehow something got lost between idea and execution. They sadly sounded more like a cover band covering themselves. The setlist was great, stellar even, and the performance was ok, his voice was good, and so on - but it was just missing huge chunks of meaning all over. Sad, somehow.

GStreamer I converted the FAQ to Docbook so it's easier to add lots of entries to it locally, then update the website FAQ. Took some time to get the sed...