Coder's Log

Help needed for Debian and Ubuntu

2011-12-22T11:47:00.000-08:00

If you read any of my previous blog entries, you must be now familiar with this 'express installation' concept we have in Boxes. Its pretty neat actually, you just set a few options at the beginning and then you can leave Boxes (or your machine) and when you are back, everything is setup for you automatically in a new box.

I have invested a lot of time/efforts on this already and will be spending a lot more time in future as well but I am just one man so can not possibly cover all operating systems out there. That is why I am asking for help from anyone who will be interested in adding express installation support for Ubuntu and Debian while I focus on Fedora and Windows variants. Oh and if you are interested in adding support for some other distribution/OS, that contribution will also be more than welcomed.

In any case, happy hacking!

Another awesome release of Boxes

2011-12-20T16:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we rolled out the second release of Boxes for upcoming GNOME 3.3.3. There are many fixes/improvements in this release to list them all here but the most significant ones in my opinion are:

A nicer UI for deletion of Boxes designed for protecting the user from accidental deletion of boxes. Here is a video demo of it in action.
Special handling of 'live' and unknown media: Quick launch of a temporary box for it, which is made permanent automatically (only) if anything is installed on the box by the media. Here is a video demo of this behaviour in action.
Express installation for Windows XP now works, thanks to important clues provided by Lucas Meneghel Rodrigues. Don't believe me? I have video footage that proves it.
UI for setting user and administrator password and in case of older Windows, ability to set product key as part preparation for express installation. Please check out the videos above for demo of this feature in action.

Apart from changes in Boxes itself, there were some note-worthy changes in our dependencies that helps us directly.

Christophe Fergeau added a big bunch of new APIs to libvirt-glib (libvirt-gconfig to be precise) for dealing with libvirt's configuration XML. Now Boxes uses that instead of manually writing/editing XML strings.
A Google Code-In participant, Mateusz Kaplon added a lot of data about various different operating systems to libosinfo. For Boxes that means more complete and reliable detection and default resource allocation for various operating systems.

For a detailed list of changes in Boxes 3.3.3, please refer to the release notes.

Behold the Boxes!

2011-11-22T14:29:00.000-08:00

Dear readers! If you recall, in a blog post not so long ago I introduced you to the wonderful virtual world I now live in. Now around the same time I wrote that post, some of the GNOME designers and developers (myself included) felt the need for having a UI as an integral part of GNOME that lets users easily manage (create and destroy) virtual machines and at the same time lets them connect to remote machines.

Two of our awesome designers, Jon McCann and Jakub Steiner) started creating design for this UI. We (as in Jon McCann) named it 'Boxes' as its something that deals with..hm.. boxes. At the same time, we (me, Marc-Andre and Christophe) kept working on the foundations for Boxes, mainly in the form of lots of improvements to libvirt, libvirt-glib, libosinfo and spice-gtk.

About less than a month ago we started implementing the design when the design stabilized a bit. The implementation actually started as a "proof of concept" from Marc-Andre over a weekend. The result was already so good that we decided to move it to git.gnome as the bases for Boxes' implementation. While most of the credit for the UI goes to Marc-Andre, I think he will agree that it wouldn't have been so easy to get this started so quickly if we hadn't chosen to write this in Vala.

Since by now you have read a lot of blah blah already, I'll stop boring you more and show you some screenshots of what we have already:

And if that gets you excited, you'd want to see this screencast where I show Boxes in action.

After a few days of tiring work on fixing critical issues in Boxes and its dependencies we finally managed to roll-out our first release. You are more than welcome to try it out already and report any issues you find but please keep in mind that at the moment we require the latest (unstable in many cases) releases of our dependencies to be able to make use of their latest features. If you happen to be a jhbuild user, you are in luck as building boxes is as easy as typing `jhbuild build gnome-boxes`.

Why not virt-manager?

virt-manager is an awesome tool and I myself use it everyday. I am sure other Boxes hackers are using it on daily bases as well. However we must keep in mind that the UI we were looking for in GNOME is not meant for enterprise-level system-administrators who have hundreds of mission-critical virtual-machines on an array of super computers but rather a typical end-user who just wants to connect from his laptop to his work machine(s) and/or try different operating systems. While virt-manager is undoubtedly the best choice for the former, its not at all tailored for the latter.

It should be noted that while we decided not to use virt-manager for the UI, we still are trying our best to share as much code base/efforts with virt-manager as possible in terms of infrastructure, mainly in the form of libvirt, libosinfo, qemu and spice-gtk.

Known issues

Boxes is still in its infancy so you might find a lot of issues in Boxes and its dependencies but one issue that is a big show-stopper at the moment is the breakage of floppy support in recent Qemu. Boxes depends on floppy-support for making automated/express install possible for both Linux and Windows. Fortunately the issue is already fixed in git master of Qemu and its just a matter of releasing and packaging by distributions.

How to help?

Seems many people are already very excited about this little project of ours and I'm hoping this blog entry will attract more contributors so I wanted to point out some things we need help with. If you are interested in UI work, Marc-Andre has written down a TODO for Boxes that you can pick some tasks from. Other than that, we still need a lot of help with two of our main dependencies:

libosinfo: This library is our store for information on operating systems and means to detect operating systems from installation media.
libvirt-glib: libvirt-glib wraps libvirt to provide a high-level object-oriented API better suited for glib-based applications.

While Boxes is written in Vala, these libraries are completely written in C so if you are a C hacker and want to contribute, these would be good places to start with. While most of the work needed on libosinfo is that of populating its database with information on all kinds of operating systems out there, libvirt-glib still lacks a lot of needed API. One particular part of libvirt-glib that needs the most work and is of highest priority to us is its API to deal with libvirt's configuration XML.

We all love boxes, don't we?

libvirt-glib 0.0.1 is out!

2011-11-16T06:22:00.001-08:00

The first public release of libvirt-glib is out! libvirt-glib wraps libvirt to provide a high-level object-oriented API better suited for glib-based applications. Daniel wrote nice release notes so I'll save myself some time and quote it for more details:

I am pleased to announce the first release of the libvirt-glib package,
version 0.0.1 is now available from

  ftp://libvirt.org/libvirt/glib/

The packages are GPG signed with

    Key ID: 15104FDF  Daniel P. Berrange 
    Key fingerprint: DAF3 A6FD B26B 6291 2D0E  8E3F BE86 EBB4 1510 4FDF

libvirt-glib comprises three distinct libraries:

   - libvirt-glib    - Integrate with the GLib event loop and error handling
   - libvirt-gconfig - Representation of libvirt XML documents as GObjects
   - libvirt-gobject - Mapping of libvirt APIs into the GObject type system

As of this release only the event loop integration and some basic APIs for
managing domains are provided. The representation of XML as GObjects is a
major work item that is just beginning.

The libvirt-gconfig library can be used without linking to the main libvirt.so
library, so it is suitable for consumption by applications which use libvirt
indirectly via AMQP, CIM or another API transport which accepts XML documents.

All the libraries support GObject introspection to enable immediate usage
from any language which can dynamically import objects via introspection.
There are also Vala bindings which are automatically generated from the
introspection data.

NB: While libvirt aims to be API/ABI stable, for the first few releases,
we are *NOT* guaranteeing that libvirt-glib libraries are API/ABI stable.
ABI stability will only be guaranteed once the bulk of the APIs have been
fleshed out and proved in non-trivial application usage. We anticipate
this will be within the next 6 months in order to line up with Fedora 17.

Follow up comments about libvirt-glib should be directed to the regular
libvir-list@redhat.com developmenht list.

Thanks to all the people involved in contributing to this release.

Introducing libosinfo

2011-10-25T17:18:00.000-07:00

The first release of libosinfo is out!

What is libosinfo?

libosinfo is a GObject based library API for managing information about
operating systems, hypervisors and the (virtual) hardware devices they can
support. It includes a database containing device metadata and provides APIs
to match/identify optimal devices for deploying an operating system on a
hypervisor. Via the magic of GObject Introspection, the API is available in all
common programming languages with demos for javascript (GJS/Seed) and python
(PyGObject). Also provided are Vala bindings.

libosinfo is Free Software and licenced under LGPLv2+.

Dependencies

Required:

gobject-2.0
gio-2.0
libxml-2.0

Optional:

gobject-introspection
Vala (build-time only)

Download

http://fedorahosted.org/releases/l/i/libosinfo/

Homepage

http://fedorahosted.org/libosinfo/

GNOME 3.2 party in Helsinki!

2011-10-06T06:30:00.000-07:00

The party turned out to be a lot more successful than I thought. I thought only a few people will show-up since there aren't that many gnomies around that I know of. We had lots of nice discussions on various topics especially the future of GNOME and Free SW in general. One of the participants was very interested in having some way to write UIs that work for both big screens and tiny screen of his Openmoko mobile phone, which turned out to be quite an interesting discussion.

Taking the EXOPC running Fedora 16 with me was indeed a good idea since almost every participant wanted to see how it works. Although I had to keep telling/reminding everyone that on-screen-keyboard in gnome-shell is not exactly finished, I noticed that people were pretty much already able to use GNOME 3.2 with a touch-only interface. The biggest issue people encountered wasn't the OSK though but the bad touch-screen on the tablet.

Some pictures from the event:

Helsinki GNOME 3.2 release party

2011-10-03T19:08:00.000-07:00

If you happen to be in Helsinki tomorrow (Wednesday) evening, don't forget to drop-by at Kaisla to celebrate the awesome GNOME 3.2 release with us. Not only you will get to hang-out and have beers with other cool people in town but also get to try out GNOME 3.2 on a tablet. If you have never been to Kaisla before, this is one bar you must visit if you are interested in beers as they have a rather decent collection of beers from different countries.

See you tomorrow at 8pm there!

Got a red hat? Check!

2011-09-09T18:35:00.000-07:00

I finally got my (long awaited) hat!

Now back to work...

See you in Berlin!

2011-08-02T13:25:00.000-07:00

I have a talk where I'll attempt to ~~brain-wash~~ educate the masses about the awesomeness of Vala language. If you are even slightly interested, please do attend. I also have arranged a BoF together with KDE's Friedrich Kossebau to discuss about the possibility of SSDP (discovery protocol used by UPnP) as a system service.

See you in Berlin soon!

Slightly more on virtual world..

2011-06-22T06:40:00.000-07:00

Forgot to mention in my last blog post that SPICE is not just more efficient at network bandwidth utilization but is also much more faster/responsive. Also, Jon Nordby pointed out that the screenshots of virt-manager I copied from virt-manager website are several years outdated. Here is how the main UI looks like now a days.

P.S. I was going to inline this screenshot but blogger.com is not letting me do that. :(

Welcome to the virtual world!

2011-06-21T18:03:00.000-07:00

About two months ago I informed the followers of this blog that I will now be working on SPICE project for Red Hat. Judging from the questions I was asked after that, I realized that not many people know about SPICE so I thought I write at least one blog entry dedicated to explaining what SPICE is all about. Before I get to SPICE itself, let me first introduce you to the world SPICE lives in.

Virtualization and Virtual Machines (VMs)

For some reason, I feel that I should leave the definitions to wikipedia and only quote it so that is what I am going to do:

"Virtualization, in computing, is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as a hardware platform, operating system, a storage device or network resources."

"A virtual machine (VM) is a "completely isolated operating system installation within your normal operating system".Today, this is implemented by either software emulation or hardware virtualization".

Virtualization (of software and hardware platforms) is really nothing new and has been around since..well the the real thing itself: computers. There has been several implementations of different kind ever since and I are two main reason they exist and grow:

Developing/testing software for hardware that you do not have. This makes virtualization softwares were attractive for consumer product manufacturers to be able to start the development of software soon after the plans for a particular product are finalized since it takes some time before they can manufacture enough prototypes for every developer and tester involved.
Portability: In a typically VM setup, installation is done on drive images (files) rather than actual drives/partitions, which means you can carry or send your (virtual) machine anywhere you like.
Ability to use multiple operating systems at the same time: Many Linux and Mac OS X users often need to run applications that are only available for windows and vice versa. Dual-boot is one solution to this issue but that implies you will only be able to use one OS at a time.
Partitioning of a single host to multiple servers: Consolidation of many servers to a single host is a popular use case these days, done internally in many companies and also by hosting services. aka “The Cloud”.

Despite its big drawback, traditionally dual-boot has remained to be the preferred solution for many for a long time. The reason for that has mainly been the limitations of virtualization solutions, especially in terms of performance. However due to significant improvements in both hardware (built-in virtualization support and multi-core) and software, virtualization solutions have been gaining a lot of popularity lately.

Tools

Qemu + KVM

There are many such solutions out there, both Free and non-Free out there but the solution of our choice is Qemu. This awesome virtual-machine manager (a.k.a hypervisor) combined with Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and built-in virtualization extensions in modern CPUs is capable of providing such a virtual environment that puts the real thing to shame.

Qemu+kvm might be a very powerful tool, its still very much a power-user tool. For example you have to use long commandlines with different switches to use Qemu effectively. Worry not! There is another set of tools to help there:

libvirt

While Qemu+KVM might be an awesome solution, its still one of the many hypervisors out there and with some many people pouring into the virtualization industry, you can be assured that there will be a better alternative available sooner or later. libvirt not only abstracts you from hypervisors but also adds some really nice features on top of that:

Manipulation (creation, deletion and modification etc) and monitoring etc of virtual machines on remote hosts, securely.
Live migration of virtual machine(s) from one host to another.

Apart from the libvirt library itself, the libvirt package also comes with a very nice commandline tool called virsh that exposes libvirt API as convenient arguments. As you can probably guess from its name, virsh is a shell so if you can launch it without (command) arguments it will launch an interactive shell, awaiting your commands.

virt-manager

Neither libvirt, not virsh are tools that an end-user could be expected to use. Thats where virt-manager comes into picture. It basically provides the same functionality as virsh but unlike virsh, its designed for end-users and hence has a very user-friendly graphical user-interface. Here is some screenshots that should give you a good idea:

While virt-manager has nice UIs for everything related to VM management, it still leaves the remote access of virtualized (guest) OS/desktop to tools that are tailored for that, such as VNC and SPICE.

SPICE

SPICE in simple words can be described as very smart remote-access enabler for virtual machines. Oh wait, I was supposed to leave definitions to wikipedia:

"In computing, SPICE (the Simple Protocol for Independent Computing Environments) is a remote-display system built for virtual environments which allows users to view a computing "desktop" environment - not only on its compute-server machine, but also from anywhere on the Internet and using a wide variety of machine architectures."

SPICE was originally developed by Qumranet as a proprietary solution. Red Hat acquired Qumranet in 2008 and in December 2009 Red Hat open-sourced the protocol.

Now with definition and history lesson taken care of, lets talk about the real thing: tools. SPICE, the implementation is divided into 3 main parts:

Server

The SPICE server that runs inside the Qemu binary as a library. Its mainly responsible for authentication of client connections, relaying of graphics output of guest OS to the client using a Qemu feature called QXL and relaying of user input (mouse and keyboard) from client to the guest.

Client(s)

This is the tool that end-user should be concerned with. It provides a view into the guest OS (very much like the popular VNC).In the past there was only one SPICE client called, spicec. Due to various reasons (not embeddable, too low-level etc), it was deemed necessary to create a better client-tool. So for the past some months, our team has been working on a SPICE client Gtk+ widget called (surprise suprice) spice-gtk and helped in integration of it in vinagre (the GNOME remote-desktop client). I still haven’t used (or even built) spicec but from what I’ve been told, vinagre+spice-gtk are already much better than spicec in functionality so I guess I haven’t missed anything. Wait! Why am I telling you all this when I can just show you?

Just to be very clear here, spice-gtk is nothing specific to vinagre so if you want to have SPICE integration in your UI(s), you can do it very easily using spice-gtk. Apart from the C API, it also provides gobject-introspection and Vala bindings.

vdagent:

There are certain important tasks that spice-server needs to perform that it can not do so itself as it runs on the host rather than guest. A good example is copy/cut and paste between client’s host and guest desktop. For this reason, vdagent exists. Its a helper that runs inside the guest (and as such is installed from the guest). So making the copy&paste possible, it proxies the appropriate events to/from the SPICE client from/to guest windowing system through spice-server.

Whats wrong with VNC?

VNC has been around for a while now and in modern unix world, its considered as the remote desktop solution so its natural for people to ask: why create yet another solution for the same problem? The reason is that SPICE protocol has been designed to be very efficient on bandwidth usage and to satisfy the needs of a virtualized environment ^[1]. Recall QXL I mentioned above? QXL is handled/implemented as something called paravirtual devices in SPICE. Its probably appropriate to quote the related wikipedia definition here first:

“In computing, paravirtualization is a virtualization technique that presents a software interface to virtual machines that is similar but not identical to that of the underlying hardware.”

So while a VNC server reads frames from video memory and sends (compressed though) the updated areas (if any) to the client, spice-server on the other hand presents the guest windowing system with an X driver that captures X protocol operations directly. That is what makes SPICE a lot more efficient at network usage compared to RFB protocol that VNC uses.

The end

I am really not good at explaining things so I’m sure I must have left-out some necessary details but worry not! We have a team of awesome hackers who can always help you with any issues related to SPICE. You can reach us either through our IRC channel or mailing-list. If you are attending the Desktop Summit 2011 in Berlin, you are in luck cause not only there is a talk about ‘Integrating virtualization into the desktop’ but also some of us will be attending the full duration of the conference so you can come and discuss with us in person.

If you are interested in readily available products based on these awesome virtualization tools, I suggest you have a look here.

[1] Actually, currently SPICE can only be used to access virtualized desktops, though one of our team members is actively working to make it possible to connect to normal/real desktops.

Release logs are important!

2011-06-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Turns out that not many Free Software maintainers follow the practice of writing proper release logs targetted for packagers/end-users. To justify their laziness, they come-up with lame excuses like "Oh, the user never sees the release log" etc and at the very most copy&paste the (developer oriented) VCS changelog since the last release. Here is how it actually affects a user:

Now if you click on the URL provided, you will be taken to a page where there is a lot of information but the one you are looking for: What exactly changed? In this particular case, its just an bugfix release but many times new features are added and users can't know that unless you put that nicely in your release log.

So please stop justifying your laziness and take the efforts to write the release log if you are a maintainer of a Free Software project. OTOH, if you are a downstream packager, please copy or link to the upstream release log in your package's changelog that upstream maintainer has put his/her time/efforts into. Thanks!

Canon Pixma MP560 printer and Linux

2011-05-30T12:50:00.000-07:00

When I bought this printer, I failed to find any Linux drivers for it. I must admit I didn't try hard to find them either since I was very much in a hurry at that time. Since then I had just assumed that drivers for Linux just don't exist.

But today I decided to search/try harder to get it working against my fedora laptop. The result was that I found the drivers very easily and after several minutes of efforts, I finally got it working! So I thought it blog about it and provide some pointers so process gets easier for others:

Ensure you have 'DefaultLanguage en_GB' line in your /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and your firewall isn't blocking Port 8611 for TCP/UDP.
Get the drivers from here. The drivers are available as rpm and deb packages.
Once you have the packages downloaded and installed on your system, find out the mac address of your printer somehow. The method I used was to watch for packets in wireshark and pinging the broadcast address of the network.
Once you have the mac address, Run this command as root:

/usr/sbin/lpadmin -p MP560LAN -m canonmp560.ppd -v cnijnet:/${MAC_ADDRESS} -E

Note that mac address bytes must be separated by '-' here rather than ':'.
Your printer should now be installed and working!

Rygel 0.10 is here!

2011-04-16T18:19:00.000-07:00

We just made our first stable releases of Rygel after many months of active development. I used to post a blog entry after each release with the full-log but I stopped doing that because some people didn't like it going to planet GNOME and I thought chances are high that other viewer might also be getting annoyed by it.

Anways, I would like to highlight some of the changes since 0.8.3:

Lots of improvements to our interoperability with other DLNA devices in the market.
Many optimizations to search, browse and streaming.
More efficient and correct use of Tracker APIs.
Richer media hierarchies.
Simplified transcoding by use of new 'encodebin' GStreamer element.
Preferences UI has been trimmed down to only provide a few options that users actually need. The plan is for this UI to disappear completely in GNOME 3.2 in favor of better (more integrated with rest of the desktop) alternatives.
More configurability (through config files, commandline and environment) for power users.
Ability to use Rygel as only a streaming server (without advertising it on the network).
Ability to bind Rygel to specific networks by their ESSID or network IP address.
Loads of random bug fixes.
Port to more modern APIs. For example port from dbus-glib and GValue usage to GDBus and GVariant.

For a full list of changes, please refer to our NEWS file. Hopefully this release is in time to make it to upcoming releases of all major GNU/Linux distributions along with awesome GNOME 3. Which reminds me:

Future Perfect

2011-04-05T11:59:00.000-07:00

Ever since I blogged about me looking for opportunities outside Nokia, I was contacted by quite some companies. Some of them ended-up giving me nice offers but in the end the offer that stood out amongst all was from Red Hat. So last evening, I accepted their offer to join the awesome Spice team.

The reasons I chose Red Hat over others were:

Red Hat being undoubtedly the leader in Open Source technologies for more than a decade has always been on my 'awesome places to work at some day' list.
The Spice project that I'm being hired to work on is simply awesome.
They offer good working conditions.

I'll be staying in Finland and most likely working from home (unless I'm asked to work at the Espoo office). I will be officially joining Red Hat on May 2 and my last day at Nokia will be on April 21.

Before you ask, nothing disastrous is going to happen to GUPnP and Rygel. Of course I won't be spending as many hours on these projects as now but keeping in mind that my first 2 years of work on both these projects was purely in my spare time, I think I'll still be able to keep these projects running. Perhaps now I'll be able to better focus on upstream needs rather than that of my employers (more like working around DLNA conformance test tool issues).

Yet another git history visualization

2011-03-16T18:18:00.000-07:00

Here is a decade of GStreamer hacking squeezed into 5 minute visualization using gource.

I used the following commandline to create this:

gource -1280x720 -s 0.05 --stop-at-end --hide filenames  --highlight-all-users \
--file-filter po -a 5 --camera-mode track  --user-image-dir ~/hackergotchies \
--disable-progress --disable-bloom  --output-ppm-stream - --output-framerate 30 \
| gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 !  'image/ppm,width=1280,height=720,framerate=(fraction)30/1' \
! ffdec_ppm !  ffmpegcolorspace ! x264enc speed-preset=10 ! avimux ! \
filesink  location=gst-dev-history.avi

Rygel Development History Visualization (part II)

2011-03-15T19:18:00.000-07:00

Here is yet another version thats twice slower (and therefore longer), has the gloom off and filenames disabled and is in H264+AVI format. Oh and this time I managed to use GStreamer to record the video, rather than ffmpeg.

In case anyone is interested, I used this commandline to create it:

gource  -1280x720 -s 0.1 --stop-at-end --hide filenames \
--highlight-all-users  --file-filter po -a 5 --camera-mode track \
--user-image-dir  ~/hackergotchies --disable-progress \
--disable-bloom --output-ppm-stream -  |gst-launch-0.10 fdsrc fd=0 \
! 'image/ppm,width=1280,height=720,framerate=(fraction)60/1' ! \
ffdec_ppm !  ffmpegcolorspace ! x264enc speed-preset=10 ! \
avimux ! filesink  location=rygel-dev-history.avi

Rygel Development History Visualization

2011-03-13T09:18:00.000-07:00

I recently discovered this awesome tool called, gource. Using that I created a visualization of rygel's development history and uploaded here.

Note that translation commits are missing. That doesn't mean I do not acknowledge or value those contributions but I had to exclude them because otherwise the screen was too crowded for viewer to actually see anything at all.

Futures

2011-02-12T08:44:00.000-08:00

Now that my company has decided to join forces with Microsoft, I am no longer certain of my future at Nokia. Although I would really like to stay until our MeeGo product is out at least since I hate leaving things unfinished but I don't see any harm in starting to look for other opportunities already.

So like my colleague and friend, Alberto I have put my updated CV here. Feel free to send job offers or suggest any good open job positions to my inbox.

FOSDEM

2011-02-01T14:50:00.000-08:00

Not only that, I am also delivering a talk on one of my favorite programming languages, Vala. My other favorite language is always nicely presented by his awesomeness, Andy Wingo so I don't need to talk about that. :)

Yes, I'm not doing a rygel or gupnp talk this time. My apologies if that disappoints anyone. :)

Rygel needs your help!

2011-01-23T15:28:00.000-08:00

While it is a well known fact that Rygel is as awesome as this new Intrepid class ship of mine in Star Trek Online

unfortunately its preferences UI looks as ugly as this

Apart from being ugly, it also doesn't really integrate well in GNOME as there is already a UI that lets you easily specify your file sharing preferences: gnome-user-share. I had some discussions with Bastien on how to fix this and we had agreed on a plan to kill this UI while merging the relevant parts of it into gnome-user-share in July 2010:

Rygel:

always starts as part of the session.
times-out and exits if there is nothing to share.
(MediaExport backend) doesn't share anything by default.

gnome-user-share

uses the MediaExport's DBus API to add/remove folders.

While the Rygel parts are mostly in place, Bastien (being a very busy developer) didn't manage to get any time to do the gnome-user-share part and neither did I. :(

GNOME 3.0 is happening very soon and Rygel might not get its due fame in release notes (again) if there is no nice UI to impress the end users with. So if you want to help either Rygel or GNOME 3.0 project, here is you chance!

Rygel 0.7.6 (A Kiss is But a Kiss)

2010-08-18T15:42:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.7.6 (A Kiss is But a Kiss) is out!

Another micro release to fix the critical regression in 'Year' hierarchy of
Tracker plugin.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.7.4 (Look at the Princess)

2010-08-17T07:08:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.7.4 (Look at the Princess) released!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.32.0
release.

- Fix wildcard handling in search request.
- Distribute correct copy of scallable icons.
- Provide icons in DLNA standard sizes.
- Provide icons in JPEG format as well.
- Don't offer transcoding from video to audio and viceversa. This makes sense
  anyway and reduces network traffic.
- Only offer time seeking if duration is known.
- Report correct DLNA profile for MPEG-TS HD and WMV transcoder.
- List DLNA formats first in the list of supported formats.
- Provide correct values for out parameters of GetCurrentConnectionInfo action.
- Correctly handle HTTP 'POST' requests.
- Correct checks for vala bindings.
- Use new 64-bit size property in GUPnP resource API so that we can deal with
  resources bigger than 2GB.
- Fix some (potential) crashes.
- Correctly handle a translated string involving plurals.
- Don't use deprecated libsoup API.
- Correct flaws in code related to search for media object by ID. This combined
  with some changes in Tracker plugin (see below) improves the reliability and
  especially the performance of Tracker plugin a lot.
- Use the mime-type and DLNA profile when provided in item creation requests.
- Advertize byte-seek support for thumbnails.
- Correct algorithm to decide whether to seek or not.
- Set standard header on XML files.
- Prefix service URLs with a "/". This seems like the right way to do it and it
  might actually improve our IOP.
- Make use of new APIs to report all known DLNA profiles in list of supported
  formats (MediaServer only).
- Add support for the "Genre" tag in music items.
- External:
  - Handle AlbumArt property.
  - Fix a few crashes.
  - Remove workaround for bug#602003.
Tracker:
  - Make sure metadata container get unique IDs.
  - Performance improvements to search for media object by ID.
  - Make use of DLNA profile when provided.
  - Don't use Tracker's logo as icon.
  - Ignore duration of '0'.
  - Print debug after item creation in store.
MediaExport:
  - Disable plugin when Tracker plugin is/becomes available.
  - Require sqlite3 VAPI only for this plugin.
  - Code clean-up and general speed improvements
  - Extract embedded album art
  - Remove the ability for user-defined virtual folders, providing a set of
    built-in folders similar to that of tracker's.
  - Fix some minor regressions introduced by the switch to gupnp-dlna metadata
    extraction
  - Move configured files and folders into their own "Files & Folders" container
    to de-clutter root.
- Localization:
  - Add ta translation.
  - Update Galician translations.
  - Update Hebrew translation.
  - Update Spanish translation.
  - Update Romanian translation.
  - Update Slovenian translation.
- DLNA test cases fixed in this release:
  - 7.2.14.2
  - 7.2.28.1
  - 7.3.25.1
  - 7.3.26.3
  - 7.3.26.4
  - 7.3.29.3
  - 7.3.29.4
  - 7.3.33.4
  - 7.3.33.5

Dependency-related changes:
  - Require and adapt to Vala 0.9.5.
  - Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.9.
  - Require gupnp-dlna >= 0.3.0.
  - MediaExport
    - Require gstreamer-tag >= 0.10.28.
    - Require gstreamer-app >= 0.10.28.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Yaron Shahrabani 
Lucian Adrian Grijincu 
Kjartan Maraas 
Jorge González 
Fran Diéguez 
drtv 
Claude Paroz 
Andrej Žnidaršič

Download source tarball from here

GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0 & GUPnP Vala 0.6.11

2010-08-17T07:02:00.000-07:00

GUPnP DLNA 0.3.0 released!

Changes since 0.2.1:

- New API and tool (gupnp-dlna-ls-profiles) to list all supported profiles
- Move API to get a profile to the DLNADiscoverer namespace
- Make GUPnPDLNAProfile opaque, add to API documentation
- Add support for several AVC_MP4_MP profiles
- Print stream topology instead of a simple list in gupnp-dlna-info
- Add debug output controlled by an environment variable for eaesier
  debugging
- Beginnings of an automated testing infrastructure
- Add relaxed/extended mode properties (more details in the next release)
- Use 'bitrate' instead of 'maximum-bitrate' while matching streams
- Various bug fixes

All contributors to this release:

Arun Raghavan 
Parthasarathi Susarla 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

GUPnP Vala 0.6.11 released!

Changes since 0.6.10:

- Require and adapt to gupnp-av 0.3.0.

All contributors:

Arun Raghavan 
Parthasarathi Susarla 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarballs from here

Rygel 0.7.3 (Out of Their Minds)

2010-08-03T16:08:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.7.3 (Out of Their Minds) is out!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.6
release.

- Add Album-art support.
- Add support for sorted Browse/Search.
- Don't push data after HTTP response is cancelled.
- Advertise support for search by "createClass".
- Revive accidently removed XBox hacks.
- Fix icon export for uninstalled case.
- Simplify plugin APIs to further abstract plugin developers from UPnP details.
- Add convenient MediaRenderer APIs for plugins. This involved moving most of
  the GstRenderer code to core.
- Fix seeking once again.
- Improve error handling in HTTP request handling code.
- Port to new DIDL-Lite contributor APIs.
- Port to Vala 0.9.3 and 0.9.4.
- Clean-up README and specify build and run-time dependencies.
- More debug output.
- MediaExport:
  - Make use of gupnp-dlna for faster, more complete and reliable metadata
    extraction.
  - Print a debug message if extraction fails for a file.
  - Add windows formats to positive list of file extensions to include in the
    metadata extraction.
  - Don't share anyt folder by default.
  - Fix url-escaped folder names on PS3.
  - Fix issue of empty title of top-level virtual folders on PS3.
  - Process 256 children at a time. This improves performance of harvesting of
    large folders.
- GstRenderer:
  - Rename to Playbin.
  - Advertize support for 'video/mp4'
  - Advertize support for RTSP
  - Handle error from playbin.
  - Don't claim support for unsupported UPnP actions and state variables.
- External:
  - Fix a crasher bug.
- Localization:
  - Add French translation.
  - Update Simplified Chinese translations.
  - Update German translation.
  - Update Galician translation.
  - Update Swedish translation.
  - Update Slovenian translation.
- Lots of other non-functional and/or minor improvements and fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require Vala >= 0.9.3
- Require gupnp >= 0.13.4
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.8
- Require gupnp-dlna >= 0.2.1 (new dependency)
- Require libgee >= 0.5.2
- Use gtk+-2.0 (>= 2.21.5) if available rather than gtk+-3.0

Bugs fixed in this release:

607411 - Need to mention non-compile time deps.
624445 - Samsung can't FF/REW/PAUSE when playing video/avi from Rygel.
625556 - New configure flag to switch GTK+ version.

All contributors to this release:

Aron Xu 
Arun Raghavan 
Claude Paroz 
Eleanor Chen 
Frédéric Péters 
Javier Jardón 
Jens Georg 
Mario Blättermann 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball here

GUPnP A/V 0.5.8 released!

2010-08-03T16:02:00.000-07:00

Changes since 0.5.7:

- Fix crashes in DIDLLiteContributor API.
- Remove incomplete and broken DLNA guessing code. Applications should use
  gupnp-dlna now for all their DLNA needs.
- Do set the 'dlna:profileID' property of 'albumArtURI' node and treat it as
  mandatory as per DLNA guidelines (7.3.61.3).
- Prefer non-transcoded resources over transcoded ones when choosing compatible
  resources for a particular MediaRenderer.
- Minor correction to DIDL filtering code.
- Some other minor improvements/fixes.

Bug fixed in this release:

2187 - GUPnPDIDLLiteContributor class doesn't work

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.7.2 (Dream A Little Dream)

2010-07-12T10:35:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.7.2 (Dream A Little Dream) is out!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.5
release.

* MediaExport:
  * Support DLNA's 'AnyContainer' upload extenstion.
  * Only harvest media files. We use a positive list for file extensions to
    include in the metadata extraction.
  * Implement fallback to the default (slow) search implementation.
  * Lower severity for some of the console messages.
  * Update code according to latest GStreamer Vala API fixes.
* Tracker:
  * Improve Sparql query builder to achieve much better performance and reduced
    D-Bus traffic.
* GstRenderer:
  * Relicense from GPL to LGPL.
  * More descriptive default title.
- Localization:
  - Add Simplified Chinese translation.
  - Add Traditional Chinese translation (Hong Kong and Taiwan).
  - Updated Spanish translation.
- Various non-functional improvements to core and plugins.

All contributors to this release:

Aron Xu 
Chao-Hsiung Liao 
Jens Georg 
Jorge González 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.7.1 (Home on the Remains)

2010-06-24T16:38:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.7.1 (Home on the Remains) is out!

A new release in the current unstable 0.7.x series for upcoming GNOME 2.31.4
release.

- Implement DLNA's 'AnyContainer' upload extenstion. This allows clients to
  upload items without having to specify target container. Currently it only
  works for the Tracker backend.
- Report types of items that could be created/uploaded in a container and allow
  clients to search containers by this property.
- Port last bits of C code to Vala. Now Rygel is completely written in Vala.
- Make Rygel build/work against both current stable and unstable Vala releases.
- Offer SD transcoding in EU profile. Seems certain Sony Bravia TVs only
  support EU profiles. With this change, they should at least be able to use the
  SD transcoding.
- Two more unit tests.
- Provide default configuration for WMV transcoding.
- Correctly handle boolean commandline option for disabling WMV transcoder.
- External:
  - Port the external plugin to use the new D-Bus MediaServer specification:
    http://live.gnome.org/Rygel/MediaServer2Spec. The new specification is meant
    to be very generic and scale well to large media hierarchies.
  - Make use of search API when implemented by the external application.
  - Various other performance improvements.
- Preferences UI:
  - Improve resize behavior.
  - Add missing bevel to URI tree view.
  - Replace GtkVBox by GtkVButtonBox where appropriate.
- Localization:
  - Added Punjabi Translation.
  - Updated Norwegian bokmål translation.
  - Updated Galician translations.
  - Updated Spanish translation.
  - Updated Hebrew translation.
- Various non-functional improvements.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require gtk+-3.0 >= 2.90.3.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.7.
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.7.

Bugs fixed in this release:

593628 - mp2ts transcoder not working with certain Bravia TV models.
596214 - URI table is missing bevel.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Eric Anderson 
A S Alam 
Fran Diéguez 
Jorge González 
Kjartan Maraas 
Yaron Shahrabani

Download source tarball from here

Bridging UPnP Networks

2010-06-17T16:39:00.000-07:00

As part of this years Google Summer of Code, Sunil Ghai (a student from India) has taken-up the task of securely bridging multiple UPnP networks across the internet. You can follow the progress of the project through Sunil's blog.

Before you say it, yes! I did get the idea from my "competitors" but unlike them, we are going to do it the (UPnP) standard and efficient (as usual) way.

GUPnP 0.13.4 & GUPnP AV 0.5.6 released!

2010-06-15T05:13:00.000-07:00

GUPnP 0.13.4 released!

Changes since 0.13.3:

- GUPnPService should remove all handlers installed on the shared SoupServer
  instance when it is disposed.
- Fixate subscription timeout to be 300s as per DLNA requirement (7.2.22.1).
- Correct type of action argument of GUPnPService::action-invoked.
- Remove redundant copying of GValue content in a few places.
- Handle multiple variables inside property node in event notifications to be
  compatible with server-side implementations using older GUPnP
- Fix syntax of event notifications with multiple properties.
- Add/fix gobject-introspection annotations for various functions.
- Some non-functional improvements.

Bugs fixed in this release:

2084 - Add scope annotations to various functions
2131 - GUPnPServiceAction is a boxed, not a pointer
2086 - Fix gtk-doc format on all functions in public GUPnP API

All contributors:

Sven Neumann 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg

Download source tarball from here
-----------

GUPnP AV 0.5.6 released!

Changes since 0.5.5:

- Optimize namespace handling in DIDL-Lite handling code.
- Hide internal function gupnp_didl_lite_object_new_from_xml().
- Remove new redundant gupnp_didl_lite_container_new_from_xml(). 
- Free the array allocated by xmlGetNsList().

All contributors to this release:
  
Sven Neumann 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Roommate for GUADEC

2010-06-11T05:49:00.000-07:00

I am looking for someone to share a room with in a hostel/hotel in Hague during GUADEC. If you are interested, please send me a mail.

Rygel 0.7.0 (Picture if You Will) is out!

2010-06-07T12:07:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.7.0 (Picture if You Will) is out!

This release marks the start of the new unstable release-cycle. This is also the
release cycle that will be integrated into GNOME 2.31 (and 3.0 eventually).
Changes since 0.6.0:

- Exit on failure to load any plugins in 5 seconds.
- Add icon to preferences UI's desktop file.
- Correct error on missing 'Elements' node in 'CreateObject' action from client.
- Advertize upload features in 'X_DLNACAP' in device description.
- Remove comments from description files as per DLNA requirement (7.2.30.1).
- Don't allow comments in DIDL-Lite from client either. This is to satisfy the
  DLNA Confirmation Test Tool rather than DLNA itself.
- Don't advertize unimplemented actions.
- autogen.sh should create m4 directory if it doesn't exist already.
- Correct Icon path in preferences UI for uninstalled case.
- Specify on debug log where rygel is currently looking for plugins.
- Localization:
  - Don't translate all strings in media-export plugin.
  - No need to translate Mediathek plugin.
  - Add Hebrew translation.
  - Add Swedish translation.
  - Add Czech translation.
  - More Spanish translations.
  - More Slovenian translations.
  - More German translations.
- MediaExport:
  - Fix search result. Search was returning the the result for the current
    limits, not the overall result count. This lead to strange behaviour on
    e.g. XBox 360.
  - Optimize searches. Noticable speed improvements on XBox music browsing.
  - Fix broken SQL query to get object by path.
  - Remove redundant custom tag for duration.
  - Make harvesting of metadata optional.
  - Re-enable simple mode which means we exporting media on the UPnP network
    even if no meta-data extractor is available.
  - Remove redundant URI table from database.
  - Work around a problem in GStreamer element playbin2.
  - Explain the term 'harvest' for translators.
  - Many non-functional improvements.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Andrej Žnidaršič 
Daniel Nylander 
Fran Diéguez 
Jorge González 
Mario Blättermann 
Petr Kovar 
Yaron Shahrabani

Download source tarball here.

Part of GNOME 3.0

2010-06-01T16:59:00.000-07:00

The decision for inclusion of modules into GNOME (3.0) just came-in and proposal for Rygel was approved. \o/ Now I better get it working. :)

Married

2010-06-01T16:44:00.000-07:00

So last saturday I got married to this amazing woman I've been in love with for the last 3 years of my life. Except for the start of the wedding (when I was extremely nervous) I enjoyed the whole event a lot. That includes the bachelor's party that my awesome friends threw me 2 days before the wedding. Here are some pictures worth sharing, the first one being from Bachelor's party, as you can guess:

Although many people helped in different ways, three people that deserve the most appreciation are Timo (my best man) who arranged the Bachelor's party, Anna Haukka who was the main official photographer and Tiina Taxell (Bride's maid). Also special Thanks to Edward to arrange some important things before the wedding and Christian (also my best man) for bringing Edward so early in the morning and the rings. :)

One of the weird things about my wedding was that it brought many hackers from all around Europe to Helsinki for a few days. :)

Rygel 0.6.0 (The Way We Weren't) is out!

2010-05-15T07:05:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.6.0 (The Way We Weren't) is out!

This release marks the start of the new stable release-cycle. Changes since
0.5.2:

- Localization:
  - Fix translation framework.
  - Mark all (possibly) user-visible string for translation.
  - Use more translator-friendly language.
  - Provide comments for translators.
  - Correctly case abbreviations.
  - Translations:
    - German (de) 100%
    - Slovenian (sl): 100%
    - Spanish (es): 57%
- Fix time-seeking.
- Fix a potential race-condition in aborted HTTP requests.
- Don't stream if request is for subtitles.
- Use bigger (64Ki) buffers when streaming from gstreamer source  element.
- Remux only if transcoding is not needed.
- Configuration option for specifying plugin load path.
- Add configuration from Environment.
- Fix port specification through commandline.
- Add and expose Rygel logo.
- Pause streaming pipeline when/if client isn't reading fast enough.
- Add more unit tests.
- Use gnome-autogen.sh.
- Add missing libuuid to build and linker flags for all plugins.
- Plugins are now able to provide a model description.
- MediaExport:
  - File size change suggests file change.
  - Move media DB and metadata harvesting code from core to module as  this is
    the only module that is using it.
- External plugin now sets model description.
- Lots of non-functional improvements and fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Sqlite now only needed for media-export plugin.

Bugs fixed in this release:

617762 Wrong file size exported to PS3
590649 LiveResponse does not rate limit the GStreamer pipeline
615834 Uses ALL_LINGUAS in configure.ac
616189 Translation issues
617750 Only re-encode audio and video when necessary

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Mario Blättermann 
Jorge González 
Andrej Žnidaršič

Download source tarball here.

More info on the project on Rygel home page.

Rygel logo v2

2010-04-21T15:01:00.000-07:00

So based on comments received on the Rygel logo in the last blog entry, Klaus did some adjustments and came-up with even more improved version:

256x256:

32x32:

Future of Rygel

2010-04-20T17:19:00.000-07:00

While you can follow the progress of Rygel through the release announcements on my blog, mailing-lists and even git log, I feel that I am not providing enough information about the future plans. Also there are some things that are not (or so far have not been) in a shape to be part of a release so here is some of what is coming:

Logo

I've been looking for an artist to make me a nice logo ever since the start of the project. A few artists gave it a try but they didn't succeed in creating anything worth showing to anyone. I couldn't possibly blame them since:

Its not very clear to everyone what Rygel is and I suck at explaining things.
Its hard to represent it even when you learn what it is.

So what happened was that I told Sebastian that I was so jealous of his new logo, he asked Klaus to attempt to do the same for Rygel. He did and after a bit of talking and him trying different ideas, we finally agreed on this:

64x64:

32x32:

16x16:

Some people like it, some people don't but I like it. I think Klaus did a pretty good job, keeping in mind this wasn't an easy one. If you are one of those who don't like it, feel free to provide better alternatives or suggestions for Klaus.

Tracker or no Tracker

About an year ago, we (mostly Jens Georg) wrote a plugin (media-export) for Rygel that exposes folders on filesystem on the UPnP network. Although that meant us re-implementing some wheels and getting hated (no i know Ivan still loves me :)) for not being active member of Tracker revolution, I think this was still the right decision because:

The stable tracker version (0.6) we were using sucked big time in many ways, a fact admitted by every Tracker developer I've talked to regarding this.
AFAIK most GNOME developer (not involved with Tracker project) and distribution packagers didn't feel very positive about the project. Rygel was getting part of the heat for depending on it and that wasn't helping in gaining popularity for a new project.
It wasn't really very difficult to implement media-export in Vala, I didn't need to spend a lot of time on it myself and I didn't feel like standing in the way of a new plugin that I'll get almost for free and will satisfy a lot of people.

So now its mid'ish 2010, the world has changed and so has Tracker:

Tracker is now a blessed GNOME dependency. That means no one can say 'boo' at me anymore for depending on Tracker, while I walk the streets. More than enough people are now positive about the project.
New Tracker APIs are very different from that of 0.6, richer easier, dynamic, complete and future proof. Not to mention its based on existing and proven technologies/concepts: RDF and Sparql.
Most of the performance issues that tracker 0.6 was known for, has been addressed appropriately.
Tracker is now nicely divided in different components so an application can easily depend only on the parts that it really need. For example, Rygel won't have to depend on evolution since it doesn't need any email-related stuff.
I made sure 'nmm' ontology of Tracker has the needed UPnP properties that I will need in Rygel.

Some people still just don't like the very idea of Tracker and for those lost souls, I quote Owen Taylor:

I think it will definitely be hard to implement our ideas without something that looks a lot like Tracker, and since we have Tracker something that looks a lot like Tracker is most likely Tracker :-)

So keeping these facts in mind I've decided to:

Strip down almost all the functionalities of media-export so it only exposes the file-system hierarchies on UPnP network without any metadata. Actually this is exactly what Lennart wanted in the first place when he asked for this plugin. With metadata extraction in place, we are no better than tracker 0.6 anyway.
Remove media-export from preferences UI. Keeping in mind what kind of users will still use media-export in its new form, its quite enough that they can configure the directories to export by manually editing the configuration file.
Provide an easy way for the user to specify which media from tracker-store to expose on UPnP network. Since user chooses the files to harvest for metadata and keep in tracker-store using tracker's preferences UI, I think it's better if this option is also provided in there but I need to discuss with Ivan yet regarding this. If that is not feasible, I'll do this in rygel-preferences.

Other features

Unit tests: In the last release we introduced a few unit tests. This is just the beginning and we intend to write units for at least all core modules.
MediaServer v2: Iago and Juan talked about this in their blog and announced that they already have implemented v2 so now I have to do my part and implement the consumer part in Rygel: i-e Port v1 code to v2 and I am already on it.
DLNA compliance: Looking at the results of DLNA CTT session we had last time, we've a lot of work to do here. Hopefully mostly small fixes here and there.
Getting married on 29.05.2010. This is the hardest one but I'm sure I can do it. :)

Update

Some facts that I forgot to mention/explain when I posted the blog entry and to reply to some comments I received here and on IRC:

media-export is not being dropped. Please read carefully before making such assumptions and then saying 'Boo' to me for that. :)
I still don't plan to have a hard dependency on Tracker at all. It will still be one of the plugins. If you want something like Tracker that is not tracker, you are more than welcome to take the existing media-export code and maintain it as separate or part of your project/process.
Once gst-convenience library that Edward and Arun are working on, is in a stable state and delivers to it's promises of speeds (so far it has), we'll re-add export of metadata in media-export but this time around, we'll do it on the fly and won't need to deal with databases and stuff.
Tracker has always (even in the 0.6 days) provided easy ways for specifying which directories you want it to index so once we've a way to tell it which of the indexed media to expose on UPnP, we've all the features the media-export currently provides.

I'll leave the comments about the Logo for Klaus to reply. :)

Update#2

OK OK, I get it that I am making a lot more people unhappy than I am making happy with the 'media-export' plan. So based on that and the fact that Jens is willing to keep maintaining media-export for me, I'll leave this as is. I'll just move code in the core that only media-export uses into media-export plugin. I myself will embrace the future and concentrate on Tracker integration. :)

Rygel 0.5.2 released!

2010-04-14T07:40:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.5.2 (Crackers Don't Matter) is out!

Another release in the unstable 0.5.x series. Changes since 0.5.0:

- Add support for Xbox 360 and Window Media Player 11.
- Add support for subtitles. Currently only useful for certain Samsung DLNA TVs.
- Add Windows Media Video (WMV) transcoder.
- Add unit tests for a few modules.
- Fix some (potential) crashes.
- Make database operations cancellable.
- Throw error on database creation failure.
- Simpler (hopefully) build rules.
- Fix race-condition in streaming code so we don't terminate the connection
  before all the bytes are sent to the client.
- Fix leaking of HTTP messages of live streams on termination.
- Fix 'Content-Length' header values for partial requests.
- Fix parsing of search expression containing characters not within the original
  latin1 range.
- Use bigger (64Ki) buffers when streaming media to reduce cpu usage and
  therefore improve battery life.
- Include spec version in description document.
- Remove now unneeded work-around for vala bug#568972.
- Advertize photos with their specific class, i-e 'photo' rather than 'image'.
- MediaExport:
  - Implement search by URIs.
  - Implement search by album.
  - Error-out on invalid search expression.
  - Add support for virtual containers. This allows creation of metadata-based
    hierarchies in the user-config.
  - Fix deletion of containers.
  - URI-escape meta-data fields.
  - Catch previously uncaught exceptions.
  - Fix upgrade of database from older schemas.
- Lots of code clean-ups and documentation fixes. 
    
Dependency-related changes:

- Require gupnp >= 0.13.3.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.5. 
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.5.
- Require valac >= 0.8.0.

Bugs fixed in this release:

608886 - media export plugin corrupts its database when you change directories
609944 - Files not harvested on update
606305 - Samsung subtitles

All contributors to this release:

Jens Georg 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Cyrille Chepelov

Download source tarball from here

GSSDP 0.7.2, GUPnP 0.13.3, GUPnP AV 0.5.5 & GUPnP Vala 0.6.5

2010-04-09T09:47:00.000-07:00

GSSDP 0.7.2 released!

Changes since 0.7.1:

- Provide gobject-introspection GIR and typelib.
- Use silent build rules.
- Fix issues with version-independence magic in SSDP code.
- Fix build issues in jhbuild environment.

Bugs fixed in this release:

2025 - autogen.sh fails to find autoconf macros when they're installed in a
           non-standard location
1927 - gssdp fails to answer M-SEARCH sometimes
1921 - GObject Introspection Makefile for GSSDP

All Contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg 
Jens Georg 
Neil Roberts 
Ross Burton

Download source tarball from here

GUPnP 0.13.3 released!

Changes since 0.13.2:

- Include the Content-Type header in the HTTP messages. This satisfies DLNA
 CTT test cases 7.2.5.9 and 7.2.29.1.
- Use g_message instead of g_warning if we can't connect to DBus.
- Make the HTTP server listen on the context's interface only.
- Fix some potential crashes in GUPnPServiceProxy and GUPnPContextManager code.
- Fix build issues in jhbuild environment.
- Fix some gcc warnings.
- Add new API to host path for specific user-agent(s).
- Add gobject-introspection support:
 - Provide gobject-introspection GIR and typelib.
 - Add needed annotations to doc comments.
 - Add GList variants of action-related functions to satisfy PyGI.
- A few non-functional improvments.

Dependency related changes:

- gssdp >= 0.7.1

Bugs fixed in this release:

2054 - Xbox hacks
1965 - gcc warning fixes
2039 - GUPnP is hard to use with jhbuild
1948 - Signal handler are not disconnected when ContextManager is disposed
2030 - gupnp context listens on 0.0.0.0 instead of the context's ip
1924 - Content-Type header must contain charset="utf-8" in all HTTP transactions
2006 - Implement 3 new functions for language bindings (begin_action_list,
           end_action_list, gupnp_service_action_get_value_type)
1919 - Add GObject Introspection Annotations and Makefile
1979 - g_warning make gupnp-igd test fails
1906 - Tests failed with gupnp 0.13

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg 
Ross Burton 
Olivier Crête 
Neil Roberts 
Sven Neumann 
Jens Georg 
Yakup Akbay

Download source tarball from here
-----------

GUPnP AV 0.5.5 released!

Changes since 0.5.4:

- Provide gobject-introspection GIR and typelib.
- Provide microseconds in 'duration' to satisfy XBox.
- Fix data type of GUPnPDIDLLiteContainer:child-count
- Fix build issues in jhbuild environment.
- Enable silent build rules if they are available.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Zach Goldberg 
Neil Roberts 
Ross Burton

Download source tarball from here
-----------

GUPnP Vala 0.6.5 released!

Changes since 0.6.4:

- Require & adapt to:
 - gssdp 0.7.2
 - gupnp 0.13.3
 - gupnp-av 0.5.5
 - vala 0.8.0
- Don't hide gupnp_root_device_get_relative_location

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here

Introducing Zhaan

2010-04-03T07:57:00.000-07:00

I mentioned this cool guy Zachary Goldberg in my blog and in my talk before. While I mentioned his name in regards to his efforts to making sure GUPnP glues nicely with gobject-introspection and is usable from Python, he went much further than I expected and made a cool new UPnP control-point for N900 based on GUPnP in Python. He named it Zhaan (another character from Farscape in the spirit of Rygel).

Some mandatory screenshots:

You can check out more screenshots/specs of the project and follow its status here.

There are many people out there making cool UIs but they end-up using wrong tools and/or re-inventing the wheel so its nice to see someone doing cool stuff but the right way. :)

Rygel 0.5.0 (Mind the Baby) is out!

2010-02-23T15:31:00.000-08:00

The first release in the unstable 0.5.x series. Changes since 0.4.6 that were
not provided by any subsequent 0.4.x releases:

- New URI generation scheme that avoids problematic characters which makes some
  crappy renderers choke.
- Allow creation of new media items and tranfering data into existing ones (
  upload). This is relavent to, and works for both MediaExport and Tracker.
- Implement GetTransferProgress and StopTransferResource actions.
- Advertise:
  - support for connection stalling.
  - live response to be sender-paced.
- Rewrite SearchCriteria parser to make it more reliable.
- Tracker:
  - Port to the Tracker 0.7 APIs.
  - Provide richer & more intuitive media hierarchy.
  - Signal container update on changes to subjects.
  - Act on config options allowing user to define which categories to share.
  - Support for search by URI.
  - Descriptive IDs for containers.
- MediaExport
  - Implement custom search that translates to an SQLite query and therefore
    performs much faster than before.
  - Print message on console when harvesting is done.
  - Don't modify DB if harvester was cancelled.
  - Cancel harvester before starting new one.
- Lots of non-functional improvements and fixes.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg

Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.4.12 (Through the Looking Glass) is out!

2010-02-23T15:26:00.000-08:00

Another release in the stable 0.4.x series. Changes since 0.4.10:

- Fix desktop file.
- A few fixes to satisfy latest valac (0.7.10).
- Adapt to new libxml Vala API.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Andreas Henriksson 
Philip Withnall

Download source tarball here

Regarding meaning of life

2010-02-18T04:57:00.000-08:00

Back in the days when we were losing a lot of good souls to "World of Warcraft", I used to say to myself "Losers, there's so much in life to enjoy and so much to do to bring Free SW on every machine out there.." and promised myself that I'll never even try any MMORPG.

About a month back, Rene came over to me carrying a German game magazine and showed me a comparison of the upcoming MMORPGs based on Star Trek and Star Wars. Now I can resist all games but a chance to live the life of a Star-fleet officer? No way!

So I started playing Star Trek Online last month when it was still in beta and got into it. Soon I pre-ordered the game for amazon.co.uk and life-time subscription (that also allowed me to play a freed Borg character).

Now when I say "I got into it", I don't mean I am playing for hours and hours everyday. It means I play maximum 5 days a week and for 1-3 hours only. Anyway, here is a nice picture taken by Ekaterina while I'm fighting off a Gorn ship:

UPDATE: Forgot to mention that I have a key that should allow a month of playtime and I am willing give it out for free to a friend. :) So let me know if you want to try it out.

FOSDEM fun

2010-02-09T03:21:00.000-08:00

Just like the last 2 years, I joined the FOSDEM fun. Just like every year there were lots of awesome beers, chocolates, waffles and of course conference full of awesome hackers from all over the world & their awesome talks. In short, the same old 'awesome' experience. Also I finally got to meet Jens George (phako) in person. Another thing that went it a totally unusual (and unexpected) direction was my home directory. Here is how it went:

Early Sunday morning (8:00) my alarm goes off to wake me up in time for my 10:15 am talk. I manage to get up after half an hour of snoozing the alarm, get ready (including getting a shower out of almost non-functional shower), back-up my slides on USB stick and manage to get to the conference room 10 minutes before the talk along with my room-mates, Marc-Andre and Juerg. Failed to get anything to eat or even a cup of coffee before that.

I open-up the lid of my laptop to find out that it won't be able to wake-up from suspend. No problems, happens all the time even since I moved to Ubuntu so I apply the usual solution: Forced reboot. When the system boots I get into another issues that I had been having ever since I moved to Ubuntu: Soon after I provide the password for my encrypted partition (home and swap), I am told that home partition could not be mounted. No problems, I again apply the usual solution: Hit escape key to get to a root shell, where I do this:

# cryptsetup remove home # cryptsetup create home /dev/sda6 Enter passphrase: # mount /home

Normally, at this point I just hit CTRL+d and normal boot sequence resumes and everyone on the laptop lives happily ever after. However, this time thats not what happens. `mount` says:

mount: wrong fs type, bad option, bad superblock on /dev/mapper/home, missing codepage or helper program, or other error In some cases useful info is found in syslog - try dmesg | tail or so

This has also happened before but usually this means I mistyped the password and I just have to repeat the above procedure. However, after trying several times, I keep getting the same message. I give-up and lend Marc-Andre's laptop for the slides show. After the presentation, I tried everything and asked everyone I knew who might have any clues but no help came.

Since I get the same questions each time I tell this story to anyone, I thought I append this blog entry by an FAQ:

Q: Why on earth are you encrypting your partitions:
A: Nokia security policy.

Q: What makes you so sure that you haven't just forgotten the password.
A: Because I keep the exact same password for both the partitions and I am able to successfully decrypt one of them.

Q: Have you tried looking at `dmesg | tail`?
A: Yes, nothing in there.

Q: Have you tried fsck?
A: Yes, that can't make any sense out of the "unencrypted" block device either. Because of this, I suspect something is wrong on the actual (encrypted) device, which fsck can not help with.

GUPnP AV & GUPnP Vala releases

2010-02-04T06:41:00.000-08:00

GUPnP AV 0.5.4 released

Changes since 0.5.2:

- Gracefully handle empty or no 'res' node.
- Function to get the list of descriptors from DIDL-Lite objects.
- More complete comparison for LPCM mime types.
- Fix incorrect type conversion of DLNA flags.
- DLNA flags should not default to a specific DLNA version.
- New APIs to deal with contributor-related properties in DIDL-Lite objects.
- Remove redundant construction methods.
- Add forgotten header to the meta-header file.
- Add and fix gobject-introspection annotations.
- Lots of documentation fixes.
- Many minor non-functional fixes/improvements.

Bug fixes in this release:

1935 - Incorrect conversion while parsing primary DLNA Flags
1934 - DLNA Flags should not default to a specific DLNA version.
1933 - Content type matching fails when additional parameters exist in LPCM
       mime-type
1814 - Add "artists" property to GUPnPDIDLLiteObject

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Yakup Akbay 
Zachary Goldberg

Download source tarballs from here

GUPnP Vala bindings 0.6.4 released!

Changes since 0.6.2:

- Require and adapt to gupnp-av 0.5.3.

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarballs from here

Me too

2010-01-28T03:06:00.000-08:00

I'm even presenting there.

Rygel 0.4.10 (A Human Reaction)

2010-01-24T12:08:00.000-08:00

Rygel 0.4.10 (A Human Reaction) is out!

Another release in the stable 0.4.x series. Changes since 0.4.8:

- Restart application on SIGHUP.
- Fix cancellation of HTTP streams and in turn a critical leak.
- Correct condition for byte-seeking.
- Correctly handle boolean commandline options.
- Enable check for Vala if any stamp file is absent.
- Fix condition for partial content transfer.
- Correct linker argument order. This should fix the build issue on Gentoo.
- Work-around for an automake bug.
- Limit search slice to result size.
- Fix a spelling mistake in error message.
- Tell valac to put debugging symbols to generated code so gdb can refer to
  lines in the Vala source code.

Bug fixes in this release:

601395 - restart on SIGHUP

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg

Download source tarball here.

Rygel 0.4.8 (Till the Blood Runs Clear) is out!

2009-12-22T07:29:00.000-08:00

Here goes the release log:

A bug-fix release in stable 0.4.x series to fix seeking in general and playback
for clients that always seek (Sony PS3).

Dependency-related changes:

- Require valac >= 0.7.10.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here.

GSSDP 0.7.1 and GUPnP 0.13.2 released!

2009-12-04T10:38:00.000-08:00

GSSDP 0.7.1 released!

- Don't leak target regex.
- Make GSSDPClient ignore Point to Point interfaces.
- Use SO_REUSEPORT if present. Darwin and some BSDs don't have SO_REUSEADDR, but
  SO_REUSEPORT.
- If we can't create a request socket don't try to create a multicast socket.
- Have specific GError code for interfaces without an IP address.
- Actually remove gssdp_client_new_full().

Bugs fixed:

1898 - GSSDPClient keeps autoselecting my VPN
1810 - Not possible to run multiple ssdp clients on darwin
1800 - leak of a gregex in gssdp-resource-browser
1796 - gssdp_client_new_full is declared in header but not implemented

All contributors:

Olivier Crête 
Ross Burton 
Iain Holmes 
Mattias Wadman 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download release tarballs from here

GUPnP 0.13.2 released!

Changes since 0.13.1:

- Utilize libconic (Maemo5) if available.
- Unix context manager must signal the unavailibility of all contexts when
  disposed.
- Enable silent build rules if they are available.
- Fix race-conditions in client-side notification handling.
- Unix context manager ignores point-to-point interfaces.
- Context manager ignores interfaces without IP addresses.
- Don't require timeouts to be specified in subscription requests.
- Fix build against gcc 4.[1,2].
- Make network manager thread-safe.
- Remove idle source on dispose in context manager implementations.
- Warn in docs that gupnp_service_info_get_introspection() is evil and why.
- Service retrieves introspection data in truly async way.
- Fix some leaks.
- A bunch of code clean-ups.

All contributors:

Olivier Crête 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Ross Burton 
Jens Georg 
Cem Eliguzel 

Bugs fixed:

1890 - Timeout parsing problem with SUBSCRIBE method
1880 - subscription/notification handling is racy
1906 - Tests failed with gupnp 0.13
1849 - Compile error when using gcc 4.[1,2] and strict aliasing
1494 - Ability to deal with multiple network interfaces
1881 - networkmanager interaction should use its own dbus connection

Download release tarballs from here

We can has Python too

2009-11-28T11:14:00.000-08:00

Zachary Goldberg reports:

As I've been mentioning lately I have been working on using PyGObject + GObject Introspection (recently forked, now called PyGI + PyGObject + Gobject Introspection) and have some exciting news!

I have been working on fleshing out a whole bunch of unit tests which exercise the entire GUPnP API. I hate a major roadblock in that PyGI did not support native callbacks! So, after a week or two detour I have implemented PyGI callbacks (which now work rather nicely, but need a bunch of stylistic cleanups and error checking before its pushed back upstream.. priorities!) as well as some working GUPnP demos.

My best demo so far is about 25 lines of python which:

1) Gets all devices on one network interface
2) Scans for all the services each device provides
3) If the device is GMediaRenderer and it provides an AVTransport Service (it does...) then it
3a) Stops whatever is currently playing
3b) Loads a new URI (hardcoded from my mediatomb server for now, havn't played enough with gupnp-av to dynamically get the mediatomb data -- for now!)
3c) Initiates playing

3a->3c have been tested using the synchronous GUPnP action api (send_action...) as well as the asynchronous API (begin_action.... end_action...) with callbacks!

Update: Seems this info is out-dated already, Zach has done quite some more after this.

Video of Maemo summit talk

2009-11-21T11:26:00.000-08:00

For those interested in UPnP/DLNA on Maemo and happen to miss Maemo summit, here is the video of my talk. You'll notice that slide screen is only half visible but that is not really a problem since you can access the slides here.

GUPnP AV, GUPnP Vala and Rygel releases

2009-11-21T06:51:00.000-08:00

GUPnP AV 0.5.2

Changes since 0.5.1:

- Add a missing NULL check.
- Fix a potential leak of xmlDoc.
- Register a (g)type for GUPnPSearchCriteriaOp for better gtk-doc and
 vala-gen-introspect support.
- Fix docs for GUPnPSearchCriteriaParser::expression.
- Fix parsing of SearchCriteria strings: Closing parenthesis doesn't imply end
 of SearchCriteria expression.

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here.

GUPnP Vala 0.6.2

Changes since 0.6:

- Remove bogus type_argument from gupnp metadata.
- No need for custom bindings for SearchCriteriaParser.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require vala >= 0.7.8.
- Require and adapt to gupnp-av >= 0.5.2.

Bugs fixed:

1850 - Vapi for ServiceAction.get_message is wrong

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg

Download source tarball from here.

Rygel 0.4.6 (They've Got a Secret)

Brief summary of changes since 0.4.4:

- Implement optional UPnP Search action. This is not only a must have feature
 for a commercial MediaServer but is also a big first step towards proper
 XBox 360 support.
- Simplify Browse action handling.
- Simplify MediaServer plugin implementation.
- Make sure autostart dir exists before attempting to write to it.
- Fix a potential crash that is trigered by MediaContainer reporting incorrect
 (higher) number of children.
- External:
 - Work around (vala) bug#602003.
 - Optimizations and code clean-ups.
- Tracker:
 - Provide an efficient Search implementation using Tracker's search API.
 - Minor code clean-ups.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5.2.
- Require gupnp-vala >= 0.6.2.
- Require valac >= 0.7.9.

Bugs fixed in this release:

600256 - Segfault when trying to access a stream

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download source tarball from here.

Some important definitions

2009-11-14T06:42:00.000-08:00

The information on this page is essential for everyone out there who is even tiny bit interested in UPnP/DLNA.

Rygel 0.4.4 (Green & Mean) is out!

2009-10-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

Here goes the release log:

Brief summary of changes since 0.4.2:

- Provide a gstreamer-based MediaRenderer plugin. This is mostly code stolen (
  and heavily adapted) from gupnp-media-renderer except that it doesn't depend
  on libowl-av and/or gtk+.
- More ease for MediaServer implementors.
- Better error handling.
- Make sure no message is suppressed until we know what level of console output
  user wants.
- Make use of vala's async support to simplify code quite a bit.
- Plugins should load xml files from source tree when built with
  '--enable-uninstalled' configure flag.
- Build with no optimizations in debug mode.
- Use closure table to speed up object lookup and deletion.
- Add build option for SQL debugging.
- Workaround a crasher bug (#3774) in sqlite 3.6.12.
- Use vala's static client D-Bus syntax.
- Early ignorance of disabled plugins. This not only speeds-up startup a bit but
  also rids us of redundant debug messages.
- MediaExport:
  - Nicely handle unavailability of gstreamer's playbin(2) element.
  - Fix a potential crasher.
- Tracker:
  - Use multidimensional arrays to deal with search results. This combined with
    static client D-Bus syntax gives us quite a speed boost.
  - Handle item creation error.
- External:
  - Allow applications to provide custom thumbnails for items.
  - Support pixel-aspect-ratio properties.
  - All D-Bus operations are now done asynchronously.
  - Make use of plugin icon if provided.
  - Move magic string substitution to core so other plugins can benefit from it.
- Lots of other improvements and bug fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require and adapt to libgee >= 0.5.
- Require and adapt to valac >= 0.7.8.

Bugs fixed in this release:

597276 - Rygel crash on startup
587649 - thumbnails not published for external media servers
589959 - External plugin should query media servers on demand
598005 - unable to load media-tracker plugin

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Thijs Vermeir

Download source tarball from here.

GUPnP 0.13.1 released

2009-10-07T12:30:00.000-07:00

GUPnP 0.13.1 is out!

Release log:

Changes since 0.13:

- Use unix context manager if NetworkManager service is not available.
- Fix some minor leaks.

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Ross Burton

Download source tarballs from here

Rygel 0.4.2 (Thank God It's Friday, Again)

2009-10-03T11:29:00.000-07:00

I always forget to announce the micro releases here. Here it is now:

Brief summary of changes since 0.4.1:

- Ability to specify verbosity of console messages by a number between 0 to 5.
- Be able to survive unavailability of D-Bus session bus. This should make it easier to setup Rygel on headless NAS machines.
- MediaExport:
 - Provide duration and date of media.
 - Improved guessing for type (UPnP class) of media.
 - Re-harvest metadata when a file/directory is modified.
 - Speed-up browsing (twice as before).
- rygel-preferences:
 - Fix enabling/disabling of widgets.
 - Copy the desktop file from correct location.
- Mediathek and GstLaunch disabled by default in the user configuration.
- Add GstLaunch to maemo configuration (disabled by default though).
- Put dbus-glib-1 to the list of vala API dependencies.
- Fix seek headers.
- Be more verbose at the end of configure.

Bugs fixed in this release:

596500 - Mpeg TS video files are mistaken for audio files
596213 - Wrong state for checkboxes
596327 - Enables some weird plugins by default
596330 - Missing some metadata

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg

Download source tarball from here

Rygel 0.4.1 (Even more fascinating!)

2009-09-27T12:35:00.000-07:00

Soon after Rygel 0.4 was released, Peter Robinson pushed it for F12 and our good friend Bastien Nocera started testing it immediately. He found many issues and some of them were so critical that we immediately had to make a another release with fixes for those issues. Thanks Bastien!

Rygel 0.4 (Fascinating!) is out!

2009-09-23T13:56:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.4 (Fascinating!) is out!

As usual, the release announcement:

Brief summary of changes since 0.3:

- Rygel is no more just a MediaServer but rather a collection of DLNA (UPnP AV)
  services (devices in UPnP speak).
- Port to new GUPnP APIs. The biggest advantage of that is that we now have
  dynamic network support, i-e Rygel can attach/detach to/from a network
  interface as it goes up/down.
- Support for time-based seeking in transcoded streams.
- Random tweaks to transcoding pipelines.
- Provide a DBus service providing two functionalities:
   * Ability to tell Rygel to shutdown. Starting of Rygel is automatically
     handled by D-Bus since a .service file is provided by Rygel.
   * Ability to tell Rygel (MediaExport plugin actually) to (un)export URIs on
     the fly.
- Implement enabling/disabling of UPnP in the preferences.
- Configuration through command-line options.
- Use a .ini configuration file rather than gconf.
- Special default configuration for Maemo.
- Don't spam the user's config directory and instead keep the description files
  into a separate subdirectory.
- `make clean` doesn't clean the generated C files anymore.
- Remove "all rights reserved" part from all copyright headers.
- Remove integrated DVB plugin as DVBDaemon now implements the external plugin
  interface and hence dynamically glues to Rygel, just like PulseAudio.
- New classes to further ease the plugin implementation.
- (Un)pause the SoupMessage at the right time. This was causing a lot of delays
  when playing media on Sony PS3.
- Bitrate is supposed to be in bytes/second. Not really but tell that to writers
  of UPnP specification.
- Expose transcode formats in the GetProtocolInfo's source argument. This should
  make Sony Bravia TVs happy.
- Transcoder URIs are now sorted according to their distance from the original
  format.
- Provide "contentFeatures.dlna.org" header in the HTTP responses.
- Provide DLNA transferMode header in the HTTP responses.
- Only advertise internal URIs on local loopback interface.
- Replace 'ip' config by 'interface' so users can bind Rygel to interfaces
  rather than IP.
- Allow plugins to provide thumbnails.
- Add thumbnails (if available) for each item if none provided by plugins. This
  works both on the desktop and Maemo.
- Suppress all C compiler warnings by default. These warnings are mostly useless
  for us since almost all C code is generated.
- Preference dialog is now more like a GNOME preferences dialog.
- Provide .desktop file for preferences dialog.
- Shave the build output.
- GstLaunch: New plugin that exposes gstreamer pipelines described using
  familiar gst-launch syntax in the user configuration.
- Tracker plugin:
  - Nicer default title.
  - Better detection of Tracker availability. Apparently ubuntu folks think that
    providing a .service file is wrong.
  - Better titles for top-level folders.
  - More usable hierarchy: Browsing by artists, albums and tags.
- Folder plugin:
  - Rename to MediaExport.
  - Nicer default title.
  - Use the new Rygel classes to extract, export and save media metadata.
  - notify about updates to containers.
  - Skip files/folders starting with '.'.
  - Avoid crash if unknown file is found.
  - Delete gone directories on new start.
  - React on deletion of files.
  - Add recursive file monitoring.
  - Provide simple and easy options to add and remove files and folders from the
    preferences UI.
- External plugin:
  - actually use 'DLNAProfile' property.
  - Don't load the plugin more than once.
  - Utilise optional MediaItem properties.
  - Fetch items on demand.
  - Fix critical warnings.
- Mediathek plugin:
  - Fix crash if no config is available.

Dependency-related changes:

- Require gupnp >= 0.13
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.5
- Require GStreamer >= 0.10.23
- Require libgee >= 0.3.0

Bugs fixed in this release:

584649 - Folder plugin should not export dot files and directories
586108 - ID3 information not exported on mp3 files
588034 - Bad durations for audio video files with media export plugin
585986 - Some copyright headers claim "all rights reserved"
585989 - Running "make clean" should leave generated C files in place.
586134 - Tracker plugin fails if org.freedesktop.Tracker can't be activated,
         even if tracker is already running
586243 - GStreamer 0.10.23 required for correct operation of transcoder
587651 - Support for some MediaItem properties missing
587855 - HTTP Error responses not sent
587866 - No way to notify about new sub-containers
588030 - rygel-preferences crashes if user's config file is missing
588162 - Support seeking in transcoded content
589955 - dc:creator never included in DIDL output
589956 - git ignore rules
589974 - Set the bitrate for transcoded resources correctly.
589977 - Rygel not recognised by Sony Bravia televisions
590643 - refactor HTTP request handling code
590702 - Rygel should provide thumbnails for items
591580 - not compatible with Samsung UE46B7070
593228 - [plugin] new gstlaunch plugin

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
James Henstridge 
Thijs Vermeir 
Ole André Vadla Ravnås

Download source tarball from here

We got thumbnails

2009-09-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

I got thumbnails working in Rygel. :) Right now rygel doesn't generate the thumbnails on it's own but provide thumbnails if already generated by another application (e.g nautilus) and stored in the freedesktop or maemo (they are almost the same) standard location. It works on both desktop and N900 and now that gupnp stack has been released, a rygel release with this and some other cool features will arrive shortly. :)

Now it's very easy for me to find the videos of my friends.

GSSDP 0.7, GUPnP 0.13, GUPnP AV 0.5, GUPnP Tools 0.8 & GUPnP Vala 0.6

2009-09-09T07:30:00.000-07:00

GSSDP 0.7 released!

Changes in this release:

- Join the multicast group on the specified interface.
- Put the message src timeout in the specified GMainContext.
- "host-ip" property moved from GUPnPContext to parent GSSDPClient.
- Use inet_aton instead of inet_addr and handle the error from it.
- gssdp-device-sniffer ported to GtkBuilder.
- Version-independent target match. This makes client forward and backward
compatible with resources that implement different version of the specs than
the client.
- Version-independent M-SEARCH response. This has the same effect as above but
only the other way around.
- GSSDPClient now binds to interface rather than IP.
- No need to find the default route.
- Add "active" property to GSSDPClient.
- Fix pkg-config paths.
- Add basic .gitignore.
- Other minor/internal changes.

Bugs fixed:

1621 - new gssdp timeout not added to the specific maincontext
1570 - gupnp doesn't set the pkgconfig lib dir correctly in 64 bit env

Dependencies dropped:

- libglade

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Ross Burton 
Jens Georg 
Olivier Crête 
--------------------------------------

GUPnP 0.13 released!

Changes since 0.12.8:

- Print reason when fail to fetch description doc
- Support for dynamic/multiple networks through a new class, ContextManager.
This class creates/destroys new context as new network interfaces go up/down.
It also provides two convenient methods to take care of control point and
device reference managment for you. Currently we have two implementations of
context manager:
* unix: The static but guaranteed to work on Unix, implementation. This is the
        default if none chosen at configure-time.
* network-manager: A NetworkManager based implementation.
- Idle handlers should use the assigned GMainContext.
- Gracefully handle 'no root element in description' scenerio.
- "host-ip" property moved from GUPnPContext to parent GSSDPClient.
- ControlPoint set itself inactive before getting disposed.
- New function to retrieve the capabilities of a DLNA device as announced in
the device description.
- New function to retrieve the content of arbitrary elements in the device
description.
- Fixed a crash that happens when service-proxy goes down before subscribtion to
it completes.
- Correct condition for SID being NULL.
- Don't create redundant proxies.
- Must not announce earlier versions of resources. This is strictly forbidden
according to the latest UPnP specs. Instead GSSDP now handles M-SEARCH
requests independent of version requested.
- Free app developer from hosting of description documents.
- New API to get SoupMessage associated with ServiceAction.
- Handle the SOAPAction header being missing.
- Fixed strrchr result checking.
- Provide and use a wrapper class for xmlDoc objects, GUPnPXMLDoc that is a
first-class gobject.
- New domains for XML errors.
- Many other minor fixes.

Bugs fixed:

1626 - Print reason when fail to fetch description doc
1769 - audit issues
1760 - missing/invalid SOAPAction header crashes gupnp
1705 - Provide a public API to get information about a GUPnPServiceAction's HTTP
     request

Dependencies changed:

- gssdp >= 0.7

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Ross Burton 
Sven Neumann 
Jens Georg 
Steven Dorigotti 
---------------------------------

GUPnP AV 0.5 released!

Changes in this release:

- New completely object-oriented, much simpler and consistent API:
* GUPnPDIDLLiteResource & GUPnPDIDLLiteObject are now first-class GObjects.
* Convert the helper methods to read props and their attributes from DIDL-Lite
  xml node into new first-class objects with writable properties:
  - GUPnPDIDLLiteObject
  - GUPnPDIDLLiteItem
  - GUPnPDIDLLiteContainer
* GUPnPDIDLLiteObject provides a convenient method to get the compatible
  resource given a SinkProtocolInfo string.
* A new class for dealing with protocolInfo fields: GUPnPProtocolInfo.
* A new class for dealing with DIDL-Lite descriptors: GUPnPDIDLLiteDescriptor.
* GUPnPDIDLLiteWriter now provides a much simpler API that is consistent with
  rest of the GUPnP AV API.
* GUPnPDIDLLiteWriter now handles filtering of DIDL-Lite XML.
* Correct possible values of GUPnPDLNAFlags.
* Replace GUPnPDIDLLiteParserObjectCallback by following signals:
  - object-available
  - container-available
  - item-available
- New Error domain for protocol related errors.
- Workaround for broken printf() implementations.
- Bitrate is in bytes/second and not bits/second.
- Enable DLL on windows.

Dependencies changed:

- gupnp >= 0.13

Bug fixes in this release:

1729 - bitrate checks in gupnp-dlna.c look wrong.
1579 - Minor fixes to enable dynamic library on windows

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Sven Neumann 
Jens Georg 
Ross Burton 
--------------------------

GUPnP Tools 0.8 released:

Changes since 0.7.1:

- Add lenient mode: Just pick-up the first resource available.
- Specify filter in Browse actions to reduce network usage.
- Don't browse containers with no children.
- Always re-browse containers on updates.
- Update childCount after browsing is done.
- Support for multiple networks.
- Leave selection of resource to gupnp-av.
- No need to search for all UPnP resources anymore.
- Fix infinite loop in icon cancelation code.
- No need to care about hosting of description document anymore.
- Adapt to new gupnp-av API.
- Add cmdline option to gupnp-upload to specify network interface.
- Many other minor/internal fixes.

Dependencies changed:

- gssdp >= 0.7
- gupnp >= 0.13
- gupnp-av >= 0.5

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Ross Burton 
-----------------------

GUPnP Vala 0.6 released!

Changes since 0.5.4:

- Adapt to new gssdp, gupnp and gupnp-av APIs.
- Fix pkg-config paths.

Bugs fixed:

1570 - gupnp doesn't set the pkgconfig lib dir correctly in 64 bit env

Dependencies changed:

- gssdp >= 0.7
- gupnp >= 0.13
- gupnp-av >= 0.5

All contributors:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Ross Burton 
---------------------------------

WARNING: All these releases are API and ABI incompatible with previous releases.

Download source tarballs from: http://gupnp.org/sources/

Maemo based Nokia N900 phone

2009-08-27T04:36:00.001-07:00

So the Maemo-based Nokia N900 is finally announced. We are finally free to tell everyone the cool stuff we have been cooking all this time. My work on this device was mostly with UPnP/DLNA and MAFW, not counting my work from n800 that was re-used. GUPnP will soon be in your pocket, so those out there who doubt the greatness of this library, time to face the facts. :)

So now is the time to ask all the questions you have on our soon-in-the-shelves mobile phone. :)

GUPnP 0.12.8 released

2009-06-03T05:17:00.000-07:00


Changes since 0.12.7

- Don't crash if device descriptions don't contain a root element.
- Fix pkg-config paths.
- Avoid using asserts.
- Use the closest match instead of using the icon that was last checked.
- Expect xmlRecoverMemory to fail.
- Reject action messages with zero content length.
- Change version in action answer.

Bug fixes in this release:

- bug#1570: gupnp doesn't set the pkgconfig lib dir correctly in 64 bit env.
- bug#1574: Avoid using asserts.
- bug#1592: gupnp_device_info_get_icon_url() does not return the closest match.
- bug#1604: Crash on action without any content.

All contributors to this release:

Ross Burton 
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Steven Dorigotti 
Sven Neumann 
Jens Georg 

Download at: http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp/gupnp-0.12.8.tar.gz

Rygel 0.3 (Berlin is cool if it doesn't rain) is out

2009-05-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

Rygel 0.3 (Berlin is cool if it doesn't rain) is out!

Here are is relase announcement:


Brief summary of changes since 0.2.2:

- Transcoding from any format (that gstreamer's decodebin2 can handle) to mp3,
 linear PCM and mpeg transport stream containing mpeg 2 video and mp2 audio.
- Plugin API to deal with user preferences.
- User preferences UI: rygel-preferences.
- New plugins:
  * Folder: Recursively exports folders specified in the user preferences.
  * ZDFMediathek: Exports online media from 2nd German TV station.
  * External: Exports media hierarchies provided by external applications
    through implementation of this spec:
    http://live.gnome.org/Rygel/MediaServer. The first application
    that utilizes this feature is PulseAudio.
- Drop xbox support. It didn't work anyway and we better concentrate on
 implementing standard stuff that it at least worthy of being called "UPnP" (
 at least for now).
- Tracker and DVB plugins are only loaded if their corresponding services are
 available.
- Export of duration for music and video items from Tracker.
- Use HTTP EOF encoding rather the CHUNKED for live streams.
- Ability to build rygel plugins outside it's source tree.
- HTTP proxying only if needed.
- Now that gupnp-av does DLNA profile guessing for us, no need to lie about
 DLNA profile anymore.
- Add a summary after configure.
- HTTServer is now internal API.
- Use git-version-gen to generate package version.
- Differentiate between modules and plugins
- Passive, asynchronous plugin loading. A side-effect of which is that modules
 can now load more than one plugin.
- Differentiate between name and title of the plugin.
- Plugins can now dynamically change their availability.
- Add API to get/list plugins.
- Re-use existing description from user's home directory. This not only speeds
 the start-up but also obsoletes the necessity to keep immutable data (e.g UDN)
 in user preferences.
- Provide gconf schemas.
- Lots of other improvements and bug fixes.

Dependency-related changes:

- Explicitly require and link to libsoup-2.4 >= 2.26.0.
- Don't require Vala (and bindings) in distribution tarball.
- Require gupnp-av >= 0.4.
- Require Vala >= 0.7.3.
- Require Gtk+ >= 2.16 if preferences UI is not disabled.

Bugs fixed in this release:

582173 - git-version-gen: generate versions with - instead of .
577000 - gupnp-av-cp does not like & in uris
576998 - Rygel wants to transcode audio files to video/mpeg
575935 - Add support for duration metadata field
574604 – bug connecting to PS3

All contributors to this release:

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) 
Jens Georg 
Henrique Ferreiro 
Lennart Poettering 
Marc-André Lureau 
Rob Taylor 

Download source tarball at: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/rygel/0.3/

Here is me watching streams from 2nd German TV channel, transcoded to mpeg transport stream through Rygel on my PS3:

Here is the video clip if you are interested or don't believe me. :)

GUPnP Tools 0.7.1 released

2009-05-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

Changes in this release:

- Use g_printerr() instead of g_critical() in case of problems.
- Initialize the GError to NULL at declaration.
- Declare variables as const to setisfy the compiler.
- Add missing casts.
- Use g_content_type_is_a() to compare mimetypes.
- Correct the order of mimetype check.
- Iterate over item resources rather than renderer protocols.
- Port all UIs to use GtkBuilder.
- Bump-up Gtk+ requirement to 2.16.

Removed dependency in this release: libglade.

Contributors to this release:

Sven Neumann <s.neumann@phase-zero.de>
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) <zeeshanak@gnome.org>

Download tarball here:
http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-tools/gupnp-tools-0.7.1.tar.gz

GUPnP 0.12.7 released

2009-04-27T05:38:00.000-07:00

GUPnP 0.12.7 released.

Changes in this release:

- Chain up dispose and finalize in GUPnPDeviceInfo
- Use a dedicated SoupSession for event handling
- Fix device icon fallback logic
- Fix user agent string
- Sanity check UDN while parsing

Download source tarball from: http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp/gupnp-0.12.7.tar.gz

Contributors to this release:

Sven Neumann
Ross Burton
Zeeshan Ali

GUPnP on windows

2009-04-27T04:48:00.000-07:00

I have been asked several times in the past if gupnp is portable enough. I always told them that I don't know for sure but the only problem i see is the low-level networking bits. Nobody really showed interest in actually trying it out on windows but then came Jens Georg. He managed to make gupnp stack and network-light working on windows within a weekend, despite the fact that some of his hours were wasted due to firewalls being enabled after a reboot and him forgetting about it. He has a small video of network-light running nicely on win32 on his blog.

My first Javascript app

2009-04-17T02:10:00.000-07:00

Last night I tried to make a small app/script in javascript (gjs) and it actually worked. :) Here is the code:


const GLib = imports.gi.GLib;
const GUPnP = imports.gi.GUPnP;
const Mainloop = imports.mainloop;

// This doesn't start any threads
GLib.thread_init (null);

let context = new GUPnP.Context ({ main_context: null,
                                   host_ip: null,
                                   port: 0
});

let cp = new GUPnP.ControlPoint ({ client: context,
                                   target: "ssdp:all"
});

function onDeviceProxyAvailable (cp, proxy) {
        log (proxy.get_friendly_name ());
}

// Tell us when there is a new device available
cp.connect ("device-proxy-available", onDeviceProxyAvailable);

// Search and listen for UPnP resources on the network
cp.set_active (true);

Mainloop.run ("0");

GUPnP AV 0.4 and GUPnP Vala 0.5.4 released

2009-04-12T14:05:00.000-07:00

GUPnP AV 0.4 released.

New in this release:

- Watch for empty DIDL-Lite nodes.
- Escape the URIs before putting them into DIDL-Lite XML.
- The '.' must be omitted from duration if fraction part is not included.
- Be more lenient when parsing DIDL-Lite XML fragments.
- Don't require the DLNA profile string.
- Try to guess the DLNA Profile if not provided and put "*" in the whole 4th
field of protocolInfo if our guess work fails.
- Make sure 4th field of protocolInfo is completely in compliance with DLNA
guidelines. This only implies one change in the API: enum dlna_play_speed is
replaced by play_speeds, a GList of allowed play speeds as strings.
- Use '1' and '0' to express boolean properties in DIDL-Lite XML.
- Other minor fixes.

All contributors to this release:

Henrique Ferreiro García
Peter Christensen
Sven Neumann
Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)

Download from here: http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-av/gupnp-av-0.4.tar.gz

-------------------------------
GUPnP Vala 0.5.4 released.

A new minor release mainly to update the gupnp-av bindings.

Download from here: http://gupnp.org/sources/bindings/gupnp-vala-0.5.4.tar.gz

Zakir Naik and evolution

2009-03-28T21:30:00.001-07:00

This name must be alien to most of the people reading this blog but he is quite a popular in indo-sub continent. Recently a muslim friend of mine presented his arguments to me when we discussed evolution so I thought of watching one of his videos about the theory of evolution. The following are my notes on this video that I was supposed to send to my friend but then realized that it would be nice to 1. share it with others 2. have these available somewhere in public:

He starts his speech with the argument that in no book, it calls evolution a fact but theory. Now this only shows his ignorance about the very definition of a scientific theory and this alone should be enough to simply ignore anything such has to say about science. However I will not do that and listen to rest of his speech and address his arguments. Here is my notes on each of his arguments:

1. Quote from Darwin "I do not believe in natural selection, I do no believe in theory of evolution". First of all, could someone please provide me with a citation for this letter Darwin wrote? Although I have a gut feeling that he is just lying but putting that aside, he is talking about the very early days of Darwin when he was very young and hadn't yet really arrived at the theory of evolution so him not believing in it at that time should not be very surprising and have much (if any) weight as an argument.

2. He presented an argument about Darwin admitting missing links that I couldn't quite catch despite the fact I heard it again and again. If he is just talking about missing links themselves, he seems to be ignorant of an important fact that Darwin was able to correctly predict at least a few missing links to be found later that really where found later just like he predicted.

3. The *only* reason theory of evolution is taught everywhere now a days is that church has been against science and theory of evolution goes against the church. I am sorry but this is such a stupid thing to say. This might be able to explain why it's taught in western/Christian countries but how does this explain it being taught in China, Japan and India for example?

Also not all churches have always fought against theory of evolution. Some churches, like Lutheran got over it ages ago and they hadn't challenged the validity of evolution for a long time. In fact I personally know a Lutheran priest who recently wrote any article on how this theory doesn't go against the teaching of Bible.

Catholics have never really been against evolution and recently they've started to show signs of embracing it.

Notice the stress on *only*. This implicitly implies that he denies any evidence supporting it what so ever and that is something quite contrary to reality. If he had denied or challenged the validity of the big amount of evidence present, that would have been very different but simply denying it's existence is nothing but either utter ignorance or lie.

4. Then he describes the states of human evolution according to theory of evolution. He puts them in wrong order and he doesn't even seem to know that homo-sapiens is the name for the modern humans. Surprise surprise, he proves the theory of evolution wrong by criticizing these stages that he got wrong himself. This is just another example of his ignorance about this theory he is talking against so confidently.

5. He talks of 100s of scientists who are against theory of evolution including nobel prize winers but when he give examples, he is only able to mention one Nobel prize winning scientist. I tried to catch the name of that person but didn't quite catch his name or maybe (just maybe) this person doesn't actually exist?

All the other people who mentions, I have never heard of them and searching for their names on Internet doesn't bring-up much, unlike when you search for Albert Einstein, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Hawking and other big scientists in the recent times.

It could be just that I don't get to catch the names correctly and google isn't able to suggest anything better but I will appreciate if anyone could provide me this list of scientists.

6. He again come to "there is no proof whatsoever" and then he contradicts himself immediately after that saying "there is some proof on the microscopic level". If he had challenged the proof and/or evidence supporting evolution, that was another thing and I could think about that but simply denying the existence of any proof is simply making a loud noise about one's ignorance to me.

7. He then claims that evolution on microscopic level is not against the Quran so he simply accepts that as a fact. Thinking about this, I wonder where does Quran says that evolution can't happen on non-microscopic level? The only thing in evolution that really does conflict with Quran is evolution of man himself. So why make the difference between microscopic species and non-microscopic ones?

8. He then calculates the chances of evolution happening and comes up with a very small number. How does he do that? By completely keeping two very important facts from his calculation: 1. the incredibly huge amount of number of solar systems in this universe 2. The extremely long amount of time it took. I once saw a program on National Geographic in which they calculated the same probability with these importance facts in mind and they came up with a very big number.

9. He then goes on attacking the 'theory' that homosexuality is genetic, which he concludes by saying it is illogical. However I remember hearing the news 1-2 years ago about scientists finding the exact gene that causes a person to be homo-sexual. Not only that, they even found how it transfers from one generation to another. Anyway, this is off-topic and i don't have any reference so i'll let him win on this one. :)

10. At the end, he talks of the 'theory' that all man are descendants of one man. He says that it's just a theory so he doesn't quote it or anything but since it's in accordance with Quran, he predicts that in 100 years it will be proven. How exactly can he know that? What proof he has in support for this theory that he is comfortable with believing in that, even though it's just a 'theory'?

Looking at the history of all religions (including Islam), it's very easy to predict instead that they all will accept theory of evolution at some point, many in fact has already done so and some (Catholics) are showing signs of doing so in the near future. In fact, they will then claim that this theory was foretold in their religious books long time ago and present it as a big argument everywhere.

In the end, a very simple picture that shows one of the many evidence in favor of evolution (thanks Karl Lattimer for pointing it out):

Maemo community - Students Wanted

2009-03-24T09:13:00.000-07:00

Just copy&paste from Valerio's blog to get this on planet GNOME:

The Maemo community is looking for talented students to join us in the Google Summer of Code initiative.

We already have a good pool of ideas, but we are also looking for students ideas in the mobile/embedded field, especially in the following areas:

* Location based apps;
* Context aware apps;
* Linux kernel advances, related to mobile/embedded;
* Social apps clients;
* Mobile/embedded apps in general that can benefit a wide range of platforms (maemo, openmoko, beagleboard, etc…).

More informations about Maemo @ GSoC can be found here.

We have transcoding!

2009-03-22T05:06:00.000-07:00

Since transcoding is one of the hottest feature almost every user expects from a decent modern MediaServer, I finally manged to put some time into implementing it. After two weeks of hacking, I finally have transcoding implemented in Rygel. Yay! The source format/codec could be anything that gstreamer's decodebin2 can handle. The target format/codec had to be specific and I currently support mp3, PCM and mp2 video + mp2 audio encapsulated in mpeg transport stream.

Before you ask, no! none of the above transcoding classes work against PS3 but PCM. So you can listen to your OGG vorbis file on your PS3, yes but no videos that are in format alien to PS3. With transcoding working with PCM, I don't think any PS3 user will miss transcoding to mp3 (especially keeping in mind the inevitable loss in quality because of transcoding from one lossy codec to another) but transcoding of videos is something users would want/need so I will look into why PS3 refuses the mpeg ts stream from Rygel, however I have a feeling that the problem is most probably not in my code but mpegtsmux gstreamer element. If that is the case, I might not be able to get to dig into this issue any time soon myself. However, anyone willing to contribute is welcome to look into this matter.

Multiple networks and GUPnP

2009-03-07T03:01:00.000-08:00

When GUPnP was first used at Maemo software, one of the first questions I was asked was: Can't GUPnP handle multiple network interfaces just like ClinkC (the now deprecated UPnP framework in Maemo)? The answer to that question was "yes but you have to take care of creating GUPnPContext objects for each network interface yourself" and that wasn't very convenient. This issue, accompanied by the fact that applications had to know when the interfaces go up and down to create and destroy the associated GUPnPContext object themselves, made the lives of application developers not so easy.

Recently when this issue was raised on the mailing-list and bugzilla by two different people, I started to think about how to solve this issue. Keeping in view Ross' advice I came-up with the following solution

A GUPnPContextManager class that basically just have two signals: "context-available" and "context-unavailable", that it uses to create/destroy and report GUPnPContext object for each network interface as it goes up/down. While the API was easy, the implemenation wasn't as there is no portable way of doing this. So what I did was that I wrote two different implementations that user (packager) can choose at configure time:

GUPnPUnixContextManager: Unix-specific implementation of GUPnPContextManager that only checks for all the up interfaces and creates a GUPnPContext object for each one of them. It doesn't unfortunately have any way of knowing when the interfaces go down. One can monitor network interfaces using netlink but that will be linux-specific and therefore should go into a separate implementation. Such an implementation will also be something that will be feasable for maemo so in case you are interested in small tasks for maemo, this is yet another chance. :)
GUPnPNetworkManager: Implementation of GUPnPContextManager based on NetworkManager. This is a full-features implementation and hence the default one.

Although I got this working last week, I realized that Jorn might have overlooked something in his great plan: Every GUPnPContext was joining and watching the multicast channel on the same (default) interface no matter which interface it was created for so the discovery/announcement part wasn't quite functional on each interface. Since this required some fundamental changes in GUPnP stack and the fact that it had been quite some time since I last touched unix socket APIs, it took me a week to get this right. Fortunately, GUPnP API/ABI didn't need to be broken for all this and all that changed in the API was the move of a property from one class in gupnp package to it's parent class in gssdp package (this implied deprecation of one getter and addition of another though).

So after two weeks of hard work, the world seems to be a better place now. The needed changes are yet to be reviewed and merged by Ross so for now if you are interested to try these out, you need to use my 'multinet' branches from gitorious repos:

http://gitorious.org/projects/gssdp/repos/mainline/logs/multinet
http://gitorious.org/projects/gssdp/repos/mainline/logs/multinet
http://gitorious.org/projects/gupnp-tools/repos/mainline/logs/multinet

First time skied

2009-03-01T15:42:00.000-08:00

So after 4 years in Finland, I finally got to ski for the first time ever in my life. It was so much fun but unfortunately also extremely tiring at least for a first timer like me who hadn't developed the needed muscles for it. Ansku took some pictures:

Rygel 0.2.2 is out

2009-02-23T15:29:00.000-08:00

Changes since 0.2:

- Use the new (0.6.9) Tracker API.
- Priority of gio-based streams are based on requested DLNA transfer mode.
- GIO-based/like asynchronous plugin API.
- Adapt to latest changes in gupnp-vala API.
- Serialization of media objects isn't done by media objects themselves anymore, but by a new separate class, Rygel.DIDLLiteWriter.
- Internal API is marked 'internal' so it doesn't get to our (Vala) API.
- MediaObject now derives from GLib.Object.
- Generic AsyncResult implementation, SimpleAsyncResult.
- StateMachine interface that all state machines classes implement.
- Visible performance improvements in Tracker plugin by proper use of Tracker APIs.
- Use Filename.to_string() and therefore make Bastien happy.
- Require lastest version (0.1.5) of libgee to use List.slice().
- Don't limit the number of objects returned to a client, let it decide that on it's own.
- Proper handling of update notification to the client by use of a very simple bubble-up mechanism for containers to signal updates.
- Decrease needed gconf version to 2.16.
- Set application name and therefore make Lennart happy.
- Require latest version of vala (0.5.7) and gupnp-vala (0.5.3).
- Allow multiple URIs for each media items.
- Response for seekable media request is now sent buffer by buffer so the whole file is not put into memory.
- Some improvements to build system.
- Lots of other improvements and bugfixes.

Download source tarball from here:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/sources/rygel/0.2/

Rygel is an implementation of the UPnP MediaServer V 2.0 specification
that is specifically designed for GNOME (Mobile). It is based on
GUPnP and is written (mostly) in Vala language. Project was
previously known as gupnp-media-server.

More info at: http://live.gnome.org/Rygel

GSSDP 0.6.4, GUPnP 0.12.6 and GUPnP Vala 0.5.3

2009-02-23T15:26:00.000-08:00

GSSDP 0.6.4 released

New in this release:

- Send ssdp:byebye before sending the first ssdp:alive. [Jussi Kukkonen]
- Moderate the outbound SSDP messages. [Jussi Kukkonen]
- Documentation fixes. [Jussi Kukkonen]
- Send byebyes in dispose without sleep. [Jussi Kukkonen]
- Use g_set_error_literal(). [Jorn Baayen]
- Depend on glib 2.18. [Jorn Baayen]
- Do not byebye unavailable resources. [Jorn Baayen]
- All resources must respond to "ssdp:all" messages. [Hugo Calleja, Jorn Baayen]

Download from here: http://gupnp.org/sources/gssdp/gssdp-0.6.4.tar.gz
---------------------------------

GUPnP 0.12.6 released:

New in this release:

- Port to FreeBSD. [Romain Tartière]
- Ship the XML files needed for example app. [Romain Tartière]
- Keep a reference on the control-point during signal emission. [Sven Neumann]
- Allow passing NULL to ControlPoint constructor, for default resource
factory. [Sven Neumann]
- Remove debug output that accidentally went in with the last commit.
[Sven Neumann]

Download from here: http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp/gupnp-0.12.6.tar.gz
-------------------------------

GUPnP Vala 0.5.3 released:

New in this release:

- Service::action_invoked.action is now 'owned' by the handler.
- Remove all generated files on `make clean`.
- Tell Vala that ServiceAction doesn't have ref/unref functions.
- Add a pkg-config file for gupnp-vala.
- Require latest vala, gssdp and gupnp.

Download from here: http://gupnp.org/sources/bindings/gupnp-vala-0.5.3.tar.gz

Writing Rygel plugins

2009-02-17T04:34:00.000-08:00

While I had been trying my best to make sure writing Rygel plugins is easier than frying eggs before my FOSDEM presentation, I was quite disappointed about how the presentation actually went. I thought I simply lost everyone in there by the end of th presentation and didn't get to make a very good impression. But seems the ease of writing Rygel plugins didn't go unnoticed in that presentation after all since I happen to catch the attention of at least one developer, Jens Georg who is working on two plugins for Rygel and you can follow the progress on his blog.

Geek Humor

2009-02-02T04:19:00.000-08:00

I was poked by a Salvatore Iovene, a very good friend and colleague from time to time to have a look at his comic series. I always thought I should have a look at it as it might be good but then I used to forget about it. Today he poked me again (this time when i was sitting in front of a computer) and I did have a look at it. Oh boy! this is some really great stuff. If you like Geek Humor, I strongly recommend it. Some trailor:

XChat Guile 0.3

2009-01-31T11:27:00.000-08:00

Changes in this release:

- Move/port to Guile-1.8.
- Get rid of all locking and thread stuff and in turn dep on gthread.
- Guile console. [Lionel Elie Mamane]
- Use alist instead of list where appropriate.
- Use XCHAT_EAT_* instead of hardcoded 0/1. [Lionel Elie Mamane]
- Fix memory leak in xchat_write. [Lionel Elie Mamane]
- We maintain this NEWS file from now on. :)
- Some other minor fixes.

Download release tarball from here:
http://static.fi/~zeenix/xchat-guile/xchat-guile-0.3.tar.gz

What is it?
===========

XChat-Guile is a plugin for XChat that enables XChat plugin writers to
write their plugins in Scheme language.

Requirements:
=============

* XChat >= 2.4.1
* Guile >= 1.6.4

API Documentation: http://static.fi/~zeenix/xchat-guile/xchat-guile.txt

Regarding Mono project

2009-01-27T14:27:00.000-08:00

Jeff explained to me on IRC how the mention of Mono in my last blog entry the way I put it, gives people the impression that I implied mono has anything to do with the issue. I really didn't mean to imply that so I am very sorry for causing this confusion. Now that I am writing this , I will make it very clear for the record that I do not have anything against the mono project. Quite on the contrary, I am extremely impressed by this great project and the service it has done for the Free Software world. Microsoft supporting the development of a Free Software project, never thought we'll ever achieve this but Miguel and his great team of hackers have made that possible.

Give Lennart a break

2009-01-26T15:04:00.000-08:00

Even though Lennart has been working hard to make people lives easier, it seems some people are working hard to make his life harder by making discouraging comments not just about his ideas but the great work he has been putting up.

First of all, if you don't know why a sound server is needed on a modern desktop environment, you need to research about it (asking Lennart or anyone who knows *politely* might be a good start). Making a big fuzz of your ignorance and being proud of it won't help anyone, especially yourself. If you had asked this question from Lennart and he didn't give you a nice satisfactory answer at that time, it must have been because he must be getting really tired of answering this same exact question so many times, over and over again. That doesn't mean a sound server is not needed. No need to rush to conclusions. Ask someone else and/or research more. God is in the details.

Secondly, if Lennart's software breaks some proprietry shit, it's really not his fault and the last thing we need is some random mono-hacker who doesn't even know why a sound server is needed, to blog about Lennart being the guilty party.

Thirdly, there is nothing wrong with GNOME having a hard dependency on PA and there is no need to uninstall GNOME. This is as silly as saying "so if you don't want to have gtk installed on your machine, just stop using GUI apps or change desktop".

No really WTF do you guys want from him?

FOSDEM2009

2009-01-22T15:31:00.000-08:00

Like many other Hacker fellows, I'll also be attending FOSDEM this year. I even have a talk at the GNOME devroom just like last year but this time I'll be mostly talking about Rygel rather than GUPnP. If you are coming to FOSDEM and happen to have any interest in Rygel, especially in how to write plugins for it don't forget to attend it.

Rygel 0.2 is out

2009-01-19T15:09:00.000-08:00

Rygel 0.2 is out. Here is the release announcement:


The major change after last release (as gupnp-media-server) is the introduction
of a simple yet powerful plugin-based architecture/api: Everyone plugin:
- is loaded into a separate MediaServer instance.
- can implement any kind and number of resources (currently only services).
- can export an icon file.
- inherit it's ContentDirectory implementation from a base class that does most
  of the UPnP-related work. More improvements on this planned for next release.
- use an intuitive API to easily export media from URIs and live GStreamer
  source elements over HTTP.

Other changes:

- Relicense under LGPL to allow proprietary plugins and ease of moving code
  from/to gupnp libraries.
- DVB Daemon integration though a plugin. Now you can watch live channels from
  your PC on your PS3 for example.
- Test plugin that exports one audio and video item, streaming contents from
  GStreamer's audiotestsrc and videotestsrc elements respectively.
- Better interoperability with Sony playstation 3.
- Announce unavailability to UPnP world on exit.
- Loads of other improvements.

Download source tarball from here:
http://ftp.acc.umu.se/pub/GNOME/sources/rygel/0.2/

GUPnP migrates to Git

2009-01-06T14:22:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Ross and Richard Purdie, GUPnP moved to Git today. I already updated the jhbuild modulesets to reflect the new repos.

Rygel and DVB

2008-12-28T08:54:00.000-08:00

I had been working on adding a DVB plugin to Rygel lately so that people can easily watch TV on all their UPnP-capable Renderers without having to swap DVB cards around (people typically have one). Although I had finished the basic version of the plugin 1-2 weeks ago, the live streams never worked for me. Yesterday, I realized my mistake (wasn't handling the dynamic pads from the gst source element) and when i corrected that, here is what happend:

There are still some issues to fix, especially the artifacts that happen because RTP headers are not getting stripped off when Rygel proxies the RTSP stream over HTTP but I am hopeful I'll be able to fix them soon.

UPDATE: The artifects issue i mentioned above has already been fixed in the trunk so now you can enjoy a smooth live tv experience. :) Also! before you ask, no this doesn't work with PS3 yet (most probably because of some missing metadata in the DIDL-Lite fragments).

Rygel now part of maemo plan

2008-12-09T04:57:00.000-08:00

So it is no secret anymore that Rygel will be part of maemo platform. If you are interested in contributing to maemo, here is yet another chance. I have a big pile of TODO for Rygel so if you are interested, do contact me. In case you prefer IRC like I do, I am always on #gupnp on irc.gimp.org.

DVB-T on Linux

2008-12-03T04:13:00.000-08:00

One of the excuses I had to not implement DVB-Daemon integration in Rygel was that I didn't have the needed hardware to do so. Some days ago, I decided to get rid of this excuse by buying myself a Hauppauge Nova-T DVB-T stick. After a few days of trying different things, fiddling around and filing ivalid bugs, I finally manged to get it working with both DVB Daemon and Totem. Here is some advice based on my experience so far:

If you happen to have the same DVB card as I do, make sure you have the recent enough (>= 2.6.25) Linux kernel that provides the needed driver (dib0700)
out of the box.

Get yourself the latest firmware from here and place it under /lib/firmware. The driver still looks for it by it's old filename so make a symlink in the same directory to this file by the name "dvb-usb-dib0700-1.10.fw".

Unless you know exactly what kind of channels file needs to be created, DO NOT use w_scan for creating a channels file. Use gnome-dvb-setup.py (part of DVB Daemon) to do that.

If gnome-dvb-setup.py is unable to find your local channels, concider the possibility that the small antenna provided with the DVB-T card might not be big enough to do the trick. I had this problem and I solved it by connecting to the cable from the bigger antenna on the top of my house.

Also, I must say I am very much impressed by how much great work Sebastian 'sebp' Pölsterl has put together in such a short amount of time. This could possibly be one of the best GSoC projects ever. It's not that it just works but the quality (architecture and design) of the code seems to be pretty good as well. Implementing featurefull software in a short amount of time without compromising quality is something even many very experienced developer can't seem to be able to do but Sebastian has done it.

Rygel update

2008-11-25T06:59:00.000-08:00

For the past few weeks I have been cleaning-up and lately re-designing the source code. I am mostly finished with that and I can hopefully focus mostly on functional features piled in my todo now. The biggest change has been that plugins are now loaded into separate Media Servers and allowed to implement all kinds of resources (currently only service implementation is possible) instead of just providing a Media Provider interface. I decided to make it so when I realized that some plugins will need to implement additional services. For example a DVB plugin will want to implement a UPnP ScheduledRecording service rather than just exporting the channels.

On a side-note, our brave user (and now a contributor) Florian Steinel has got Rygel working with his PS3 already. According to him all his audio and image files are discovered and played/rendered without any problems but not all of his video files. Yes, there is still room for improvements but I was expecting quite a lot of work on making it work against a PS3 but glad to see that we are already very much compatible with it. Here are some screenshots of him playing with Rygel and PS3.

WARNING: If you want to try out Rygel with your PS3, you need to get tracker and vala from the SVN trunk.

UPDATE:Those weird looking titles in the screenshots turn out to be some Tracker-related issue:

<fsteinel> hhm, those name are already in the xml file lets see tracker... <fsteinel> a tracker metadata bug nice, gstreamer gets it :-) <fsteinel> gstreamer title: "El Reloj" -> tracker title: ÿþE a tracker reindex later and the error is gone :-)

Secure UPnP not a dream anymore

2008-11-03T04:58:00.000-08:00

On last friday evening, while thinking about security and UPnP, I realized adding security might not be as hard as one might think. If HTTPS is used instead of HTTP together with authentication, Your neighbor should no longer be able to play his p0rn on your Media Renderer once he/she breaks into your wireless network. Giving it more thought, I then realized it might not be so hard to add this support into GUPnP and I was correct.

After a few hours of reading libsoup docs and hacking around this weekend, I managed to add support for HTTPS in GUPnP. Adding authorization doesn't need any changes in GUPnP since we expose both SoupSession and SoupServer so applications can very easily add that there. Also no changes were required in GUPnP for the control points to be able to deal with devices/services using HTTPS instead of HTTP, thanks to libsoup. Here is a bug that you can follow if you are interested in this topic.

WARNING: Use of HTTPS and/or authentication is not described in any existing UPnP specification that I know of so if you decide to use this in your device/service implementations, don't expect interoperability with other devices/services.

Rygel the GNOME UPnP Media Server

2008-10-28T15:22:00.000-07:00

I am pleased to announce that gupnp-media-server project has been moved to GNOME SVN under the new name, Rygel. Currently it's a basic implementation on top of GUPnP and Tracker but I'll be putting a lot of time and love staring from next week to turn it into a very great project. Special emphases will be put into making it fit the UPnP needs of GNOME.

This would be a very good time to convince me to implement all the features you would want to see in a UPnP Media Server so I can add them to my TODO file. :)

UPDATE: While updating the jhbuild moduleset, I found out that rygel isn't buildable with latest vala/bindings. I'll try to correct the issue(s) tommorrow so don't panic if it doesn't build for you. It's just the demo effect. :)

Good news for the lazy

2008-10-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

Jussi recently commited some major changes to Ross' gupnp-binding-tool and one of the new features is support for server-side bindings. This makes writing UPnP implementations in C even more easier. So laziness is becoming less and less of an excuse to not write UPnP stuff. :) Here is a nice document with a nice explanation of how to use it.

Claudio has bad memory

2008-10-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

Claudio has bad memory so here is my feelings about both of these places in my own words:

Meritähti: I really like that place, nice food in a very affordable price. Also it is very near to our office, which makes it the first choice to go to for a meal before we hit another bar for good beers. However, it is most definitely not the best restaurants or bar in Helsinki. Not even one of the best ones. There are lots of very excellent restaurants in the city but of course they charge a lot more.

Molly Malone's: That is one of the best bars in Helsinki, lots of nice beers, nice friendly atmosphere and live concert every evening.

BTW, Bastien just committed my patch to nautilus-sendto trunk that adds support for sending files to UPnP Media Servers. I've only tested in against Nokia N81 and Media Server provided by Intel tools for UPnP but it should work for most of the Media Servers that support uploading.

GUPnP: achievements and way forward

2008-10-09T14:21:00.000-07:00

As most of you probably know already, GUPnP is now officially part of Maemo and therefore future internet tablets. This is a major milestone and gives a big boost to my motivation to continue my UPnP adventure. Although I try to put as much of the bits and peaces of spare time i get from my job into UPnP work and I am pretty sure the Intel (former OH) will continue their work as well, we could certainly use more hands to accelerate the development.

If you want to help, here is a short list of TODOs that you might want to have a look at and decide if you could help on any of these:

Bindings: Although the more bindings we have the more worlds we can conquer but what we definitely need is bindings for most popular languages in GNOME/Maemo world, namely C#/mono, Java and Python. If you are interested in helping with this, I strongly suggest you take the g-i-r route. Also if you are only interested in C# bindings, I suggest you talk to Jerome Halton who already have a half-baked solution.

Integration: GUPnP can't possibly become the standard UPnP framework of the GNOME world until we have:
- plugins for Totem, Rhythmbox and Banshee enabling these apps to browse and search contents on UPnP MediaServer (MS), export playback control on the UPnP network by implementing a MediaRenderer (MR) and to redirect playback of contents to other MRs.
  
  You might notice that I didn't mention sharing of contents on the network, the reason for which is that I believe (and Jorn agrees) that that should be the responsibility of a dedicated MS (gupnp-media-server) as part of the desktop session. Having a dedicated MR OTOH hardly makes any sense.
- GVFS backend for UPnP, allowing the GIO world to browse, copy and move contents to/from UPnP MS as if it was just a local filesystem.
- PulseAudio integration: Wouldn't it be nice if I could redirect all audio output of my laptop/internet tablet to my cool UPnP-enabled speakers or my desktop machine running Totem, Rhythmbox, Banshee or better yet PulseAudio itself (which would mean p-a implements both an MR and an MR control point (CP)? This is actually part of Lennart's great plan to conquer the world so I thought I mention it here in case someone does it before Lennart gets the time to do it himself.

UPDATE: Forgot to mention a very imporant task: Porting to platforms other than Linux. We mostly use glib, libxml2 and libsoup so this shouldn't be a huge task. The only platform-specific code in the whole stack that I know of is the networking bits.

Fire in the hole!

2008-09-30T11:46:00.000-07:00

Many thanks to Olivier Crête, we now have a nice small library for firing holes through firewalls using a part of UPnP IGD API. This library also provides a convenient way to do all that without having to use a gmainloop. While Olivier will most probably use it in his farsight2, I am sure this will be useful for other projects (I did not say Ekiga :)) as well.

We want MiniObject

2008-09-26T13:17:00.000-07:00

My last blog post managed to attract the attention of some of our beloved GNOME developers, especially the ones working on/with embedded systems. That made me realize that I am not (at least completely) on crack and decided to file a nice big bug for addition of something similar to GstMiniObject to core gobject library. Lets see what happens next. :)

Think before you create GObjects

2008-09-22T12:48:00.000-07:00

I had always been hearing that GObjects are slow and it's not always a good idea to use/write them but I never saw any evidence to support that. I had this desire to write a test application to get this evidence but felt too lazy to do it in C. I realized a few days ago that I can write such an app very easily in Vala without giving up much on my laziness. :) So here is an app that I wrote last evening after returning from vacation. Here are the results on my laptop:

$ ./test-perf 0.000182 seconds taken in creating 10000 structs. 0.001598 seconds taken in creating 10000 instances (compact). 0.003522 seconds taken in creating 10000 instances. 0.090455 seconds taken in creating 10000 instances (GObject).

The ranking is exactly how I expected it to be but didn't expect such a big difference between them all.

Back from Italy

2008-09-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

What a beautiful country. The people were very nice and the food was just amazing.

Regarding closures

2008-09-13T05:15:00.000-07:00

After reading/watching Stuart's nice slides on Closures in the context of JavaScript, I have started to like JavaScript. Personally, I don't accept any language as a high-level scripting language if it doesn't support closures. Python is therefore straight out of my window. Although Vala isn't a scripting language, it would be nice to have such support in there as well. It already supports lambda functions with no restrictions and Jürg has concrete plans to support closures, it's more a matter of when rather than why or how. When that support is there, just try and stop me from loving Vala. :)

UPDATE: Thanks to Anonymous, I now stand corrected that Python does fully support closures. Although I still don't like the fact that it restricts lambda functions to be one-liner but at least it's not straight out of the window anymore. :)

UPDATE#2: Andy Wingo informs me that python doesn't really fully support closures. He even put up a small code fragment to make his point. So I hereby throw python out the window, again. :)

Go Havoc

2008-09-08T13:42:00.000-07:00

Since I totally agree with last two blog entries of Havoc, I originally started to write this entry to get them to the planets I am on and he is not (yes, there are some) but then I couldn't resist adding my own thoughts. :)

Regarding "embeddable" scripting languages, I came-up with the exact same conclusion 4-5 year ago. When I looked around at that time, I realized that GNU had realized that long time ago and had a nice embeddable implementation of the easiest yet powerful language, Scheme. Guile was the name of that implementation. I soon became a firm believer of "Most of the implementation in C, while the highest-level (only) logic written in Scheme/Guile". While I was acting on my belief, I couldn't help but notice that the only other person in the whole GNOME community that had similar vision was Andy Wingo. Many (if not most) had been going for Python. Some of them even took this scripting language as far as coding complete frameworks in it.

As I mentioned in my previous blog entries, I did hack in Python for a while but the more I coded in it, the more I hated it. Now that I think back on that experience I realize that I wouldn't have hated it so much if the projects I had worked on where not completely written in it and it had used Python as what it is, a scripting language.

But lets not make this yet another anti-Python rant and agree with the conclusions drawn by Havoc for us. :)

More Network Light fun

2008-09-07T04:07:00.000-07:00

When I wrote GUPnP Network Light, I thought of it as just a simple example application that demonstrates how easy it is to implement UPnP devices and services using GUPnP. However there is one man, Mr. Hugo Baldasano Calleja who being an electrical engineer is very much interested in light bulbs and has recently been writing control point for Network Light.

While discussing about his code with him on IRC, I started to wonder how would a simple control point GUI for Network Light look like. I realized that it would look exactly the same as the Network Light itself. Since Hugo had already made it possible for multiple instances of Network Light to co-exist happily on the same network/machine, I decided to turn Network Light GUI to be a Control Point that controls all the Lights on the network, not just itself. The change is already in the trunk and will be released soon. Here is a screenshot:

GSSDP 0.6.2 and GUPnP 0.12.2 released

2008-08-31T12:57:00.000-07:00

Jorn made minor releases of GSSDP and GUPnP today. The main purpose of which is to fix the build on Rawhide. Here is the release announcement:


GSSDP 0.6.2
===========

- Reannounce resources after max_age / 2 - 1 instead of after max_age.
 [Peter Christensen, Jorn Baayen]
- Remove unnecessary call to g_thread_init(). [Zeeshan Ali]


GUPnP 0.12.2
============

- Support returning actions outside of the 'action-invoked' signal handler
 in service implementations. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]
- Add explicit dependency on gthread. [Zeeshan Ali, Jorn Baayen]