Coder's Log

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. - ...

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 Go...

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. :)

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, s...

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 corre...

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 .

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.

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. :)

Just pushed my commits to gupnp-media-server SVN trunk . Now we support plugable media providers, which can be written either in Vala or C. Also included in these commits is gstreamer-based metadata-extractor. Still not done (due to lack of time :() is a standalone media provider based on this extractor, GIO and SQLite.

GUPnP is an object-oriented open source framework for creating UPnP devices and control points, written in C using GObject and libsoup. The GUPnP API is intended to be easy to use, efficient and flexible. GUPnP MediaServer is an implementation of the UPnP MediaServer V 2.0 specification based on GUPnP and tracker . It is written (mostly) in Vala language. Download at http://gupnp.org/sources/gupnp-media-server/

This is just to inform everyone that I do realize that a hard dependency on tracker is not the way to go and this is just a temporary measure. I am writing a gstreamer/gio based metadata extractor as we speak. Although I'll try my best to get this done before GUADEC at least, it might take longer since I do this on my spare-time (something I don't have in abundance). Disclaimer: I am not against tracker and I *will* keep the current tracker-based media source (as a plugin), though i might need to drop that as a temporary measure for while until i get the plugin system implemented.

I finally managed to port all the existing C code to Vala. What did i achieve from this exercise? For one thing, the code got much simpler, with LOCs being reduced from 2101 to 1117 (46.8 %). Also this proves that (at least the server-side) GUPnP's Vala bindings are already in a stable/usable state. Special thanks to Jürg Billeter , Ali Sabil and Jussi Kukkonen for their continuous support during this exercise and for quickly fixing bugs that I reported.

While my MediaServer implementation is still in it's very infancy, I was already asked by more than two people if it will work with Xbox. I didn't have a clue since I don't have an Xbox so I asked Naba if i can visit him on some weekend to find some clues but he was kind enough to lend it for a week instead. For the past one week I had been having lots of fun with it. This nice page by Frank Scholz gave me headstart and I was able to get Xbox see my MediaServer rather sooner. The only other achievement I had in the whole week is that Xbox is able to see the videos but can't play it (most probably because I don't give it all the metadata it requests). The good thing is that now i have a very good idea of what Xbox expects from my MediaServer and I am very hopeful on getting my MediaServer working with Xbox at some point. Here is the log of all the SOAP messages I get from Xbox for anyone interested.

Next on my TODO is a desktop-wide UPnP MediaServer based on tracker . Basically, it will make all of your media availabe to other UPnP devices that is tagged as "shared via UPnP". I already have a working dummy implementation, based on code from Jorn's rhythmbox plugin. I call it "dummy" because ATM it only exports a hardcoded list of media files. Here is a screenshot of Windows Media Player playing music from it using on2share plugin: