Coder's Log

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 p

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 m

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

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.

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 i

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) 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 0.7.3 (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 f

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

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-Bu

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 al

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. :)

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 libuui

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:

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 0.5.2 (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. - Remo

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. :)

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 m

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

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 .