Posts

Give Lennart a break

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

FOSDEM2009

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

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 respect

GUPnP migrates to Git

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

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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

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

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