10 days in Turkey

We’re back at home after an awesome time in Istanbul, in which we attended GUADEC, did some sight-seeing (not enough), hung out with a bunch of really fun awesome people, and attended a great conference about what people are hacking on and planning for GNOME.

Friday
Arrived from Dublin around 11pm and got to the Golden Horn Sirkeci. Rang Wim & Christian and set one tone for the week by going out for beers until 3am.
Saturday
Woke up late. Hungover for some reason. Went out and explored the spice market and Grand Bazaar. On the way back to the hotel ran into Collabora people sitting on the terrace of their hotel.

Luis and KrissaAfter a beer there, we all went searching for dinner and discovered the cushions on the street next to the Golden Horn, conveniently already populated with several other attendees, including Luis, Krissa and Phillip Van Hoof. Enjoyed dinner, beer & nargileh until after midnight.

Sunday
Up early. Had breakfast at the hotel, and then off to the impromptu GStreamer summit from last blog post. Jaime went exploring while we chatted. We were short by a few key GStreamer hackers who either couldn’t make it to Istanbul or missed my poor excuse for an announcement, but had a nice solid representation of core hackers nevertheless. Quick summary:

  • Discussed that we should move GStreamer out of CVS, and our best overall choice is Git. FDO already has the infrastructure, we have people who know how to use it and will be there to help those of us who don’t and, most importantly, Tim & Edward are willing to do the migration work.
  • People weren’t interested in doing a 0.12 branch along the lines of 0.8->0.10 where everyone stops hacking on 0.10 for 12 months while the new version is produced. Instead, we should try a process where (after we move to Git and can do this sort of thing easily) people create their own experimental branches. After, when we have enough interesting experimental branches we try and bring them together and call it 0.12.
  • Saw and did interesting demos of in progress hacking: Edward’s HDV camera support. Wim’s basetransform rework. My DVD navigation pieces.

After, went hunting food and stopped at a place where, as soon as they saw us looking at the menu, about 10 nice policemen jumped up from the tables they were sitting at and took their food inside so we could sit outside.
After lunch, Andy declared “Let’s go to Asia!”, and we caught a ferry. Saw police in riot gear and tanks, then discovered the protest they appeared to be prepared for. Had beer, caught another ferry and reclined in the Cushion Street again for more food, beer and nargileh.
Monday
I know this one! It’s Eunuchs!Up early and off to see Topkapi palace. I found myself constantly assessing features of the palace for ledges, handholds and other climbing points. Clearly played too much PoP.

After, caught the tram to the conference venue. We had a little trouble finding the place, but not as much as some. Met up with some more people, and went to Ghee’s printing BOF and Marina’s Online Desktop widget talk. Went for dinner at 360 restaurant before joining the opening drinks at Reddim night club. Didn’t stay long after the price of beer changed and the temperature went up.
Tuesday
dondurma bressert
Had Turkish icecream for breakfast, then I went to the conference while Jaime did some more sightseeing. Enjoyed the Banshee BOF – Banshee is cool. Inspired to try using Banshee as my primary media player for a while.
Ran into Marc-Andre and Meriam on the way to dinner and they joined Wingo, Zeeshan and us for dinner and chilling followed by more chilling under the Galata bridge with others.
Wednesday
Straight to university in the morning. Went to the conference opening, then Travis’ Soylent talk, the Clutter Guts talk, lunch with Lennart and kfish. As always after a clutter talk, felt inspired to try building a video app in clutter.
After lunch, Leisa’s great keynote on user experience design. Inspired to reimplement Silverback by gluing Istanbul and Cheese together.
Florian’s Elisa talk was interesting, and we talked with him about why Elisa doesn’t work for our video-watching workflow. It still feels like Clutter and Pigment duplicate a lot of effort, but I understand why combining is tricky.
Pippin’s GEGL talk was great. I really liked his ‘semantic desktop prototype’ presentation tool. Inspired to hack pretty things with GEGL.
A second good keynote from Blizzard. I want to see more of his presentations. Interesting stuff about using Firefox to influence the future of the web. Intrigued by their optimisation tools and techniques. Inspired to go optimise something. Drinks on the roof of the university with live music, followed by Cushion Bar.

Thursday
Matt Webb’s keynote, then Rob’s Telepathy talk. I want to see features like ‘Right-click->share my desktop to Joe’ land in releases. Actually, I want to see ‘Right-click->Frag Joe in Quake ]|[‘ first.

Michael’s Moonlight canvas talk. There are lots of people exploring paths for the ‘platform for next generation UIs’ thing – clutter, moonlight, webkit, mozilla. It’ll be interesting to see where they converge.
After lunch, Kristian’s “GTK+ State of the Union’ keynote. I like their approach to GTK+ 3.0. The care it takes to preserve ABI/API while still producing new features and working around design shortcomings slows GStreamer development down too.
Went to Colin’s and then Owen’s Online Desktop talks. Glad to hear later that the APOC guys and the Online Desktop guys had some conversations about the commonalities and differences between them.
Collabora boat partyNot sure why Alp’s WebKit talk qualified as a keynote, but maybe because I already saw substantially the same talk at FOSDEM.
Fun with penis-enlargement pumps at dinner. More fun at the Collabora boat party. I came 3rd in the icecream eating competition. Inspired to eat icecream, forever.
After the boat party, we went out for kebabs with a crowd led by Pete and Miguel. Amusing chilli eating competition between Aaron and Jono. A good time was had by all.
Friday
Went to Benjamin’s Flash talk, then Bastien’s update on bluetooth development. Interested in PackageKit, but worried that it has a restrictive (prescriptive?) view of what package management systems should be allowed to ask as they install things. Apparently I’m not the first.
Excellent set of lightning talks after lunch, then the AGM. I liked the inspirational tone of Federico’s Document-Centric-Gnome proposal, but found the paper design unconvincing. I’d like to see a prototype though 🙂
Google sponsored cup-o-beer-foam party had a good light show, but I can’t find a good pic of it.
Saturday
Aya SofiaHad a sleep-in and then visited the Blue Mosque and Aya Sofia before going to Alberto and Joerg’s APOC talk. Also went to Alberto’s talk about polishing GTK’s image. Somewhat inspired to create a ‘GNOME stack SDK’ for Windows that’d come with GStreamer, GTK, Pango, etc in one big bundle.
After, went to the Galata tower, and then met up with Collabora guys and more to go to Asia again for dinner. Amusingly, the good restaurant from the guide book turned out to be the place we’d randomly ended up in on Sunday for drinks. Turns out the food is quite good.
Sunday
Caught the plane back to Dublin. Did some good hacking on the way – integrating my recent GStreamer DVD navigation work into playbin so (e.g.) Totem can use it. Check it out:
Totem DVD

Hoping to have it feature complete within the next 2.5 months.

New GStreamer Plugins and FOSDEM

I just finished uploading the releases of 3 of the big GStreamer modules – the Good, Bad & Ugly plugins modules. These releases are really big, because all 3 haven’t been released since June last year! 8 months of sweet hacking has produced some nice stuff. Among my favourite features of these releases:

  • DVB support – soon to be integrated directly into Totem for TV watching from the comfort of…. whereever you’re comfortably using Totem
  • Vastly improved RTSP and RTP support. Sweet.
  • Video4Linux 2 capture support improved – go Cheese!
  • Wrappers for native QuickTime and DirectShow plugins on OS/X and Windows. Thanks, Songbird and Fluendo!
  • A bunch of plugins hit the quality standard and graduated from the Bad collection to Good and Ugly. Helping to improve the plugins in the Bad collection is a great way to get involved!
  • OpenGL support became sophisticated enough to warrant its own module, and gst-plugins-gl was born.

There are, of course, lots of other changes – check it out

Tomorrow evening, Jaime and I’ll be landing in Belgium for FOSDEM, which is going to be awesome. I’m a big fan of our community gatherings and getting to meet up with y’all. I was sort-of looking forward to giving a talk with some other GStreamer guys on Sunday in the GNOME/CrossDesktop devroom, but confusion over whether I said we would or not means the slot has been filled. We may still end up doing something on Saturday instead, will have to see.

We’re planning on checking out Brussels during the day on Friday, and then meeting up with everyone at the pub on Friday night. If you’re coming too, make sure to say hi!

Fun things to do with GStreamer command-lines

This is a bit of a long post, but bear with me 🙂

Last week, I found out that OpenSolaris has recently added the Video4Linux2 APIs, and now provides a v4l2 driver for UVC compatible video cameras. That’s slightly funny, of course, because it has the word ‘Linux’ right there in the name. I think it’s really cool to see that the OpenSolaris guys aren’t suffering from NIH syndrome about that though.

To continue, I’ve had my eye on the Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 for a little while, and it happens to be a UVC camera. This seemed like a good opportunity, so I ordered one. Nice webcam – I’m really pleased with it.

After that arrived, I was playing with V4L2 on one of the machines at work, and put a couple of patches from Brian Cameron into GStreamer‘s gst-plugins-good module to make our v4l2src plugin compile and work. The biggest difference from the Linux V4L2 implementation is that the header is found in /usr/include/sys/videodev2.h instead of /usr/include/linux/videodev2.h. That, and a small fix to gracefully handle ioctls that the OpenSolaris usbvc driver doesn’t implement, and I was up and away.

Coincidentally, Tim Foster was looking for talks for the Irish OpenSolaris User Group meeting last Thursday night. I thought people might enjoy a quick demo, so I volunteered.

I started off by showing that the camera shows up nicely in Ekiga, but I don’t have a SIP account so I wasn’t able to do much more there. Also, I really wanted to show the camera in GStreamer, since I’m a GStreamer guy. Note, for people who want to follow along at home I was using the version of GStreamer’s V4L2 plugin from CVS. It’s in the gst-plugins-good module, which is due for release on the 18th February.

I tried a simple pipeline to show the camera output in a window:

gst-launch v4l2src ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

This captures the video using v4l2 (v4l2src is the name of the element responsible), and feeds it via the ‘ffmpegcolorspace’ element to the ‘xvimagesink’ output. xvimagesink feeds video the XVideo extension, and ffmpegcolorspace provides for any format conversion between the frame buffer formats the camera supports, and what Xv can handle. Actually, this pipeline didn’t work by default on Tim’s laptop. For some reason, it tried to capture at 1600×1208 pixels, which the camera doesn’t support. It might work for you, not sure.

Anyway, the obvious fix was to explicitly choose a particular resolution to capture at:

gst-launch v4l2src ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=320,height=240 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

This is the same as the first pipeline, with the addition of the ‘video/x-raw-yuv,width=320,height=240’ bit, which in GStreamer jargon is called a ‘caps filter’ – it filters down the set of formats that are allowed for data transfer between the 2 elements. By default, the pipeline will ask v4l2src and ffmpegcolorspace what formats they have in common, and pick one. By filtering it down, I’m forcing it to choose 320×240. Doing that made a little window pop up with the video in it. It looked a little like this, although this one was actually from later:

OSUG USB camera shot

Next, I thought I’d show how to save the incoming video to a file. In this case, as an AVI with MJPEG in it:

gst-launch v4l2src ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=320,height=240 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! jpegenc ! avimux ! filesink location=osug-1.avi

The difference here is, instead of feeding the video to an Xv window, it goes through a JPEG encoder (jpegenc), gets put into an AVI container (avimux) and then written to a file (filesink location=$blah). I let it run for 5 or 6 seconds, and then stopped it with ctrl-c. The result looked like this:

osug-1.jpg

Apologies for the blurriness – I was waving the camera around and it didn’t really get a chance to focus.

Alternatively, I could have used something like this to record to Ogg/Theora:

gst-launch v4l2src ! video/x-raw-yuv,width=320,height=240 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! theoraenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=osug-1.ogg

I can play the recorded video back with a pipeline like:

gst-launch filesrc location=osug-1.avi ! decodebin ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

This uses filesink’s cousin ‘filesrc’ to read from an existing file, feeds it to the nice ‘decodebin’ element – which encapsulates the ability to decode any audio or video file GStreamer has installed plugins for, and then feeds the result (a sequence of raw YUV video buffers) to ‘ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink’ for colorspace conversion and display in a window.

Anyone who watched the clip might be wondering why there is a guy in the front holding up a bright orange folder. For the next trick, I wanted to show the nice ‘alpha’ plugin. By default, alpha simply adds a alpha channel with a given opacity to the video as it passes through. However, it also has a green-screen mode. Or, in this case, orange-screening.

First, I played the video I captured in totem, and paused it at a suitable frame. Then I used the ‘Take Screenshot’ item in the Edit menu to save it out as a png – which actually became the first photo above. Next, I opened the png in the Gimp and used the eyedropper to isolate the RGB triple for the orange colour. Somewhere around Red=244, Green=161, Blue=11

At this point, I used live video for the rest of the demo, but I didn’t think to capture any of it. Instead, I’ll use the short clip I captured earlier as a canned re-enactment. So, I ran the video through a pipeline like this (using v4l2src etc instead of filesrc ! decodebin):

gst-launch filesrc location=osug-1.avi ! decodebin ! alpha method=custom target-r=245 target-g=161 target-b=11 angle=10 ! videomixer ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink

This pipeline uses the alpha plugin in ‘custom’ (custom colour) mode, to add an alpha channel based on the bright orange colour-key, and then uses ‘videomixer’ to blend a default transparent looking background in behind it. Here:

OSUG demo 2 - colourkeying

The colour-key effect breaks up a little in places, because the skin tones and the wood of the desk get a little too close to the orange of the folder. A better choice of colour and filming conditions are really needed to do it well 🙂

And now for the really tricky bit:

gst-launch filesrc location=osug-1.avi ! decodebin ! alpha method=custom target-r=245 target-g=161 target-b=11 angle=10 ! videomixer name=mix ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink \
filesrc location=bg.avi ! decodebin ! ffmpegcolorspace ! mix.

This pipeline adds two things to the previous one:
1) It adds a ‘name=mix’ property assignment to the instance of the videomixer element. This makes it easier to refer to the instance by name later in the pipeline.
2) It adds a second filesrc, reading in a file named bg.avi, decoding it and then feeding it into the element named ‘mix’ – which is the instance of the videomixer element. Adding a period to the name lets GStreamer know that the connection should be made to an existing instance of something with that name, rather than creating a new instance of some element as all the other links do.

To save the output, I replaced the ‘xvimagesink’ with ‘jpegenc ! avimux ! filesink location=osug-3.avi’ to produce this:

OSUG demo 3 - colourkeying and compositing

There you go – a quick demo of doing a couple of fun things with GStreamer that don’t require writing any code. Have fun!

It’s nice to be loved

I can’t remember if I’ve had to make a brown paper bag release, so we’ll call this the first one. On Monday, I released 0.10.16 of the GStreamer Core and Base modules, and earlier today I released 0.10.17 of the same after we started seeing some reports of crashes.

It turns out that 6 months ago (0.10.14) we broke our ABI by deprecating some parts of the GstMixer class structures that we shouldn’t have, because they were in public headers resulting in a couple of base classes (GstMixerTrack and GstMixerOptions) shrinking when compiling with GST_DISABLE_DEPRECATED. Noone noticed at the time, because those bits of the class structure weren’t being used by anyone, and noone noticed if sub-classes allocated more space for their class structures than they now technically needed to.

Since then though, all the modules that use that piece of ABI got re-compiled, and now rely on a smaller parent class size, so when we inadvertantly put the structure entries by disabling the GST_DISABLE_DEPRECATED define in release builds, the OSS, SunAudio and Pulseaudio mixer sub-classes all started crashing. Which we would have caught in the release candidate tarballs, except that none of us thought about the fact that our pre-release tarballs were still building with GST_DISABLE_DEPRECATED, where the final release was not. Our fix is to bless the ‘new smaller ABI’, since noone has cared in 6 months that it changed, and the newer Base release reflects that. Core got another release too with a small compilation fix for Cygwin, mostly to keep the version numbers in sync.

I say “it’s nice to be loved”, because the broken release was out less than 2 days, and we’re already nearing 60 dupes on the bug 🙂

I know this release is karma punishing me for being so bold as to try and write down GStreamer’s first time-based release schedule. It’s too carefully calculated to show up only in the final release tarball to be anything else.

Nokia N810 hotness

Last night, I re-flashed my N800 with OS2008, and today my N810 turned up – I’m glad I elected to work from home today so I could play with it as soon as possible 🙂 I was a little worried because I have heard at least 2 people that said their order was cancelled due to problems, one even after the item was reported as shipped! That, plus the fact that the UPS tracking status only reported ‘billing information received’ the entire time.

I’m impressed with the N810 hardware. For the most part it’s very nice. I like the compactness, and have no problem with the slight weight increase over the N800. The hardware keyboard is cool, although I’m tempted to continue using my external Nokia keyboard because it allows a more normal typing style. There are a couple of hardware differences I’m not a fan of, but I understand why they did things this way. I liked having a standard SD slot rather than the mini-SD that the N810 has. I have several SD cards, but no mini-SD’s. Ditto for the micro-USB connector that’s replaced the more common mini-USB on the N800. The back cover feels a little thin when I remove it, but I don’t expect to be doing that often anyway. Everything else, I love.

I can see lots of nice changes in the OS2008 release too, although the firmware that came pre-installed had some pretty rough edges. I had to reflash the N810 immediately with the latest firmware, which is not something I’d generally expect from a piece of consumer hardware. With the shipped firmware, I couldn’t install skype from the ‘Install Skype’ option in the main menu (Unable to install Skype because libhildonfm2 >= 1:1.9.49 & libhildonmime0 >= 1.10.1 are missing). In the application manager, it had an update listed for the ‘map’ application, but would not actually allow me to make the update (Unable to install. Software contains updates to pacakges installed from a different source and is likely to harm the system).

Both problems disappeared after reflashing, but still, it marred the first impression.

Here are a few observations:

  • I really like the idea of having GPS, and the included maps for Ireland & the UK are cool.
  • When I’m indoors, the GPS can’t get a signal at all, and it took about 10 minutes to get a lock the one time I took it outside. I hope that was a fluke and it works better next time, or I probbably won’t end up using it much.
  • I’m not a fan of the new ‘finger sized’ menus. I was happy with the old ones. A configure option would be cool.
  • I like the new monochrome icon style in the status area.
  • There’s an annoying ‘Gizmo’ icon installed by default that I had to use Red Pill mode to get rid of.
  • Is there any application that uses the camera installed by default? I can see the camera there, but I had to install the Camera app before I could check out the quality (it’s not great), and there’s a thing that looks like a flash above it that I haven’t got to do anything yet
  • I like the way the new backup tool also remembers my custom repositories and restoring re-installs the extra apps I had
  • Gecko based web browser! Yay!
  • Facebook is one of the default bookmarks provided, but it renders horribly, even in fullscreen. That’s still an improvement though, in OS2007, it rendered horribly and didn’t work (couldn’t update status for example
  • I encountered a few bugs in OS2008 that existed in OS2007 and didn’t get fixed, which is not surprising since I never reported them
    • The initial setup wizard doesn’t pair with my phone (it just times out), but the standard pairing utility in the control panel does
    • Even though my Nokia SU-8W bluetooth keyboard is one of those explicitly listed in the keyboard configuration applet, the ~ key on it doesn’t work – it types *
    • There’s no obvious way to invoke the Operator Setup wizard other than pairing a new phone, which was a pain when I moved from Spain to Ireland and needed to switch service providers

Overall, except for needing to reflash my new device immediately after getting it these are pretty minor blemishes on an awesome product – well done Nokia dudes, and thanks for the developer discount – I’m looking forward to doing some hacking!

Your NOKIA.COM Order Has Shipped

My N810 is on its way. Thank you Nokia! I’m really looking forward to trying out the new hotness 🙂

In other news, we had a really fun holiday season, visiting Sweden and Norway. We spent Christmas in Vaxjo, Sweden, visiting our Australian friends that moved there in July, really enjoyed Stockholm, and then had a blast in Oslo hanging out with Christian Schaller and his family.

Christmas Holidays

My last post was months ago, as usual. The day before we moved from Barcelona to Ireland. Since then, we´ve been having fun – we found a house to live in, unpacked our things, made some new friends. I started my job at Sun, which is working out really well, and we bought a bunch of things and explored our new habitat.

Now, after 3 and a bit months in Dublin, we´re off to Sweden and Norway for Christmas and New Year´ś, respectively. We are in Göteburg at the moment, and for the next 2 days, and then catching the train across to Växjö for Christmas with our friends from Australia who moved there in July. Afterward, we head up to Stockholm, and then across to Norway for New Year´s where we willl get to see Uraeus in his natural habitat.

Congratulations to Andy Wingo on his new job – I hope it turns out fun!

Tomorrow, Ireland

It’s our last night in Barcelona tonight. 11am tomorrow, we’ll be boarding a flight to Ireland, and Monday morning I’ll be presenting myself at the Sun Microsystems Dublin office to get settled in.

Accordingly, it’s been a week of saying goodbyes to people, which is always a little strange since I’ll be talking to almost all of them regularly still, on IRC or some other form of IM.

I’m leaving behind a (hopefully) good body of work at Fluendo. I’ve got my hand in a bunch of multimedia codecs, almost the entirety of the DVD player stack, every GStreamer module release for the last 2 years, and other things that escape me right now. It would have been nice to push the DVD player all the way through to a final product, but it’s not quite there yet. Someone else will have to finish it off. Whoever that turns out to be, I hope my notes are coherent enough for you 🙂

See you all in Dublin. My plan to become the new Face of Sun is well in hand. Next stop, Irish Accent