Words from the inside

Last Thursday we announced the release of Grilo (and its plugins set) 0.1.6.

Almost 4 months went on, and as expected, lot of things were done in Grilo. In the announcement email, you can see a summary of the changes done. Of course, a more detailed list can be obtained from Git (here and here).

What would I stress here?

• Lot of fixes and improvements
• A new metadata-key system
• A command line tool to inspect plugins
• A new XML-based system to define plugins
• Synchronous functions for the asynchronous partners
• Improved GObject introspection support

We would like to thanks all people that were contributing to bring this release. And stay tuned for new releases!

Of course, if Joaquim releases a version for Fremantle, I release a version for Diablo

My workmate Iago is giving a talk about Grilo in GUADEC2010, and

After Nokia releasing PR1.2 firmware for N900, I’ve updated mafw-gst-eq-renderer so it can be installed with that firmware.

Issues with mafw-gst-eq-renderer

Some people have reported problems with this renderer, mainly related with glitches and even sound that is stopped for a while when more applications than Mediaplayer are opened.

Unfortunately, equalizer elements seems to require quite a lot of CPU. I guess as gstreamer’s equalizer element is not a key element in Maemo, very likely it is not optimized.

Thus, if you become tired of those glitches, I suggest to not install this element. This is one of the reasons why I did not put mafw-gst-eq-renderer on extras-devel.

Some time ago I posted about our work to bring Grilo content to D-Bus world (rygel-grilo), so other applications (mainly Rygel) could consume it. This was done using a specification written by Zeeshan, MediaServer1 specification, originally intended to be used with Rygel.

During its development, some issues arised with the specification, so Zeeshan and I were refining the specification. Finally, with the help of Lennart, we reached a final version that we expect can fulfill clients requirements.

Thus, what does come with rygel-grilo? First of all, I would say that right now rygel-grilo is not a very good name as other applications than Rygel can consume the content (as we will see later). I think grilo-mediaserver1 would be a better name. Let’s see if we change it in the future.

As I was telling, rygel-grilo consist of two parts:

• A library to implement both MediaServer1 producers and consumers.
• Rygel-grilo program itself, which exports Grilo content through D-Bus.

The library is intended for those who want to develop either a MediaServer1 client or a MediaServer1 server with glib: it provides an easy API to use, hiding all D-Bus stuff. In fact, rygel-grilo itself is implemented using this library.

As said previously, not only Rygel can consume content through this specification: other applications can implement this specification to consume the content too.

As an example, we have implemented a plugin for Totem that is able to get content using this MediaServer1 specification. Again, we have used the library that comes with rygel-grilo to ease the implementation.

The following video shows Totem getting content from Grilo through MediaServer1 specification:

Wonderful, uh?

Moreover, my workmate Joaquim also developed a plugin for Rhythmbox that is able to retrieve content using also MediaServer1 specification. Thus, Grilo can feed both Totem and Rhythmbox.

It is worth to note how easy is developing an application or plugin that gets content from MediaServer1. So I would expect more plugins coming soon.

After 10 days since Joaquim released SeriesFinale 0.6 for Fremantle, we are pleased to announce SeriesFinale 0.6 for Diablo.

If you want to know what is new in this version, just check Joaquim’s original post. All features in Fremantle have been ported also to Diablo.

As usual, it has been uploaded to Diablo extras-devel.

Some time has passed since the last release of Grilo. But now we are proud to announce a new release, 0.1.5, both for Grilo and its plugins set.

You can find the announces here and here.

What is new in this release?

• Mostly, we were doing bugfixing
• We did a small change in the API, specifically in the GrlData class, that is in charge of plugin configurations
• Iago has rewritten Youtube plugin, and now it is based on libgdata
• Joaquim has written a new plugin to get content from Vimeo

If you want to get more information about Grilo, ask questions or even contribute, do not hesitate and join our mailing list. And if you are going to GUADEC, do not miss the talk Iago is delivering about Grilo.

After merging changes from SeriesFinale v0.4 for Fremantle, it’s a pleasure to announce SeriesFinale v0.4 for Diablo. This way, both Fremantle and Diablo versions have the same features.

Even the colors that v0.3.6 added in Fremantle but were not added in Diablo have been added too.

I thank Joaquim for this veeery cool application, probably one of the most used applications in my case.

Damn! While I was working on the port of SeriesFinale v0.3.6 from Fremantle to Diablo, hoping to reach the upstream version of it, Joaquim announced SeriesFinale v0.4. Well, do not worry. I’m just one step back to reach him .

What will you find in this new release? Almost the same as in Fremantle version, except the cool colors Joaquim added. Main reason is that he is using a feature in Fremantle that is not available in Diablo. Actually, a minor issue, as remaining features have been ported.

We are proud to announce a new release of Grilo: 0.1.4.

In this release you can find:

• Almost all classes and functions have been documented (thanks to Víctor)
• A system to configure both plugins and sources
• Content classes have been refactored
• Some general fixes and improvements
• New functions to change content in sources that support it
• Introspection in the build system, and a Javascript example that take advantage of it (thanks to Edu)
• Some new keys
• A new source able to store general metadata

As usual, you have the code for framework and plugins, and the packaging branches for debian and rpm, and if it is not enough, a PPA with packages already built.

Enjoy them!