Words from the inside

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!

Due to lot of questions that people are asking through comments in the mafw-gst-eq-renderer related posts, I have set up a new mailing list: mafweqrenderer-list@garage.maemo.org.

Feel free to join it.

When Iago told about the Totem plugin based on Grilo, Bastien mentioned that it would be great if Grilo could provide the content over D-Bus. This would have a series of benefits, like sources running in a different space than clients, they could be implementend in any language, and so on. He even told about a specification that we could use.

It looked like a very good idea, and after talking with him and Zeeshan, we began to work on it. Zeeshan is the main author of Rygel, and also the author of the specification Bastien talked about. Rygel is able to consume content from any external application that implements that specification, and expose them over UPnP. Thus, implementing this specification has the added benefit that content can be accessed also through UPnP, using Rygel as intermediate.

So now we are proud to present rygel-grilo (yeah, name is not so cool ), a daemon that exposes Grilo content through D-Bus, feeding Rygel and any other interested client with that content. As a picture is meaningful than words, you can see here a screencast of rygel-grilo providing content to Rygel, and Totem playing it through its UPnP plugin.

While implementing rygel-grilo, we detected that the current specification does not fit quite fine for content that is quite dynamic and large. For instance, there is no way of limiting how many elements you want to retrieve from a specific category. And you know that Youtube and other on-line sources can have thousands of elements…

This and other issues were discussed with Zeeshan, who kindly started to work on a new spec more suitable for this kind of providers. The good news is that rygel-grilo supports this new spec too! So we are compatible with the present and the future of Rygel

This is an example of how cool things can be done with Grilo. Future work is to improve rygel-grilo, and adding a set of libraries that would hide all the D-Bus related stuff. These libraries would facilitate both the creation of new backends (even non-Grilo related) and also the creation of new clients, adding a few aditional services that people could use. Stay tuned for them!

Promises are debts, so I’ve been working on SeriesFinale for Diablo in order to finalize all features that I left unported in previous version.

So I’m happy to announce that SeriesFinale for Diablo reaches version 0.3.

Besides finalizing the port, this version also integrates all features that Joaquim provided to SeriesFinale for Fremantle v0.3.

I’ve uploaded the new version to Maemo Extras Devel, so if you have it in your repository catalogue, you’ll find SeriesFinale in the Application Manager.

Now, only a step remains to reach the head of SeriesFinale for Fremantle \o/

Thanks to Joaquim, he has uploaded SeriesFinale for Diablo to extras-devel.

As the same time Iago was blogging about the Totem plugin based on Grilo, we were releasing a new version of grilo: 0.1.3

What can you find in this release?

• A ranking mechanism for plugins: if several plugins are able to provide the same information, this ranking helps to choose which one should be used.
• New functions to search for sources: now it is possible to search for sources that implement some capabilities. Do you want to know which sources can be searched? No problem. Now it is possible.
• A new key, bitrate: you know, the standard key to know bitrate of clips.
• Some improvements in grilo-test-ui: besides other improvements, now eog, totem and mplayer are the default players.
• Documentation for some classes: we should not forget about adding documentation to classes. It is a bit boring, but a compulsory task. So lets do it step by step.
• Improvements in plugins: some improvements we were doing in available plugins
• New plugin, Apple™ Trailers: this new plugin allows to get the latest trailers from Apple™.

As usual, we have packaged this new release, so you can find it here and here. Also, if you use Ubuntu and are a bit lazy, do not forget that a PPA is set up.

Finally, as there is life beyond Debian and deb-based distros, a new branch to create RPM packages for grilo and grilo-plugins have been added. We have been testing it with Fedora 12, and seems it works fine.

As you see, there are no excuses to try Grilo

So finally we have brought SeriesFinale to Hell Diablo.

Some months ago I began a port of SeriesFinale to Diablo (Maemo 4), the software that rules Nokia N8×0 series. Working on it every now and then, finally I have achieved a first version which has everything I was using from Fremantle version.

After talking with Joaquim, the original author (and also my workmate), we decided to put this port as a branch in official repository.

What will you find in this port version?

• It is based on SeriesFinale v0.2.1
• Some features have not been ported yet. For instance, adding series manually or edit information about episodes is not ported yet, and thus are disabled.
• It is a multi-window application. Yes, in order to keep as much the same code as original version as possible, I ended up in a multi-window application: browsing through shows, seasons, and so on is opening different windows. Going back is as simply as closing the opened window. I know it is ugly, but my main goal was to have a functional version running in Diablo. And it does, indeed!

I expect to integrate new changes in Fremantle version, and also to implement all features that remain unported.

Regarding the multiple windows issue, I need to evaluate if it is worth to change it and use just one window with some browsing widget. The main point here is that whatever I do, it should make easy to integrate new features from Fremantle version. After all, Fremantle version is the “official” one

We want to make life easier for all people that want to try Grilo. So we have set up a PPA for Grilo.

If you are using Ubuntu Karmic, add

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/grilo-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/grilo-team/ppa/ubuntu karmic main

to your sources.list and you will have Grilo.

If you are using Ubuntu Jaunty or even the next Ubuntu Lucid, do not worry: just replace “karmic” by “jaunty” or “lucid” respectively in the sources.list.

At last, Ubuntu Jaunty have an older version of Vala, while Grilo requires a newer one. So we have backported Vala from Ubuntu Karmic to Ubuntu Jaunty and added to the PPA.

We have released a new version of Grilo, 0.1.2, a framework that provides access to different sources of multimedia content.

Main changes is this release are:

• Improved Vala bindings
• Removed flickcurl from Flickr source
• Added support for gupnp-av-1.0 new versions (greater or equal than 0.5)
• Added two new sources:
  • Shoutcast: get content from popular SHOUTcast internet radio stations.
  • Bookmarks: helps to create bookmarks to multimedia content

The work done in flickr and upnp sources has allowed to remove specific packaging branches for Jaunty, Lucid, Sid and Lenny: now you can use debian branch to build the packages in all those distributions.

Besides it, the main reason for getting rid of flickcurl library in Flickr source is that lack of a asynchronous API. As right now we are using a small subset of flickr service API, we have decided to implement our own way of accessing Flickr.

Nevertheless, our mate Mario is working in a project called flicksoup (a pet project so far), that try to fix this problem, providing a very good asynchronous API. We hope to move to that library in future.

Now, time to test Grilo 0.1.2, and stay tuned for news!