Words from the inside

There’s a lot of time I don’t blog about Grilo. But it doesn’t mean we are not working on it! Here at Igalia we do, and we also get lot of contributions from community. All the announcements are sent to the Grilo mailing list.

During this week we have released a new version of Grilo, both for core (v0.2.6) and for the plugins (v0.2.7). You can see the announcements here and here. If you are interested in more detailed changelogs, you can see them here and here.

So what happens in this release?

• As usual, lot of bugfixes.
• Bastien added support for non-file URIs in Filesystem plugin. What this means? In Filesystem plugin you can configure the base path from which the source can show content. Thus, if you setup the base path as ~/Music, it means Filesystem will show only content placed in that directory. With the new approach, you could use as base-path something like recent://, getting the list of recently used items. Cool, uh?
• My mate Sergio fixed the cache system in GrlNet. Seems we broke it at some point in the history, and we didn’t realize. We rely on libsoup and its caching feature, and Sergio is very skilled in libsoup. So who’s better than him to fix it?
• We improved grl-inspect tool. Inspired in gst-inspect from GStreamer, this tool helps to list all the available sources in the system, and list all the supported features. Now, it can also list all the available metadata keys developer can use. Moreover, it also list which sources support each key.
• We added support for i18n! Now we speak Brazilian, Czech, Galician, Greek, Polish, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish and Tajik. And we hope to support more languages in the coming releases. Many thanks to Rafael, Marek, Fran, Dimitris, Piotr, Мирослав, Martin, Miguel and Victor for their work on translating Grilo.
• Marek Chalupa added support for GOA in the Flickr plugin. This means that if you have a Flickr account configured in GOA, you will get for free a Flickr source dealing with that account. Nice!

I think that’s all. If you use Grilo and needs help or support, don’t hesitate to contact us!

A new year, a new GUADEC. And as in previous years:

This year is a bit special for different reasons:

• GUADEC 2012 is allocated in the same city as Igalia headquarter. And in the same region I was born.
• I’ll give a talk about Grilo, reviewing its current state and talking about what’s coming next.
• There will be also a BoF where we can talk for 2 hours about next features and what would be good to have in Grilo.

Of course, do not hesitate to ask me (or other Grilo contributors) whatever you want to know about Grilo if you see us around. We will be more han happy to answer any doubt.

Are you interested on Grilo? Are you going to Desktop Summit 2011? Then let’s meet there. Among other igalians,

Also, I and my fellow Guillaume have organized a hacking session on Wednesday 10th, 9:00 in room 1.401/2. If you want to learn more about Grilo, and how to use it to develop your ideas, then write down in the attendant list. It will be a pleasure to count on you, and have a funny time.

And don’t miss neither the BoF about using SeedKit to develop your applications, organized by Alexandre.

If you don’t have time, but still you have any question related to Grilo, don’t hesitate to contact with any of us. See you all there!

UPDATE: Do not forget neither the lightning talk about Grilo extension for GNOME Shell, by Philippe!

Thanks to Flumotion, you can access and view the awesome talks that happened at GUADEC 2010.

I have got those related with Grilo, and put them here. Besides the original WebM format videos, I provide also Theora version (in lower quality, intended to those who can not play WebM yet), and the slides too.

The first is a complete talk about Grilo: what is Grilo, what provides, and some of its features.

The second one is a 5 minutes lightning talk, about using Grilo to create a daemon that is able to provide content to other clients through DBus.

The thid one, is also a 5 minutes lightning talk, that explains the port of Grilo to Maemo 5, and how it was used to add more multimedia sources to N900‘s Mediaplayer.

Enjoy them!

• Iago Toral Quiroga, Grilo: Feeding applications with multimedia content (webm) (theora) (slides)

• Juan A. Suárez Romero, Rygel-Grilo (webm) (theora) (slides)

• Xabier Rodríguez Calvar, MAFWGriloSource (webm) (theora) (slides)

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.