Words from the inside

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.

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.