Tag: vala

Announcing GPhone v0.10

Hi folks!

As many of you may know, lately I have been working on Ekiga and Opal. And, as usually happens to me, I started to wonder how I would re-write that piece of software. My main ideas growth clearly: craft a GObject library, ala WebKitGTK+, wrapping Opal’s classes, paying attention to the gobject-introspection, also, redirecting the Opal’s multimedia rendering to a GStreamer player,  and, finally, write the application with Vala.

The curiosity itched me hard,  so I started to hack, from time to time, these ideas. In mid-November, last year, I had a functional prototype, which only could make phone calls in a disgraceful user interface. But I got my proof of concept. Nonetheless, as I usually do, I didn’t dropped the pet project, continuing the development of more features.

And today, I am pleased to present you,  the release v0.1 of GPhone.

Well, I guess a screencast is mandatory nowadays:

 

Grilo meets Vala

Last week, after the internal presentation of Grilo, I got pretty excited about the project: basically, using Grilo I could make epris consume feeds from Jamendo.

I started to generate the bindings for Vala. I never thought it could be that hard: the heavy use of atypical callbacks in Grilo made me find a bug in the code writer of Vala. And eventually I came with a small patch, which I’d just pushed.

Those problems brought into the discussion to use GAsyncResult within Grilo instead of the custom callbacks mechanism. We’ll see where we can go.

Finally I got my small test snippet. Cute, isn’t it?

Today also pushed another patches I’d in my Vala queue. The interesting part is, after talking with Zeeshan, I understood that the gstreamer vapi must be generated with the latest release of GStreamer. Something logical but I never stopped to think about it.

Minimal CD Ripper

Back in London I bought a couple CDs. Obviously I don’t use CD players anymore, I mostly stream all the music I hear (jamendo, spotify, last.fm). Though, if I want to hear music using my n900 without any network connection, I ought drop in there the music files. So, the solution is rip out the music from the CDs,
encode them et voilà.

The obvious solution to rip music is SoundJuicer, and I started to compile it within my jhbuild environment, but I found a huge list of dependencies which I didn’t want to install, such as brasero. As everybody knows the next logical think then is “let’s code a simple cd ripper”.

Vala was my choosen language (and don’t ask why). What I wanted was have metadata in the files (life without metadata is not feasible anymore), also I want to encode the files in AAC/MPEG4, and finally I didn’t want any user interaction: just run the program and have my directory with my music.

The first problem I found was that Vala hasn’t bindings for libmusizbrainz, so I started to cook one for libmusicbranz v2.x, which I found terrible bad to port to Vala and also it is already deprecated. Then I cooked another for libmusicbrainz3.

After that, I also found that GstTagSetter wasn’t bind to Vala either, so I made the patches for it and another for the GstIterator.

Solved all those issues, finally I came with my mcdripper!

http://gitorious.org/vjaquez-misc/mcdripper

Ah, by the way, it uses async methods, so you’ll need a recent Vala (I use the git’s version).

And finally I’ve been ripping my new CDs and storing the files in my N900.

misc

Do you remember that I promised not to use a minimalistic window manager? Well, sorry, another broken promise. Since I started to play around with imapfilter, I discovered lua. Moreover, a comment in a previous post made a mention of awesome, a minimalistic window manager configured through lua. So, I installed it, play with it, and suddenly I got delighted with all of its features: Awesome comes along pretty well with Gnome and its panel, which I didn’t want to lose at all. Besides, Awesome provides its own panel (called widget box, a.k.a. wibox), which includes a systray (sadly, awesome’s systray steals the icons from the gnome-panel’s systray). I’ve found that a tidy desktop, which avoids to the user unnecessary mouse interactions, is much more relaxed and helps the user to focus on her task. We’ll see how this experiment ends.

Meanwhile, Joaquin, a colleague from Dextra, told about they were having troubles with the gst-openmax JPEG decoder element, because it needed a JPEG parser, while the gst-goo one mimic the official JPEG decoder provided by GStreamer in gst-plugins-good. In other words, the last two elements actually parse the buffer and validates the presences of a complete image in a single buffer, while the first doesn’t, it just assumes it, relying thou on a parser after the data source, which will deliver the image meta-data through fixed capabilities in the parser’s source pad.

Loathed by HAM and all the release processes, I though it could be nice to wet my feet again in the GStreamer waters. Besides, I need to help Iago with his codec base classes, so this JPEG parser, would help me to ramp up.

As an historical note, the first element I took in charge when I get in the GStreamer development group in Dextra was, precisely, the JPEG decoder.

As soon as I chatted with Joaquin, I found a bug report about an element for that purpose, but it still missed a couple features to turn it useful for our needs. And start to hack it. First, I moved from gst-plugins-good, to gst-plugins-bad, and then parse the image header in order to find its properties such as width, height, if the image is progressive, color format, etc. And the set these data in a fixed capability. Also, the frame-rate is negotiated in the sink pad of the parser, such as in the official JPEG decoder.

Finally I got something which seems to work OK and posted it in the same bugzilla report. I hope to receive feedback soon.

On the other hand, I’m still waiting for the approval of my last patches to the GStreamer’s Vala bindings (592346, 592345 and 591979). 591979 can be particularly controversial, given that it changes a typical class method, into a static function. I guess I need to ping somebody.

On the Bacon Video Widget port to Vala, some advances had came, but still there’s nothing to show yet.