Aura

As my colleague Víctor at Igalia has said before in his post, Aura was released to the Nokia Store. Miguel, Víctor and I are quite happy with the result achieved with this app, which intention was to be kind of a port of the Cheese application of the GNOME platform to be used in the N9 or N950 Nokia phones.

The apps allows you to use both cameras (front and principal) to record videos, applying a lot of funny effects (a subset of the GNOME Video Effects) and changing them during the recording. Being Nokia a Finnish company, we decided to name the app after a Finnish Cheese to both honor the GNOME Cheese application and Finland 😉

You can download the app from the Nokia Store where we already got more than 6000 downloads and 100 reviews with a quite good average rating.

You have an example recorded by me with my own phone using the Historical effect and uploaded to Youtube:

And you have even already other videos uploaded to Youtube talking about how Aura works. This one is from a brazilian guy (obrigado!) for FaixaMobi and shows more effects:

Of course, being it free sofware you can also compile it yourself with the code at GitHub and do not be afraid of contributing! The technologies we used were the camerabin element of GStreamer and Qt/QML for the interface where we have the following components:

Aura components UML diagram

  • Main view (aura.qml) with the main interface
  • Controller, which is a mixed QML/C++ object allowing to control the pipeline.
  • Pipeline is a C++ object used by the controller to encapsulate the GStreamer code.
  • PostCapture is also a mixed QML/C++ object that opens the gallery application to show the recorded video and gives you the oportunity of sharing it, deleting it and so on. It uses a C++ controller loaded as a singleton to the context to do some stuff that can only be done in C++. Of course, you can open Gallery yourself and the videos will show up there.
  • EffectManager is a C++ class to load and manage the Effects, which is another C++ class defining how the effect must be applied.
  • Effects (Effects.qml) is a QML component to show the different effects, both software and hardware that Aura can apply. It uses the EffectManager (through the context) to load them and the Controller to apply them.
  • About view (AboutView.qml) is a rework of something done by my colleage Simón Pena and adapted to be used in Aura (Kudos!). It also uses a small AboutViewController to open a Nokia Store URL with the application instead of the browser.
  • ResourceManager is a C++ class used by the Controller to request the proper permissions to record the video.

Folga 29 Marzal

Hoxe estou de folga en contra da reforma laboral. Aínda que teño a sorte de traballar nunha empresa na que non me teño que preocupar por se vou ser despedido xa que son socio dela, considero o meu deber loitar tamén polos dereitos dos demais e tratar de botar para atrás algo que vai acentuar a precarización do traballo e sumirnos aínda máis na maldita crise. Eu achegareime á
manifestación da Praza de Vigo á convocada pola CIG, metade por quizais algo máis de afinidade política, como outra metade por aletoriedade a causa do patetismo que me causa que non se poñan dacordo por algo tan importante coma isto.

Invoking Meego 1.2 Harmattan Gallery

As part of my work at Igalia I am writing an app to record some videos for the Nokia N9. I wanted to get them shown in the gallery so I tried the DBUS approach, that is something similar to what is explained here. The problem is the same they faced, meaning that I got gallery in foreground when it was not previously running, but not otherwise.

The solution to that was using libcontentaction. In order to get this working, first you need to get the vendor name in the tags of your pictures or videos, otherwise Tracker will not index them correctly and this solution can be useless.

With the following solution Gallery will be brought to foreground and show the desired file. Code would be something like:

using ContentAction::Action;

[...]

{
    Action action =
        Action::defaultActionForFile(uri,
            "x-maemo-nepomuk/device-captured-video");
    if (action.isValid()) {
        qDebug() < < Q_FUNC_INFO << "chosen action:" << action.name();
        action.triggerAndWait();
    } else {
        qWarning() << "could not file action for" << m_file;
    }
}

The mime type is one of the defined in the galleryserviceaction.desktop that you can find in the device. For images, you can also check the mime types in that file and maybe you do not need to specify it, but I have not tried this and let it to you. Please, comment me your findings.

Mixed QML/C++ objects reloaded

Some days ago I was writing about how to have mixed QML/C++ objects in a QML application for Igalia, but I faced a problem with the code that I had written. And the problem was that I needed to receive some events and from the QML elements I was loading. Retaking that code:

#define QML_PATH "/path/to/the/qml/files/"

MyObject::MyObject(QDeclarativeItem *parent = 0) :
    QDeclarativeItem(parent)
{
    QDeclarativeEngine engine;
    QDeclarativeComponent component(&engine,
        QUrl::fromLocalFile(QML_PATH "MyObject.qml"));
    QDeclarativeItem *rect =
        dynamic_cast(component.create());
    rect->setParentItem(this);
}

and being MyObject.qml something like:

Button {
    id: "myButton"
    text: "Do something cool"
}

The natural way of connecting that button to some slot you are writing would be something like:

MyObject::MyObject(QDeclarativeItem *parent = 0) :
    QDeclarativeItem(parent)
{
    QDeclarativeEngine engine;
    QDeclarativeComponent component(&engine,
        QUrl::fromLocalFile(QML_PATH "MyObject.qml"));
    QDeclarativeItem *item =
        dynamic_cast(component.create());
    item->setParentItem(this);
    connect(item, SIGNAL(clicked()), this, SLOT(doCoolStuff()));
}

Even if you do this, you are not getting any event in the QML button you declare. It behaves as it were a label or whatever, but the key is the engine. The engine must live while you need the events of the QML component. And the easiest way of getting that done is adding the engine as a private class attribute:

#ifndef MYOBJECT_H
#define MYOBJECT_H

#include 
#include 
#include 

class PostCapture : public QDeclarativeItem
{
    Q_OBJECT

// ...

 private slots:
    void doCoolStuff();

 private:
    QDeclarativeEngine m_engine;
};
#endif

and of course removing the engine stack declaration from the constructor:

MyObject::MyObject(QDeclarativeItem *parent = 0) :
    QDeclarativeItem(parent)
{
    QDeclarativeComponent component(&m_engine,
        QUrl::fromLocalFile(QML_PATH "MyObject.qml"));
    QDeclarativeItem *item =
        dynamic_cast(component.create());
    item->setParentItem(this);
    connect(item, SIGNAL(clicked()), this, SLOT(doCoolStuff()));
}

Voilà.

Of course, if you need to connect to any element that is not the root element, you can always forward the signals and properties from the QML root object or just use the QObject::findChild method to access the right component.

Attended FOSDEM 2012

FOSDEM 2012

This was my first time at FOSDEM (thanks to Igalia for the sponsoring) and I was really impressed by the lots of tracks that you can find there, but as there are so many, you realize that there are many you are not interested at. The feeling is only a bit more intense than at GUADEC or Desktop Summit, because for your interestest, you target more or less the same kind of talks, but in this case, offer is a bit broader.

My thoughts:

  • WebKit and WebKitGtk are in a good shape.
  • We are going to more web based desktops.
  • Tizen is taking off and it is betting for HTML5 and ELF, which looks like a toolkit with very interesting features like Edje being able to write an app with different views for different platforms in an easy way (at least in the paper, because I couldn’t try it).
  • GStreamer is in the right way to 1.0 by improving APIs and features that can boost performance in embedded.
  • I would like to have gone to Wayland talks, but I could not.
  • CERN really rocks working with FLOSS, specially on drivers and even developing their own hardware for their needs. It seems they have the policy of writing and using FLOSS because of being a publicly funded organization. Many other could follow their advice.

About tourist stuff, it was really a pity to be taking some medicins that prevented me to drink the famous Belgian beer, but at least I could visit some famous stuff in Brussels, like the Atomium, Manneken Pis and the Grote Markt. What medicins did allow me was trying the famous waffles and some good chocolate made by Frederic Blondeel.

Mixed QML/C++ objects

One of the good things of QML is that you can have both C++ and QML code and interact between them. For example, from C++, you can access the QML tree and invoke methods, change properties, etc.

The other way around, you can also define C++ objects and interact with them from QML. Here you have two ways of doing it:

  • Instantiating from C++ and adding the objects to the QML context, meaning that you can invoke the public slots and access the properties.
  • Registering the QML type with qmlRegisterType and then instantiating it from QML.

At the Qt documentation you can find examples about how to implement the different approaches so I won’t talk too much about them and I’ll focus in a special case of the last approach.

Let’s see a QML code like this:

Item {
    id: myObject
    function doCoolStuff() {
        // doing really cool stuff here
    }
    Rectangle {
        anchors.fill: parent
        color: "red"
    }
}

Button {
    text: "Do cool stuff!"
    onClicked: myObject.doCoolStuff()
}

Imagine now that painting that rectangle is something that must be really done by your object, because it is needed and inherent to it, and so is the function. If the code is written only in QML, the answer is obvious, just move the whole Item code to a .qml file and leave the main code like this:

MyObject {
    id: myObject
}

Button {
    text: "Do cool stuff!"
    onClicked: myObject.doCoolStuff()
}

Let’s suppose that you need some C++ code in that object for whatever reason (you want to use some GNOME library, for instance). In this case you need to write it in C++ to define the public slots in that language. Our first step would be something like this:

#include <QtCore>
#include <QtDeclarative>

 class MyObject : public QDeclarativeItem
 {
     Q_OBJECT

// Define some Q_PROPERTY here with its methods

 public slots:
     void doCoolStuff(void);

// We could even define some signals
 };

For the slot, it does not matter if you declare it as slot or with Q_INVOKABLE because QML will see it both ways. Of course, don’t forget to write the cpp file with the implementation for the slot 😉 . And you also need to declare the QML type, for example in your main.cpp file:

#include <QtDeclarative>
#include "myobject.h"

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    // ...
    qmlRegisterType("myapp", 1, 0, "myobject");
    //...
}

So far it is not different from what you can read at Defining new QML elements section of the Qt doc.

But what about painting the rectangle? We can do it with Qt code, but as we are lazy bastards and want to use QML for that, we have two options. One of them is forgetting about it in the C++ code and having something ugly like:

import myapp.myobject 1.0

MyObject {
    Rectangle {
        anchors.fill: parent
        color: "red"
    }
}

But come on, that rectangle is part of the object and nobody should write the Rectangle themselves. So we can take the better approach of moving the Rectangle to a different MyObject.qml file and loading it in the constructor of the C++ class:

#define QML_PATH "/path/to/the/qml/files/"

MyObject::MyObject(QDeclarativeItem *parent = 0) : QDeclarativeItem(parent)
{
    QDeclarativeEngine engine;
    QDeclarativeComponent component(&engine, QUrl::fromLocalFile(QML_PATH "MyObject.qml"));
    QDeclarativeItem *rect = dynamic_cast<QDeclarativeItem *>(component.create());
    rect->setParentItem(this);
}

Voilà.

Fanciful memory management

/* gcc -Wall -Werror -o references `pkg-config --cflags --libs
   gstreamer-0.10` references.c */

#include <gst/gst.h>
#include <glib-object.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
  GstElement *old_object, *object;

  gst_init(&argc, &argv);

  object = gst_element_factory_make("playbin2", "playbin");
  old_object = object;
  g_object_unref(object);
  object = gst_element_factory_make("playbin2", "playbin");

  g_print("old_object: %pn", old_object);
  g_print("object: %pn", object);
  if (old_object == object) {
    g_print("pointers are the same!n");
  }

  return 0;
}

In this code, as you can see we alloc an object, keep the pointer in another variable, release it and then alloc it again. Then we print those pointers and the surprise sentence if they are the same. Let’s see what I got from running this program:

$ ./references
old_object: 0x63f6e0
object: 0x63f6e0
pointers are the same!

Then I decided to disable G_SLICE and I got:

$ G_SLICE=always-malloc,debug-blocks ./references
old_object: 0x81dfa0
object: 0x81df60

There were even some occasions where I had the opposite in both cases, though I guess it is easier that this happens with G_SLICE as it is designed to optimize memory management and this would be like an easy case. In other cases, I guess having the same pointer happens because of the kernel.

The thing is that if you are debugging object references, you need to pay attention to pointer itself as sometimes you can get to wrong conclusions.

Example 1: let’s say that you get something meaningful as reference count for the old object. It could be that there is some missing reference elsewhere, though if the pointer is the same as the new one, it has been released (unless somebody replaced your old pointer) and reasigned again for the new object.

Example 2: let’s say that you get garbage, then your object is released and the memory has been overwritten (or you would have a bigger problem). You could easily get a segfault if the memory has been claimed by the kernel.

Example 3: let’s say that you get 0, then it has been released and maybe not rewritten, though maybe somewhere else somebody wrote a 0 there. It could be claimed by the kernel (or GSlice) or not, but if it has been, you can easily get a segfault.

Being taken to Azkaban for use of very dark GStreamer magic

I was writing some tests for a project at Igalia and I need to mock the convert-frame playbin2 element action. The code to invoke it is something like this:

GstElement *pipeline = /* get pipeline */;
GstCaps *caps = /* create caps to adapt the conversion */;
GstBuffer *buffer = NULL;
g_signal_emit_by_name (pipeline, "convert-frame", caps, &buffer);

When you are writing tests, what you want to do is testing just your code and not to depend on something external, so in this case the idea would be providing a fake implementation for that GStreamer element action.

The way you can do this kind of things is providing the symbol in your code so that the linker when doing its job does not look any further and uses that instead of the one in the external library, so the natural solution coming to your mind would be rewriting g_signal_emit_by_name. The problem with this is that though you are not using it in your code, it is too general, so it is not a good idea.

I thought I could replace the convert-frame action in the playbin2 class, so I wrote this code:

typedef struct
{
  GstPipelineClass parent_class;
  void (*about_to_finish) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*video_changed) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*audio_changed) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*text_changed) (gpointer playbin);
  void (*video_tags_changed) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  void (*audio_tags_changed) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  void (*text_tags_changed) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstTagList *(*get_video_tags) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstTagList *(*get_audio_tags) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstTagList *(*get_text_tags) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstBuffer *(*convert_frame) (gpointer playbin, GstCaps * caps);
  GstPad *(*get_video_pad) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstPad *(*get_audio_pad) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
  GstPad *(*get_text_pad) (gpointer playbin, gint stream);
} GstPlayBinClass;

static gpointer
gst_play_bin_convert_frame (G_GNUC_UNUSED gpointer playbin,
                            G_GNUC_UNUSED gpointer caps)
{
    GstBuffer *buffer;

    /* Create my own GstBuffer with the data I need */

    return buffer;
}

void
simulator_gst_reset(GstElement *new_pipeline, GstBus *new_bus)
{
    /* ... */

    GstPlayBinClass *klass =
        G_TYPE_INSTANCE_GET_CLASS(new_pipeline, GST_PLAY_BIN_TYPE,
                                  GstPlayBinClass);
    klass->convert_frame = (gpointer) gst_play_bin_convert_frame;

    /* ... */
}

First I declared the GstPlayBinClass copying it from the GStreamer code. I didn’t change any parameters order, just replaced some pointers with gpointer as we don’t need them. This way you don’t break the ABI. Then you can declare your own element action code and finally you get the Class, assign the method and voilà!.

As I said, the solution is far from being the best, but if you know a better way, drop me a comment.