+David

Got Google+, so you can follow me here. Feel free to annoy me with questions while I finish up this next piece of work on Rygel.

(Hint: It involves dynamically grabbing gupnp-dlna's profiles instead of the builtin transcoder classes)

My apologies but if you commented I had no clue

I forgot to enable e-mailed comment notifications until just now, so if I ignored your comments in the past it's not because I'm lazy, it's because the system never told me about them.

GstTranscodeBin is (hopefully) done

I now have transcodebin doing actual transcoding as part of rygel, so I think it's time to actually publicize some git repositories.

If you're wondering what I did over the past few weeks, aside from the annoying delays which kept me from my chair at times... I moved out all the transcoding logic from Rygel into a separeate gstreamer plugin called gst-transcode. The plugin can be spawned as "transcodebin" from the element factory; it provides a sink and a src pad. You also have to set the "profile" property with a GstEncodingProfile just like encodebin. Anything coming in the sink pad gets autoplugged and transcoded, and output on the src pad.

Transcodebin is available on this github repo:
https://github.com/kmeisthax/gst-transcode

There's also a test application in tests called gst-transcodetest which grabs a DLNA profile by name from gupnp-dlna and tries to transcode a file into the target format. Compilation of the test application is disabled by default; since it's not very useful, adds a build-dependancy on gupnp-dlna, and I plan to remove it eventually. If you want to compile it look in the Makefile.am and configure.ac files to see what needs to be uncommented.

It also has debian packaging which I added back before I spent two days switching from Ubuntu to Fedora in search of newer packages, then to Fedora Rawhide to get the bleeding edge. That ordeal is immortalized on my twitter.

Likewise I patched Rygel to use transcodebin; it removes about 50 lines of code from rygel-transcoder.vala. I've also got a github for that here:
https://github.com/kmeisthax/rygel

Master is just a mirror of the gnome git; my patch is in branch gsoc2011-transcoding. I've tested this on a Sony Bluray player, specifically playing an OCRemix album in OGG format live-transcoded to LPCM through Rygel and transcodebin.

There's a known bug; if I do OGG->LPCM through the gst-transcodetest program, autoplugging fails. OGG->MP3 works, and so does Rygel's LPCM transcoder. Since I next plan to replace Rygel's transcoders with a single generic transcoder fed by gupnp-dlna's profiles, I expect this bug to rear it's ugly head when said work is done.

Project info, IRC reachability, contact info

For people interested in the project, the public page is available here. I'm making some enhancements to Gstreamer's DLNA support as well as moving some transcoding stuff out of rygel and into core. It's based off of a project request on the wiki.

There are multiple ways to contact me, including:

E-Mail! Just decode the following anti-spam mail string:

dcrkid COMMERCIAL-AT yahoo SMALL-LITTLE-DOT-ON-THE-BOTTOM com

Twitter! Follow @Libertardian for spurt-of-the-moment political and gaming rants

IRC! I'm registered on freenode as dwendt and typically lurk in #gstreamer, #gsoc, #ubuntu, and/or #Reddit

Reddi --- Actually, bad idea for me to be on Reddit during this project. Very bad idea. Forget I mentioned it.

Updated for Summer of Code 2011

Alrighty, it's GSoC 2011 time! I'm reviving the blog I used in my GSoC2009 project and should have used for my GSoC2010 project but didn't. This time, however, my project involves the GStreamer people rather than Debian - so hopefully my posts aren't being automatically routed to Planet Debian this time.

apple, jailbreaking, and debconf in manhattan?!

Well, while I tangle around with annoying conflicts between Xen and NetworkManager I might as well post something semi-related to computing. Today it's Apple's anti-jailbreaking plea. Right off the bat they point to their end user license "agreement" and claim that people who bought an iPhone or iPod Touch somehow agreed to this mystical EULA that's somehow signed at point of sale. Nevermind the fact that EULAs are non-negotiable, involve no transfer of title, money, or services, and frequently never even get shown to the user.

But enough about that. Apparantly DebConf 10 is going to be in New York City. Right next to where I live. That's great. I didn't go to DebConf this year, despite Arthur Liu recommending it to all the GSoCers. Mostly due to paranoia over airline security and US customs searching my laptop.

Debian is apparantly going to actually have release deadlines, albeit every other year as opposed to twice a year like Ubuntu. Still, it's nice to see a commitment to releasing. My first experience with Debian was a while back, when all the worthwhile packages were still in testing.

Hopefully, tomorrow I can get Xen working again. Xend won't start, something about an 'invalid dom0 state'. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that NetworkManager manually configures peth0 when it shouldn't, requiring me to fix up the routing tables. Worst comes to worse I'll have to try and run Xen and euca on my desktop, which is just barely compatible with Debian.

One of the things I'd like to do for VMbuilder is have it automatically package the Linux kernel and ramdisk into Eucalyptus, if the user opts for it. You can already upload new kernels and ramdisks with Eucalyptus/euca2ools provided your cert has the appropriate rights on the cloud. see [0]

[0] http://open.eucalyptus.com/wiki/EucalyptusImageManagement_v1.5.2

lenny vmbuilder with xen, debconf, I discover key visualization

Well, the current VMBuilder available on the git archive[0] now supports building Lenny on vanilla Xen. We're very close to building AMIs, I can almost taste it. (The reason why you haven't heard about this until today is that accessing Blogger is super-finnicky when not logged in for absolutely no reason at all. My apologies for the lack of updates on this blog.) Additionally we're starting to actually put documentation and stuff on the wiki [1,2,3] about the GSoC project and euca2ools.

The next step is to look at a few packages called 'ec2-init' and 'ec2-modules'. They only exist in Ubuntu right now, and I purposefully disabled VMBuilder from installing them on Debian so far since Debian doesn't have them. That, and I believe I should pick out a suitable AKI/ARI combo sometime (the AKI info in the Debian plugin is just a placeholder right now). This shouldn't take too long. I would like to get the VMBuilder changes in Debian soon, and hopefully get those changes in the VMBuilder trunk[4] too.

My project was part of the Debconf talk on the Debian GSOC projects which I believe was 2 or 3 days ago. I'd look up the presentation and watch it but right now I have my friend begging me to install Ubuntu for him so he doesn't have to use Vista anymore.

[0] git://git.debian.org/git/pkg-escience/vmbuilder.git
(that's a lotta gits)
[1] http://wiki.debian.org/VMBuilder
[2] http://wiki.debian.org/euca2ools
[3] http://wiki.debian.org/DavidWendt/GSOC09Project
[4] https://launchpad.net/vmbuilder