digital home of MacSlow

That’s it… I slightly feel better now. Sorry for the naive outburst of my temper. Move along.

(click to view fullsize)

A small video-player I always wanted to write myself… using - to different extends - gstreamer, OpenGL, gtk+ and cairo. The use of gstreamer and OpenGL is obvious, if you look at the screenshot. gtk+ is merely used to provide the typical event-handling and windowing-system glue-code (gtkglext in this case) and cairo is used for the masking out of the edges and getting the rounded corners. It uses multi-texturing and fragment-shading. The remaining things to implement are: using fragment-shaders for the colorspace-conversion too, hooking up some implicit-animation love for switching between different videos. Once that’s in place I would like to see some of this move into totem (if possible) to beautify transitions while switching from one video to another in case you’ve several videos in your playlist.

EDIT: This is running on an i915 on pure FOSS-drivers under metacity. It would even work under compiz using the same system… if the i915-driver would not have the known issues with OpenGL under a composited environment. On a GPU from nvidia - using their proprietary driver - it would work under compiz of course.

Feeling the pressure:
Having a look at this announcement of AMD planning to open their (ATI) drivers makes me wonder if they start to feel pressure from intel’s side in terms of Linux-commitment. There was just this announcement about intel’s new GM965 mobile chipset with full OpenSource driver support for Xorg. The included GMA X3100 graphics core in those chipsets offers vertex-, fragment- and geometry-shaders. Oh and don’t forget the new Mesa (release 7.0) will bring OpenGL 2.0/2.1 support to the table. Furthermore - as far as I remember - intel also plans to support the video-decoding functions of their hardware in their Xorg driver. While the mobile GMA X3100 may not be a pixel- and vertex-pushing beast like the offerings from nvidia, it will certainly be enough to do sophisticated rendering-effects for common and future desktop-use. Regarding the scope of the planned driver opening from AMD, we will have to see how commited AMD really is. Personally I will only applaude them, if they open up all (2D, 3D, video decoding functionality etc). Just like intel does.

Anybody, who wants to drop a shiny new GM965-equipped laptop at my doorstep

UDS-Sevilla:
This is what passionate OpenSource-advocates look like at night… disregarding their need for sleep:

Some of them even bleed for you:

No, just kidding… their were just stupid and tried to climb trees (These photographic master-pieces are from Jono’s flickr-stream)

An event like the Ubuntu Developer Summit is always a terrific experience. The people you meet and the kind of commitment you see them putting into OpenSource is a huge motivation boost… everytime. I had good chats with folks from Canonical, the Ubuntu-community, KDE and GNOME. Once again I did not understand where the often brought up aversion between GNOME and KDE comes from. It’s was pretty easy to get along with the KDE people for me.

At the Ubuntu developer summit I was able to put hands on intel’s classmate-PC (image 1, image 2, image 3, image 4, image 5, image 6, image 7). Since I got a good look at the XO at the LGM2 just a few days ago I can compare them easily. Form-factor wise the XO wins the style-competition. In addition to that the XO can be used as a tablet-PC too. Also the display of the XO looks better. But the classmate-PC wins hands down in terms of offered performance. But that does not come as a surprise looking at the hardware-specifications of both machines. Right now I find it hard to predict which of the two efforts will win in the end. Maybe there’s a place for both. Another intel-device I was able to see live for the first time is the internet-tablet from intel. Pretty directly going to be competing with Nokia’s N800 (or a successor?). From what I saw and got to know from chatting with the attending intel-folks, it’s what I always wished the Nx00 would be.

It was a bit of a pity nobody of the Ubuntu Media Center team was able to make it to the Ubuntu developer summit. I would have liked to chat with them a bit about Elisa and their plans in more detail. I also regret missing the System76 people, who attended the summit. I would like to have asked them, if they plan any GM965-based laptop with a built-in high-quality webcam. A respin of their Darter-model with those additional features would be extremely good!

I had a good last party-evening on friday where I also met with Alvaro Lopez Ortega, Carlos Garnacho and other people from the spanish OpenSource-community. What a sympathetic bunch of people! We had a good time at the clubs.

If you want to take a look at the newspaper and program-schedule from the recent LGM2, I placed one copy of each on the front desk before the main conference-room. Both are in french and english. Please read them there at the desk and leave them there for others to be able to read it.

If you have other questions regarding the LGM2, either ask me here at the UDS, wait for my LGM2-recap blog-entry or wait for the conference-videos to show up. At this point huge thanks to Ralph Giles, who took the huge burden of capturing and encoding the videos off my shoulders.

It turned out that instead of giving a talk at LGM2 (it was cut due to too much proposals), I - partly self-inflicted (I volunteered for it as nobody else felt obliged when Louis asked the audience) - became the video-monkey for most of the talks giving here this weekend. Out of the blue and totally unprepared I see myself now be in charge for recording/encoding the stuff *sigh²*. The main problem currently is, that I have no means/idea how to get the video-material from the mini-DV cassettes on my hard-disk.

• I don’t have enough hard-disk space for storing raw audio/video-material of roughly 21 one-hour mini-DV cassettes
• I never really did grab stuff from mini-DV before
• I most certainly lack the needed hardware (firewire-cable?) for doing this
• I have no idea if my Ubuntu 7.04 laptop is up to the task in terms of driver-support

My laptop has a Firewire 400 port, but I never used it. Thus I don’t know if the needed drivers/libraries are in place. That’s something I have to test. This is the point where my knowledge about digital video ends. I would welcome any help (especially from LGM2-attendees) for the mini-DV-grabbing. I’m the dude running around with the huge cairo-scarab logo on the back of his long-sleeve. Thanks in advance!