Gnome Mplayer Status

I've been working the last week to convert gnome-mplayer to use my gmtk_media_player widget backend. So far really good progress has been made and things are shaping up nicely. Found a few problems here and there vs the code I built to do the initial testing of gmtk_media_player before I converted to it, but that was pretty much expected.

The good news is that performance and memory usage seem to be about the same so far. Also, I'm really liking the event based structure of the code. It is much clearer what is going on with mplayer now to the main code.

gnome-mplayer, 1.0.4beta, GTK3

I have an idea of how to get zooming to work, but it might require clutter to do it. I'm thinking of embedding gmtk_media_player into a clutter actor and then taking advantage of the capabilities of clutter. I did this in fosfor about 6 months or more ago, and I noticed that totem recently started using clutter as well for the same purpose.

Gnome Mplayer ported to GTK3

While there are still some major issues with the application, gnome-mplayer does compile against GTK3 now. I'll probably have to spend a few days figuring out all the new tweaks that I need to make.

gnome-mplayer using GTK3

This is SVN r2002

ANNOUNCE: 1.0.3 of gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer released

gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.3 have been released you can download them from here

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/downloads/detail?name=gnome-mplayer-1.0.3.tar.gz


http://code.google.com/p/gecko-mediaplayer/downloads/detail?name=gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.3.tar.gz

Please note that these versions will use gsettings on glib 2.26 or higher which may cause all the configuration of these tools to be reset, you can force gconf with --with-gconf=yes and this is required for both applications.

If firefox crashes after installing gecko-mediaplayer, the most likely cause is gecko-mediaplayer using gsettings and gnome-mplayer is not. Please ensure that both are configured and installed properly.

gnome-mplayer changelog

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/source/browse/tags/v1.0.3/ChangeLog

gecko-mediaplayer changelog

http://code.google.com/p/gecko-mediaplayer/source/browse/tags/v1.0.3/ChangeLog

GMTK Ported to GTK3

As part of the next release I wanted to be able to have gnome-mplayer be able to be compiled against GTK3. Since GMTK is the core of the next release, I needed to port it first. It only took about an hour to complete the work. gnome-mplayer will take more time to convert, but it should be something I should be able to do in a few hours.

GTMK running under GTK3

So I need to finalize 1.0.3 and then on to this work. It appears that GTK3 may not be able to be ported to Windows, because of the embedding in GTK3 being X specific.

Avant Window Navigator vs Gnome Shell Dock

The other day I wrote up how I liked the Gnome Shell Dock but it still left a little to be desired. Additionally, I was missing the weather app and some other functionality. So I installed the Avant Window Navigator and the AWN Extras package.

AWN with some minor customization

I found that this dock gives a little more flexibility. I particularly like the Simple Switcher and the Weather Applet. The Simple Switcher gives me the ability to flip between workspaces with just my mouse, something that I found missing in the Dock.

Gnome Shell Dock Extension

With Gnome Shell, I was feeling that I was going to the Activities menu quite a bit to switch tasks. The constant movement of the mouse from left to right was a little annoying.

I then found the Dock extension (RPM name is: gnome-shell-extensions-dock). And that actually seemed to make the shell much more enjoyable.

The dock is on the right of the screen

Clicking on the icons activated tasks that were active and I could start a new task by middle clicking on the icon, which is helpful for multiple terminals. I really recommend this extension.

Update: I have found that I prefer the Avant Window Navigator over the Dock Extension.. see this post 

Fedora 15 Bluetooth

After I upgraded from Fedora 14 to Fedora 15 I found that Gnome was not showing my bluetooth devices and in fact it didn't detect any. However, lsusb found them with no problems.

I found bug #695588 at RedHat and it looked like systemctl may have not started it.

#systemctl status bluetooth.service
bluetooth.service - Bluetooth Manager
      Loaded: loaded (/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service)
      Active: inactive (dead)
      CGroup: name=systemd:/system/bluetooth.service

#systemctl enable bluetooth.service
ln -s '/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service' '/etc/systemd/system/dbus-org.bluez.service'
ln -s '/lib/systemd/system/bluetooth.service' '/etc/systemd/system/bluetooth.target.wants/bluetooth.service'

#systemctl start bluetooth.service

After running those three commands, gnome now shows my devices.

Bluetooth devices

 

Fedora 15 PreUpgrade

Well, I wanted to upgrade my primary machine to Fedora 15, so that I could starting working on making gnome-mplayer work with GTK3. It didn't go so well. I ran the preupgrade tool to go to the beta, and after a long download and a reboot, I ended up with a machine in limbo between Fedora 14 and Fedora 15. I think I am going to be able to recover from it without a reinstall, but so far I got kind of a mess.

Update:

I was able to recover from it, package-cleanup --cleandups and then reinstalling the kernel got me back.

Had some trouble with clutter, I had to remove some self installed source code, so did that one to myself.

Anyway, it is up and running now.

Gnome Mplayer 1.0.3 beta has been released

Gnome MPlayer and gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.3betas have been released

Mainly changes to use GSettings over GConf when possible. Also, support for Apple.com sites in Firefox 4.

Tar Files:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/downloads/detail?name=gnome-mplayer-1.0.3beta.tar.gz

http://code.google.com/p/gecko-mediaplayer/downloads/detail?name=gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.3beta.tar.gz

GMTK Media Player Zoom Feature

One feature I'm commonly asked for in Gnome MPlayer is a way to zoom in on the video, perhaps there is something needs closer examination or the viewer just wants to get rid of the black bars on the sides. So I began looking into how I could solve this problem. GMTK draws the video into a GTKSocket object, which is contained by a GTKFixed container. This allows me to properly center the video. I was under the assumption that using negative coordinates in the GTKFixed would not be allowed. Anyway I decided to try it to see if it would work just in case. And it actually did work with no problem. So my first attempt at this was to put the change into Gnome MPlayer. Gnome MPlayer uses a GTKDrawingArea instead of a GTKSocket so when I tried this technique I ended up with video overlaying other portions of the window, not good. But I figured I should try it in GMTK to see if it would work there anyway. It does actually work pretty well. So when Gnome MPlayer is converted to use GMTK (planned for 1.0.4) the zoom feature should come along with the code. Below are some screen shots showing it working.

GMTK at 100% zoom (I've made the window wider on purpose)

GMTK at 120% zoom

GMTK at 80% zoom

I may change the step size in the future to allow for more precise zooming, right now the steps are 10%.


Update: Looks like this feature will probably be dropped for gnome-mplayer 1.0.4, I had to make a change to the layout code to make GTK3 work correctly, and that change took away this feature.

Fedora 14's Clutter with r600g from GIT

I've been trying to run some Clutter based apps, like fosfor, on Fedora 14 for awhile now. F14 uses clutter 1.2 and the upgraded ATI ddx driver does vblank signaling differently than the original ATI driver shipped with F13. Which leads to the problems I've had with getting the clutter apps to redraw properly when using a newer DDX, including the one found in updates. Fosfor would not resize windows or things would come up blank when they should be correct.

Today I came across something in a mailing list that made it work.

CLUTTER_VBLANK=none

So I added that to my ~/.bashrc file and relogged in and since then my Clutter based apps have been working.

NeverWinter Nights on r600g

I've been testing NeverWinter Nights on the r600g driver for Linux and I have enabled s3 textures and tiling and NWN is looking great.

1680x1050 in Best Mode on an 3650 card ~20fps

gecko-mediaplayer in Chrome

gecko-mediaplayer and Chrome have not always got along so well together. But there are reports that the Chrome 11.0.686.0 and gecko-mediaplayer are working together, finally. gecko-mediaplayer had been blacklisted due to a bug the gecko-mediaplayer exposed in Chrome.

You can see the post on the mailing list here:

http://groups.google.com/group/gecko-mediaplayer/msg/a8d32ff049320d2f?hl=en

ANNOUNCE gnome-mplayer 1.0.2

Just a note to announce the release of gnome-mplayer 1.0.2

please note that there is not a gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.2 available at
this time. But gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.0 should continue to work with this
release.

Significant changes to gnome-mplayer 1.0.2 over 1.0.0

New audio device handling compatible with ALSA and Pulse devices if
support is compiled in
Several bug fixes
GTK 3 support is not yet enabled, but code should be GTK 3 clean
Audio Meter enhanced to use cairo drawing
DBUS is now optional (disables gecko-mediaplayer integration)
Code should compile and run on Windows under mingw
Get rid of VDPAU error message
Seeking on streaming media if supported by mplayer
Updated translations

Full changelog is here:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/source/browse/tags/v1.0.2/ChangeLog


Download the code here:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/downloads/detail?name=gnome-mplayer-1.0.2.tar.gz&can=2&q=

RIP: Gateway 22" monitor

Well after at least 7yrs of service my Gateway 22" display died today. Off to shop for something new. I know I want something with at least 1920x1080 resolution, but not sure if I want to go larger than 23".

Such a tough decision...

Gnome MPlayer on Windows

One of the small tasks I've been working on is to get Gnome MPlayer to cross compile to Windows. A few people have asked for it, and while I admit it has not been high on my priority list, it has been something I've been interested in seeing how it was done.

The only way I have tested it so far is by cross compiling it on Fedora and then running it under Wine. I have to say that it actually works pretty decent. Notice in the screen shot that the VO is directx and the AO is dsound.

gnome-mplayer-win32 running under Wine on Fedora 14

To cross compile I installed the mingw32 packages on Fedora.
I checked out the gnome-mplayer source code
Ran configure like this  ./configure --host=i686-pc-mingw32
Ran make

I then ran the executable under wine. Probably the trickiest part was getting the gtk icons in the right spot

I ended up symlinking the system themes into the mingw32 GTK directories

cd /usr/i686-pc-mingw32/sys-root/mingw/share
ln -s /usr/share/icons/ .
ln -s /usr/share/themes/ .

After that was done, it seemed to work like normal, minus the dbus, gpod and musicbrainz integration.

So if you have a complete mingw32 environment setup on Windows, you should be able to cross compile gnome-mplayer and then point it to a windows mplayer executable and it should work.

Radeon 2d benchmarks

For this round of testing I'll be using kernel 2.6.28-rc5 and libdrm, mesa and xf86-drv-ati all from git as of Feb 16, 2011 8:30am GMT - 7. About 2 years ago I did some 2d tests of the Linux driver on the r600g and got some good results. The performance of gtkperf has went up and down over time, but generally has hovered around 33-38 seconds on my machine when run with gtkperf -c 500 -a.

The recent radeon patches have enabled linear aligned performance and according to the changelog


linear aligned is supposedly more performant, but more importantly, linear general only works on the CB without slices.  The texture blocks technically don't support    linear general although, I think linear general gets upgraded to linear aligned in the hw which is why it currently works.


This change required changes to the kernel module as well, and those changes appeared in the 2.6.38-rc5 kernel. At this point I have also enabled color tiling, but it is currently only 1d color tiling at this point. Alex Deucher has stated that he would like to have 2d color tiling working before color tiling is enabled by default on the r6xx chips.

So the results of the test are

GtkPerf 0.40 - Starting testing: Wed Feb 16 08:56:58 2011

GtkEntry - time:  0.09
GtkComboBox - time:  2.54
GtkComboBoxEntry - time:  2.13
GtkSpinButton - time:  0.79
GtkProgressBar - time:  0.61
GtkToggleButton - time:  0.48
GtkCheckButton - time:  0.35
GtkRadioButton - time:  0.56
GtkTextView - Add text - time:  3.48
GtkTextView - Scroll - time:  1.20
GtkDrawingArea - Lines - time:  5.16
GtkDrawingArea - Circles - time:  6.67
GtkDrawingArea - Text - time:  4.16
GtkDrawingArea - Pixbufs - time:  0.42
 ---
Total time: 28.63


I did this test a couple of times and always got results below 30 on my machine, which means that 2d performance has roughly increased by 10%. Please note that gtkperf is not a very good benchmark and so you can consider this test garbage if you want, but I have found the results useful at times.


gtkperf is very sensitive to other applications updating the screen, so be sure you have minimal applications running when performing this test.

r600g Benchmarks Round 3

In October I did some benchmarking of r600g performance on my machine. Since it has been about five months since that set of tests I decided to revisit the tests and see if any improvements are to be had.

As a recap for my hardware I'm using a Asus Silent Magic EAH3650 video card (rv635 chip). A Q6600 processor (2.4 Ghz x 4), 8GB of RAM.

The OS is Fedora 14 64bit, but with the 2.6.38-rc4 kernel and libdrm, mesa, and xf86-drv-ati all from git.

In the last round I had the following results

Testing results (October 2010)

• nexuiz-glx, normal settings, 1024x768 windowed, 30fps
• vdrift, 1024x768 windowed, 30-60fps
• openarena, 1024x768, windowed, 50-60fps
• etracer, 1024x768, 25-30fps

 
With the newer r600g code I have the following results (Febuary 2011)

• nexuiz-glx, normal settings, 1024x768 windowed, 40-45fps (improvement)
• vdrift, 1024x768 windowed, 60fps at the main screen, 15-30fps during the game. The visual quality has improved quite a bit even though the frame rate is a little lower
• openarena, 1024x768, windowed, 50-60fps (no change)
• etracer, 1024x768, 50-60fps (improvement)

Also, since the October test Savage2 and Heroes of Neworth have started working correctly. So more or less improvements all around. When you see the r600g report 60fps in a test it means the card is able to draw at the monitor refresh rate, which is good.

Heroes of Neworth on r600g

As a follow up to my Savage2 results. I decided to try Heroes of Neworth.

The game is a little slow on my 3650 card with the default settings, but I think I can lower some of the quality settings and get it working fine.

Below are some screen shots running the tutorial

Training Screen

Tutorial Screen

So the progress on the driver is really coming along.

Savage 2 on R600g

Thanks to a patch from Henri Verbeet, the r600g driver in Mesa is now playing Savage2 as of Feb 7, 2011. The only thing that needs to be disabled is shadows. Everything else seems to look very nice and run very fast even on my rv635 (3650) video card.

I'm using
Kernel 2.6.38-rc3
libdrm - git
mesa - git
xf86-drv-ati - git
Based on Fedora 14

Savage2 on r600g screenshot