Gnome MPlayer changes

This week I made some interesting changes to Gnome MPlayer.

1. Asynchronous metadata loading. So now a threadpool is used to load the metadata in the background. Not that it is very slow, but it should reduce the time of long playlist loads. On my test of a 300 item playlist it cut the time by at least 50%.

2. Playlist storage rework, before this change I used to hold the playlist twice in memory, once in the load order and another in random order and switch between them as needed. I redesigned this process so that I now use indexes to hold this value. Allows for quicker randomizing, faster playlist loading and hopefully less memory usage. In addition the playlist now has an order parameter and you can sort the playlist by this value by clicking on the Order header. The change does result in when "Shuffle Playlist" is selected just the indexes are shuffled and not the actual items.

3. I also made a bunch of minor changes that were results of bug reports/enhancement requests.

Another new Media Tracker

Well the media tracker in 0.9.6 was not well received. I thought it worked well and gave plenty of feedback and looked ok. I knew it had some "GTK Theme" issues, but in general it stuck the the standards.

So anyway, after messing around with a couple of mockups, I decided to ditch the 0.9.6 media tracker and create a new one. It is a little closer to the one in totem, but still uses as little screen space as possible.


So there you go... this should be in 0.9.7. So far I'm amazed how much code I have changed yet again in the 0.9.6 to 0.9.7 development cycle.

Video of Fullscreen ClutterDesk

ClutterDesk

ClutterDesk is starting to be something. I can have it run and take over the desktop now and then you can open folders and applications (using gnome-open). You can also drag items around, but nothing remembers where it was from run to run.

I'm thinking of turning this into a real project now. It does require accelerated 3d to work. (my r6xx, with the radeon driver, sucks running it).

Followup on an Application Idea - ClutterDesk

About a year ago, I posted an idea about an application idea. Nobody ever took me up on it as far as I can tell. So I finally had some time and thought I would post a slight mockup of the idea. So here is a video that shows the mock up I have made. I developed this in about 2-3 hrs using the clutter library.




I'll continue working on this mockup and eventually turn it into something as I have time, but if anyone wants to run with it and make it a real app, I'll be happy to provide code.

Picasa on Fedora 11

I found out today that in order to run Picasa on Fedora 11, you need to have the openssl-devel.i586 package installed. This package includes libssl.so, which is what Picasa needs when connecting to the Google site.

I found this odd, because -devel packages are normally not needed on non-developer machine. But just thought I would share this information.

You might also want to install nss-mdns.i586

More F11 sound tips

I was having some issues with F11 and mplayer, in that the first few seconds of a file would be played at an odd rate or delayed at the start

Editing /etc/pulse/default.pa

and changing

load-module module-hal-detect

to

load-module module-hal-detect tsched=0

Got rid of that lag, also I found that commenting out 'load-module module-suspend-on-idle' in that file didn't seem to hurt.

I also found that if you have the snd_hda_intel device and you are hearing loud pops, you might want to try this

echo "options snd_hda_intel power_save=0" > /etc/modprobe.d/snd_hda_intel.conf

After doing all that, reboot and enjoy sound again... Now this all applies to the beta, so in the future these tips may be all wrong.

UPDATE: It appears that this issue has been fixed in rawhide and so the tsched=0 is no longer needed.

Disable 'flat' volume in pulseaudio 0.9.15

If you don't like the new 'flat' volume feature in pulseaudio 0.9.15, like I don't then try this.

Login as root and run

echo "flat-volumes = no" >> /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

And then relogin to your desktop, and that should do it.

New Media Tracker

As you can tell I'm been on kind of on a gui cleanup roll. After learning how to make widgets and finally having the time to think about what I wanted, I wrote a new tracker widget. I think this widget looks great. You'll see it below where the time of the file is.


Let me know if you agree or not. Also this code is now in SVN.

Audio Meter hits gnome-mplayer

I am just about ready to commit the first version of gnome-mplayer with the audio meter integrated... Here is what it currently looks like.


Seems to be working pretty good, and I created it as a full widget, so it could be reused in other projects quite easily.

GtkStyleColors

I wrote a little app for GTK that displays the style colors of the current theme. If you would like a copy of it, drop me an email..

It looks like this


I found it useful for picking which color to use when creating some GTK widgets.

Audio Meter

Zdravko Nikolov asked be if gnome-mplayer could have an audio meter. I had looked at this in the past and didn't get very far with it and so I decided to take a look at it again. The first thing was how to get the data from mplayer and then I found the export audio filter. I still don't quite get what I am actually getting from the filter, but the data is interesting enough that when graphed it gives something like an audio meter. Now audio techies are probably gonna think what I came up with is an abomination, but it looks pretty and for some people that is all they want.

Here is a screenshot of what I current have working in some test code, and the next thing will be to merge it into the gnome-mplayer code base.


It does scale out and so as you drag the window, everything scales up, which is good. Also if anyone has better math for this or can enlighten me a little as to what the data actually is that would be great.

Gnome MPlayer and Gecko MediaPlayer 0.9.5 Released

gnome-mplayer 0.9.5 is available here:
http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/files/gnome-mplayer-0.9.5.tar.gz

gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.5 is available here:
http://gecko-mediaplayer.googlecode.com/files/gecko-mediaplayer-0.9.5.tar.gz


Translation updates, general bug fixes. So hot key changes for example
playlist is now F9, to be more compatible with other Gnome Apps

New features:
gnome-mplayer now includes a property page in Nautilus that displays
media info. To use restart nautilus after installing and then select a
media file and choose properties, you should see an Audio/Video tab and
you can view the properties that mplayer knows there. If you have totem
installed you might see two pages.

Gnome Theme - Japan 2007

I was looking at some themes for the E17 window manager and found one called Japan2007. I liked the colors in it and so I grabbed the screen shot and then used gimp to find out the color ids. So since I use gnome, I setup up my preferences using these colors. Here is what I came up with.

Controls: Nodeka
Colors:
Window - #D8D9CC
Input Box - #EDEDE6
Selected Items - #D3D5C0
Tooltips - #F5F5B5
For all the text I used black or #000000
Window Border: Nodeka
Icons: Gnome

It looks like this

Glest and Catalyst 9.1 with dual head

I wanted to try out the game Glest on my machine and ran into some odd things.

1. Running with two displays, the game spans over both displays with the menu being split right down the middle. I'm guessing this is due to the xrandr 1.1 compatibility of the Catalyst 9.1 (fglrx 9.1) drivers.

2. Switching the displays into clone mode prior to bringing up game and then trying to start it, causes the game to crash on start.
[kdekorte@quad ~]$ glest
X Error of failed request: BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
Major opcode of failed request: 135 (XFree86-VidModeExtension)
Minor opcode of failed request: 10 (XF86VidModeSwitchToMode)
Value in failed request: 0x5b

So I guess I am kinda out of luck trying out the game. I might try and play it in dual head and see if I can move some of the in game menus around. But for games, I really wish they would stick to one display unless told otherwise.

Nautilus Property Page now included in Gnome MPlayer

Andrew Kluger asked me that since I had a replacement for all of the Totem components (thumbnailer, browser plugin, media player) except for a property page in Nautilus then perhaps I could create one. I took a look at how Totem did it an determined that it didn't look that bad. So I started working on it and within about 4 hrs had something functional. It may not be finished yet, but it seems to fit the bill.


So how it works, is you install Gnome MPlayer from SVN (0.9.5) and it will install the Nautilus plugin. Select a media file that has an appropriate mime type (if your file type is missing, let me know and I'll add it), and right click on the file. Select properties and you should then see the Audio/Video tab. Click on it an it should then give you details about the media file based on what MPlayer knows about the file.

New gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.4

gnome-mplayer 0.9.4 has been released you can download it here

http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/files/gnome-mplayer-0.9.4.tar.gz

gecko-mediaplayer 0.9.4 has been released you can download it here

http://gecko-mediaplayer.googlecode.com/files/gecko-mediaplayer-0.9.4.tar.gz


Changes:

gnome-mplayer

Compatibility with Free/Open/NetBSD
Updated translations
New commandline option "--showsubtitles" defaults to 1, set to 0 to
prevent subtitles from showing by default.
Cleanup glib/gtk assertions
Fix window resize issues
Better handling of initial video playback window, should cause fewer resizes
Fix crashes when HOME is not set
Fix some realplayer emulation issues, may not be entirely fixed as
problem site is not accessible at my location
Stability improvements
Compatibility with libgpod 0.7 (API change between 0.6 and 0.7)
Mixer option is only used when the ALSA ao is selected


gecko-mediaplayer

Switch from XPCOM to NPRuntime Mozilla interface, removes need of idl
compiler and should work on more platforms easier
Compatibility with with Konqueror 4
Fix problems with realmedia sites that use a control parameter that dbus
does not like

Google Earth on Fedora 10

If you are running Google Earth on Fedora 10 and are getting the following dialog box:

Google Earth Error

Google Earth detected an error while trying to authenticate. Please
check the following:
- your network connection (can you get to www.google.com?)
- your firewall settings
(are you blocking /usr/lib/googleearth/googleearth-bin?)

Error code: 29
For more information, visit:

Try installing nss-mdns.i386, it solved the problem for me.

Linux Catalyst 9.1 on Fedora 10

I've been using Fedora and ATI cards together for awhile and the fglrx support has always been kinda hit and miss. The last combination that worked well was Fedora 8 and fglrx 8.10 (I believe). Anyway, when I upgraded to Fedora 10, I did not expect it work well and I had trouble with 8.11 and 8.12 various issues from no display to no 3d support.

So when 9.1 came out, I was not expecting much. However, I installed the akmod-fglrx package from rpmfusion-updates-testing today and so far I have been happy. I run a x86_64 distrobution so I had to install the additional xorg-x11-drv-fglrx-libs-8.573-1.9.1.fc10.i386 package so that 3d would work with i386 applications like SecondLife. If you don't have this installed SecondLife will run at a reduced frame rate. I have not seen other apps that have required this. And since I run dual head I had to remove the virtual setting from the screen area so that fglrx set the screen rez correctly (leaving this in caused the horizontal width to be much to wide). I used the ATI Catalyst Control Center to setup the dual head setting (in previous versions this application crashed) and restarted and everything looked correct.

But I will say that Fedora 10 and Catalyst 9.1 do work together and it seems to work well. Thanks rpmfusion!

gnome-mplayer 0.9.4 will work with the *BSDs

I've had an open issue with gnome-mplayer not working on the BSDs for awhile now. It always seemed to be a locking error with the code and the problem didn't happen on any of my machines. After trying to have people help me debug it, it kept coming back to the same issue, the second call to g_mutex_lock didn't block, it would just go on thru. So I decided to bite the bullet and install FreeBSD 7 on a VM. I was able to duplicate the issue quite easily. So the next step was to write a test program that simulated my code. I did that and found that the test program behaved the same way that gnome-mplayer did in Linux and BSD. So I then opened a bug on GLIB. The comment was that the a GMutex was not guaranteed to be recursive or non-recursive. What this means is that depending on your environment the way it works changes. So I did a little chatting on irc and __tim told me to check out GCond objects. So I tweaked my test program from using a second lock to g_cond_wait(...) and changed the g_mutex_unlocks to g_cond_signal(...) . After that the test program ran correctly on both Linux and FreeBSD.

So after seeing how the test program worked, I made the needed changes to gnome-mplayer. Did some quick tests on Linux and FreeBSD and everything worked properly. The changes were committed to SVN, so expect to see gnome-mplayer available for *BSD in the near future.