ANNOUNCE 1.0.5

Version 1.0.5 of gmtk, gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer have been released

The build process is the same as 1.0.5b1 which is documented here:

http://kdekorte.blogspot.com/2011/10/105b1-of-gmtk-gnome-mplayer-and-gecko.html

The following fixes have been made since 1.0.4

gmtk

This library is new as of 1.0.5 and is required for the build. Several common functions and routines in gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplay have been moved to this library. Which should result in a slightly smaller installed code size.

gmtk can be used to build your own media players as widgets have been created to control mplayer. A simple media player can be built using this library very quickly. If you have questions about this library and how to use it in your GTK application, please email the list and I will cover its usage.


gnome-mplayer

Removal of large amounts of code that are now present in gmtk
Customization of Menu Hot keys
Remove need of mplayer config file
--vo and --dvd_device command line options
Several other small fixes


gecko-mediaplayer

Due to changes at Apple, QT files from Apple.com are now fully downloaded before playing, prevents mplayer from crashing or going into a infinite loop

Workaround xulrunner issues due to the API changing but Mozilla not bumping the API version

Conversion to gmtk for preference storage and other common routines.


Download links:

http://gmtk.googlecode.com/files/gmtk-1.0.5.tar.gz

http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/files/gnome-mplayer-1.0.5.tar.gz

http://gecko-mediaplayer.googlecode.com/files/gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.5.tar.gz

1.0.5 is getting closer

Sorry for the long delay in getting 1.0.5 out the door. There have been a lot of changes and fixes for some minor issues that have been painful to fix. Apparently, the nsapi has changed again and was not properly versioned in all instances. So several attempts were made to detect and work around the problems. I believe we have solved the issues. You can read issue 161 for all the gory details: 158-162 are all related to this problem.

I hope to have some time in the last weeks of December to get the release out the door. Hopefully, it will be painless as packages have been made and a large amount of testing has been done.

My work schedule has been a little busier over the last few months so I have had less time to spend on these applications. Also, I want to make sure we don't have any surprises. I expect we will, but I want to try and minimize them.

mplayerplug-in and Firefox 8

I've received a few emails that mplayerplug-in may not be working with Firefox 8. While I have not personally looked into this yet I believe this may be due to the removal of XPCOM in Firefox. The best option going forward would be to migrate from mplayerplug-in to gecko-mediaplayer. gecko-mediaplayer uses the nsapi that Mozilla recommends for plugins.

Now I know everyone's first thought is that gecko-mediaplayer and gnome-mplayer have to many dependencies or that gnome-mplayer requires gnome. Well lets be frank. The only main requirement difference and dependency, if you are using Firefox, is that gecko-mediaplayer/gnome-mplayer require that dbus is present and running on the system. I've done some testing and dbus does not really add much RAM or CPU usage when it is not being used.

top - 08:10:30 up 7 days, 31 min,  8 users,  load average: 1.08, 0.35, 0.16
Tasks:   3 total,   0 running,   3 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  3.1%us,  2.8%sy,  0.0%ni, 93.7%id,  0.2%wa,  0.2%hi,  0.0%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   8179620k total,  6119660k used,  2059960k free,   608028k buffers
Swap:  2103292k total,        0k used,  2103292k free,  2992068k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND           
 1686 kdekorte  20   0 24992 3572  704 S  0.3  0.0   9:45.59 dbus-daemon       
  899 dbus      20   0 22996 2684 1236 S  0.0  0.0   0:09.42 dbus-daemon       
 1685 kdekorte  20   0 22220  508  300 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 dbus-launch

As stated before gnome-mplayer does not require any gnome components, it originally did, but those components have been replaced with GTK/GLIB or other optional libraries. It can be configured to not use gconf or dconf. gnome-mplayer can be compiled to support GTK2 or GTK3 and since GTK is used by Firefox no additional library is added there.

mplayerplug-in does not support many of the features that gecko-mediaplayer does. The javascript is better, the support for Quicktime is better, and many of the problems that mplayerplug-in has are resolved in gecko-mediaplayer. So it is time for mplayerplug-in to finally go away.

1.0.5b1 of gmtk, gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer

Announcing the release of version 1.0.5b1 of the following packages

gmtk
gnome-mplayer
gecko-mediaplayer

The building of these packages is a little different than 1.0.4 due to the addition of gmtk.

gmtk is a common library that is used by gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer. So build and install it first, it should auto configure for most situations

About the only options you will need other than the prefix and the libdir are the following

--enable-gtk3 or --disable-gtk3

And then to select the backend for preference stores, either let the application configure it self to choose the best option or pick _one_ of these

--enable-gconf
--enable-gsettings   GTK 2.26 or higher required for this one
--enable-keystore

On Fedora 15 (x86_64) I use the following command to configure gmtk

./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64


Once gmtk is compiled and installed build gnome-mplayer and then gecko-mediaplayer. They will use the version of gtk and backend that were chosen in gmtk, so no need to re-specify those options. So please check your flags if you have scripted these builds in the past.

tar files of the source can be obtained from the following links:

http://gmtk.googlecode.com/files/gmtk-1.0.5b1.tar.gz

http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/files/gnome-mplayer-1.0.5b1.tar.gz

http://gecko-mediaplayer.googlecode.com/files/gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.5b1.tar.gz

Savage2 and Heros of Newerth on Fedora 15 using ATI/Gallium/Mesa 7.11

I was having some weird issues with Savage2 and Heroes of Newerth on my ATI/Gallium/Mesa 7.11 setup. They would crash stating that either OpenGL 2.0 was unavailable or an extension was missing. I was finally able to track this down by useing LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose

LIBGL_DEBUG=verbose ./savage2_update.bin
warning: The VAD has been replaced by a hack pending a complete rewrite
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so failed (/home/kdekorte/Savage2/libs/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/lib64/dri/r600_dri.so))
libGL error: unable to load driver: r600_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL: OpenDriver: trying /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so
libGL error: dlopen /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so failed (/home/kdekorte/Savage2/libs/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.15' not found (required by /usr/lib64/dri/swrast_dri.so))
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: reverting to indirect rendering
Savage2 - Fatal Error: OpenGL 2.0 not available.
Segmentation fault (core dumped)

So I went into /home/kdekorte/Savage2/libs/ (this is where I installed Savage2) and renamed libstdc++.so.6 to old.libstdc++.so.6 and tried again. After that Savage2 started working. I did the same thing with Heroes of Newerth and that solved its problem as well.

Keyboard Customization

One of the common requests I get for gnome-mplayer is the option to customize the keyboard hot keys. One thing about a US keyboard is that it has keys that a Russian keyboard does not have. So when I hardcode a hotkey, it may work for me, but may cause problems for others. So I have finally gotten around to building this functionality into the code.

Keyboard Customization screen

As of right now I only have the menu shortcuts working with this new method. If it turns out that this method works properly with Russian or other keyboards, then I'll add more shortcuts to this screen.

To use this you need SVN of gnome-mplayer and gmtk from July 20, 2011 or later. gmtk is only needed as I added one function to it.

Sample builds of gnome-mplayer based on gmtk

Here are some sample tar files of gmtk, gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer.

I don't think I have the schema file installs working correctly yet, so
you might need to install these packages on top of 1.0.4


https://dekorte.homeip.net/download/gmtk-1.0.4.tar.gz
https://dekorte.homeip.net/download/gnome-mplayer-1.0.5.tar.gz
https://dekorte.homeip.net/download/gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.5.tar.gz

Build gmtk first and install it, then build and install gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer.

For gmtk you might need to specify libdir on the configure command.

Example on Fedora 15 64bit.

./configure --prefix=/usr --libdir=/usr/lib64
  

Announcing gnome-mplayer 1.0.4 and gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.4

Announcing gnome-mplayer 1.0.4 and gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.4

gnome-mplayer improvements:

Conversion to the gmtk_media_player backend which isolates all mplayer control operations to a gtk widget. This is the majority of the change with over 3000 lines either moved or changed, and also the reason for the long testing period.

Various bug fixes over 1.0.3

GTK3 support, enable with --enable-gtk3 on the configure line.

Additional languages

Detection of Ubuntu global menus, assumed to be true when UBUNTU_MENUPROXY is defined in the environment.

dconf / gsettings preference store is enabled when using glib 2.26 or higher. Gconf support can be preferred with --with-gconf=yes



gecko-mediaplayer improvements:

Several javascript api enhancements to support more functions
Added Portuguese translation
More improvements for Apple sites


TAR Files:

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/downloads/detail?name=gnome-mplayer-1.0.4.tar.gz

http://code.google.com/p/gecko-mediaplayer/downloads/detail?name=gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.4.tar.gz

ANNOUNCE gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.4b2

This is to announce the second and hopefully last beta for the 1.0.4
series of gecko-mediaplayer and gnome-mplayer

This beta includes fixes for the tunein.com website that enhance the
Windows Media Player emulation in javascript.

gnome-mplayer

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/downloads/detail?name=gnome-mplayer-1.0.4b2.tar.gz&can=2&q=

gecko-mediaplayer

http://code.google.com/p/gecko-mediaplayer/downloads/detail?name=gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.4b2.tar.gz&can=2&q=


Please let me know if you have any issues with these packages.

ANNOUNCE gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer 1.0.4b1

I am releasing the current SVN code to get some more testing exposure. I have been using the code for a couple of weeks and I am pretty satisfied with how things are working. I'm sure there might be a few bugs mainly due to the size of the changes in the code, but many of my test cases are working well.

The code can be obtained from here:

gnome-mplayer

http://code.google.com/p/gnome-mplayer/downloads/detail?name=gnome-mplayer-1.0.4b1.tar.gz&can=2&q=

GTK3 support can be enabled in gnome-mplayer with the --enable-gtk3 flag
passed to configure.


gecko-mediaplayer

http://code.google.com/p/gecko-mediaplayer/downloads/detail?name=gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.4b1.tar.gz&can=2&q=

New Asterisk Box

About six months ago I built an Asterisk box for my home network. It allowed my to manage the phones around my house much better and to give a little more control as to what rings where and when. Everything more or less worked ok, but I had built it on my main file server and due to a motherboard issue the Openvox A800P card I had would occasionally have interrupt issues and make the calls choppy. I was able to correct most of these issues by not using the FXS daughter cards on the A800P by using a Cisco/Linksys PAP2T phone adapter, but still could generate problems with large amounts of disk activity which on a file server happen quite often. Additionally, I wanted to make the phone server to be separate from the file server.

After looking around I found an ideal box for my new server. Jetway offers a tiny Intel Atom based server the JBC110C96-525-B which has just enough room to fit the A800P card into it, which was a concern. Actually, getting the card into the machine was kinda tricky and I was concerned I was going to break it. The machine was cheap (< $200 from NewEgg) considering it reports itself as a 4 core 1.8 Ghz processor (I'm sure two are hyperthreaded) and with 2GB of RAM in it, runs very nice. I had a spare 160GB laptop SATA hard drive that I used as the primary storage. You really only need about 20GB for a PBX in a Flash (PIAF) install, and even that is overkill. Tempting to run it off a flash drive.

My experience with PIAF has been hit and miss. I like that everything pretty much works as they say it does. However, I don't like that they don't bother to package all the customizations as RPMS like the base system. To me it would be a big win if they bothered to do that. I also needed to patch the dahdi drivers to support the A800P card. Which if I had not done it before would have been much more difficult. I'm not sure why PIAF can't just provide these drivers in the base install.

Second FreePBX the web management interface to Asterisk has some real problems. I could not get it to configure my outgoing calls to go the way I wanted them, so I actually ended up removing the FreePBX generated configuration files and ended up using my own from the last server. I'm sure I'm losing some features by doing this, but the frustration of making it work drove me nuts. Probably some of this had to do with me not understanding the software that well, but it appeared to me that I had configured it correctly.

All in all the hardware is great, cheap, and dead quiet. The box has plenty of power to handle multiple calls. I've very positive it could scale to at least 10 with no problem, and probably 25 to 30. If I could get a pair of 1.5TB 2.5" SATA drives that were cheap and reliable (seems to be some issues with the quality of these drives at the moment) I would be very tempted to replace my big file server with one of these boxes.

All in all, I'm happy with the hardware I chose, not as much with the software, but there doesn't seem to be any better option at this point.

Apple Trailers on Fedora 15

I just want to know if this is a local problem or not. I went to http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/paramount/thor/ to test some problems with Apple trailers in gecko-mediaplayer. The problem is that the option to select the trailers are no longer showing up. I have this same issue in chrome and in another account. So I'm wondering if it is Fedora 15 problem or something local here. My Fedora 14 machine shows the screen perfectly.

Note how on this screen the red box that is normally on the left is missing. Any ideas? It worked last Friday that I know of.

Gnome Mplayer 1.0.4 beta status

Over the weekend I battled with gnome-mplayer/gmtk. It kept hanging on startup or crashing after running for a short period of time. Eventually, I found the problem and it was something I should have known better to do. I was setting GTK values, size allocations and colors, in the thread. This is just something you don't want to do. I could have used thread guards, but I decided to put things into the GTK idle loop, which a technique I have used in the past that works well.

As part of the testing I wanted to make sure that the iPad playback was still working properly, and it appears to be so far.

Gnome Mplayer playing music off an iPod

Any testing that could be done on the current SVN of gnome-mplayer would be appreciated.

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