Preliminary gnome-mplayer and wayland testing

On my Fedora 19 machine wayland is available and so I thought it would examine what might be needed to make gnome-mplayer run in this configuration. GTK 3 will support wayland, but what I am not finding is a way to embed mplayer into a GTK window. The current code uses the GTKSocket and passes the XID of that window to mplayer for embedding. I am also not completely sure that the GTKPlug/Socket API is going to work on Wayland. According to the GTK 3 manual I see this note

The GtkPlug and GtkSocket widgets are only available when GTK+ is compiled for the X11 platform and GDK_WINDOWING_X11 is defined. They can only be used on a GdkX11Display. To use GtkPlug and GtkSocket, you need to include the gtk/gtkx.h header.

So the current method of embedding mplayer may be a no go on Wayland/GTK3.

However, I believe I may have a workaround for all this. I think if we compile gnome-mplayer in GTK2 mode and then use XWayland everything should "just work". It is also possible there will be a way that XWayland is launched for applications that are linked to Xlibs or we may just need to but a wrapper script around gnome-mplayer to ensure it is launched properly even in GTK3 mode. Not the cleanest solution, but better than nothing. Once Fedora 20 is released and Wayland and XWayland are available I will do some more testing and see what needs to happen.

gnome-mplayer 1.0.7 released

Announcing the release of gnome-mplayer 1.0.7

Due to a change in the logging of the application gmtk 1.0.7 is *required* for gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer

Notable changes:

gnome-mplayer now has MPRIS2 support, so as support is added to the applications gnome-mplayer should be able to be controlled from several panel applications. I have requested this support from several applications but as of yet support has yet to appear.

Added Anamorphic 2.39:1 as a preset screen ratio

Prevent crash message on shutdown.

GTK compatible logging system

Fix problem when controlling the playback of audio only files

Rework playlist handling in gecko-mediaplayer so that website playlists are handled in a sane manner and caching is done correctly.

And the normal stuff:
Several bug fixes
Additional keyboard shortcuts and fixes


Files:

http://gmtk.googlecode.com/files/gmtk-1.0.7.tar.gz

http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/files/gnome-mplayer-1.0.7.tar.gz

http://gecko-mediaplayer.googlecode.com/files/gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.7.tar.gz

Enjoy!

Using a keyboard and mouse with the Kindle Fire

After installing CM9, with the 3.x kernel, on my Kindle Fire, I read about people connecting keyboards, mice and other USB devices to the Kindle Fire. In order to do this a USB cable referred to as a OTG cable is needed. I happened to order this one, but there were many options. After I got the cable, I plugged a USB 2.0 powered hub into the OTG cable which was then plugged into the Kindle Fire. A powered hub is essential as the Fire does not put out enough voltage to power most external devices. Also, on the Kindle Fire, you will want to install the applications "StickMount" and "File Expert" from the Google Play store.

Now for the big test. The first thing I did was plug in a USB mouse into the powered USB 2.0 hub.  Much to my surprise a mouse cursor appeared on the screen and I was able to move the mouse around and click a few things. I was wondering if the mouse cursor would appear as the Kindle Fire is a touch screen device. Both the touch screen and the mouse worked at the same time, so nothing was lost. So far so good. I then plugged in my USB keyboard and then I opened a browser window and was able to type in the url on the physical keyboard. So now things are looking pretty promising. The next step was to plug in a USB flash drive. Within a second StickMount popped up a prompt asking me to allow it SuperUser access and then informing me that the USB device had been mounted in /sdcard/usbStorage/sda1. I then used File Expert to navigate to that directory and view the files on the flash drive. Everything seemed to be there and I was able to open and interact with files just like files found on the Kindle internal storage. Perhaps with the right USB flash drive, very low power requirements, the USB hub would not be needed and then you would have a solution to the limited space on the Fire. One of my sticks, a 4GB one, almost worked, but the 32GB one definitely would not.

Now for the things that didn't work. I tried to plug in my 1TB External USB harddrive and while the OS knew something was there, I do not believe the file system drivers were present. I also did not have much luck with my USB Bluetooth adapter. Also while these devices where plugged in I could not charge the Kindle Fire, so I was limited on how long the device would run. This adapter from Amazon may allow you to work around that issue.

So all in all the Fire with the OTG cable, a powered USB 2.0 hub, a USB keyboard and mouse can actually function as a basic computer. Now I would not recommend this setup for full time usage, but if you want something for some basic work that requires a lot of typing on the cheap, this would be one option. I also see no reason why this setup would not work with other Android devices. So if you decide to try this, I would appreciate some feedback.

Upgrading the OS for Android 4.0.4 on the Kindle Fire

I have a Kindle Fire and it is a pretty nice piece of hardware. I use it for reading and watching videos while I travel weekly. But lately I saw that the new Android OS 4.1 (Jelly Bean) was available for it so I wanted to try it out. Needless to say it was an interesting experiment and I thought at one point that I had broken it forever. Luckily, I did not. In the end I decided to not use the Android 4.1, but to drop back to 4.0.4 because it was a little more polished and all my applications worked on it. After the upgrade the Kindle Fire feels like a new device. It responds better, does things I never expected it to do and still does all the great Kindle things I wanted it originally for.

Tools you Need:

On Windows use Kindle File Utility, I would recommend that you not run this in a VM and connect the Fire directly to a motherboard USB port. I had better luck running this tool on Windows .

Run the "install permanent root" part of the setup and that should install FireFireFire (bootloader) and TWRP (recovery tool)

On Linux use FireKit and run the install_fff_twrp_from_stock script as root (this is the actual method I used)

Once FireFireFire and TWRP are installed you now have complete control of what OS to put on the device.

So what I did next is to copy a ROM to a folder on the Kindle, doesn't matter where as TWRP will be able to navigate to it.

I got the Android 4.0.4 ROM (CM9 based) from here: http://rombot.droidhive.com/ROMs/otter/cm9/
I also got the Google apps from here: http://goo.im/gapps make sure to use the 20120429 version of them for CM9.

After the files are copied on to the Kindle, disconnection the Kindle and power it off.

Boot the Kindle (the logo should be blue now, from FireFireFire) and press the power button to boot it into "recovery" mode. This will start TWRP. First thing you should do is make a backup. This will take about 1GB of space on the Kindle so make sure you have room. After the backup is done, wipe the device including data, cache, dalvik (this will not wipe the SD card). After the wipe is done, install the ROM you just downloaded from the directory on the Kindle. Then install the gapps file you downloaded. I would recommend not flashing them at the same time, but to do one at a time.

After that you should be able to reboot your Kindle Fire and have a working Android 4.0.4 system after a few minutes of bootup.

You may also want to install the Amazon Market from here: https://www.amazon.com/app-email so that you can redownload and install the apps you have purchased before.

To enable USB storage access go to Settings -> (Device) Storage and in the top right click on the three dots and select USB Mass Storage


Desktop:

Apps:

Kindle for Android - Book reading
Next Issue - for reading my Entertainment Weekly subscription
MX Player - for playing videos, works great with subtitled .mkv files
Netflix and HBO Go work fine

Enjoy

mplayer-video-thumbnailer aka nailer update

I hadn't really noticed that my mplayer-video-thumbnailer had not been working properly in under Gnome3. Some thumbnails were getting updated and others were not. So I finally tracked down the problem and was able to solve it in about 20 mins. It turned out that nautilus had changed its configuration for thumbnails from a gconf entry to something similar to how Thunar does it.

So I made some changed and bumped the version

You can download it from here:

http://mplayer-video-thumbnailer.googlecode.com/files/nailer-0.4.6.tar.gz

MPRIS2 support in GNOME MPlayer

MPRIS2is becoming the standard way of controlling media players over DBUS. Since GNOME MPlayer already had much of this capability built in due to the usage of DBUS to communicate with gecko-mediaplayer I decided to add MPRIS support in to the upcoming 1.0.7 release of gnome-mplayer.

After a few days of work, much of the MPRIS specification has been implemented. Really not that hard except for having to figure out how to implement some of the more unusual types. The mpristester application was a huge help in debugging and ensuring that the implementation went correctly.

After initial support was working I began testing the code with a few of the gnome-shell extensions that use MPRIS to control several media players. I had to make a few modifications to them, mainly just adding "gnome-mplayer" to the list of supported players and after that they just started working.

So if you use one of these extensions, tell them to add support for gnome-mplayer to there application. And as always if they have issues, I should be able to fix the problems within a short period.

The code is in SVN now, and I recommend that you get gmtk and gnome-mplayer from SVN for the best support.

ANNOUNCE 1.0.6

Version 1.0.6 of gmtk, gnome-mplayer and gecko-mediaplayer has been released.

The following changes have been made over 1.0.5

gmtk

Setting PulseAudio as the default Audio Output is recommended for systems configured with PulseAudio as the default output device and volume is now tracked properly

Size allocation bugs are now fixed as well as media restarts when needed.

Added -zoom option to mplayer commandline when x11 is picked as the vo

Fixed compile issues due to missing libm

Fixed several pointer issues

gnome-mplayer

Removal of some older non-used code

Fixed some issues with some websites to solve gecko-mediaplayer issues

Enhance key handler to work with remapped keys

Add Preference to disable Nautilus plugin if desired, allows plugin package to be installed, but not enabled in nautilus. Solves some packaging issues

gecko-mediaplayer

Fix problem in style parser, which causes some sites not to work.

Remove some noise from the xsession-errors file

Removal of "--enable_new_libxul" configure command as it is now autodetected.


The files can be found here:

http://gmtk.googlecode.com/files/gmtk-1.0.6.tar.gz

http://gnome-mplayer.googlecode.com/files/gnome-mplayer-1.0.6.tar.gz

http://gecko-mediaplayer.googlecode.com/files/gecko-mediaplayer-1.0.6.tar.gz

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.