Base-Art / Projects

Mirabeau on Maemo

Philippe Normand — 2010-02-11T15:20:39Z

At FOSDEM Frank and I showed the work we did on Mirabeau, a screencast was made few days before FOSDEM and we showed it but I wanted to add some comments and re-arrange some parts of it, so here it is now, re-arranged with PiTiVi :)

Please install a HTML5 compliant browser. Meanwhile you can download the video from http://base-art.net/static/mirabeau2.ogg

(Video here in ogg/theora/vorbis if your browser fails to play it).

This is still work in progress, we have some issues with Telepathy MUC Tubes, I promised Sjoerd from Telepathy fame to create some new bugs in bugzilla. Also the UI itself still needs work, especially the MediaRenderer UI. I will also at some point add a chatroom window.

Oh and we also won a N900 at the XMPP developer contest thanks to this application! Thanks a lot to the XSF and Nokia :)

Coherence team at GCDS

Philippe Normand — 2009-07-09T10:58:30Z

I gave a talk about Coherence and Telepathy at Gran Canaria Desktop Summit with Frank on tuesday. It went well, there were about 50 people. I think most of the people got the concept we tried to explain: UPnP devices and services are not bound to local network anymore, thanks to the combination of Coherence and XMPP through Telepathy. The slides should be online soon, will post an update to this post when I know the url ;)

Part of the Coherence gang including Benjamin, Frank and me is here at Las Palmas, feel free to grab us if you have any question. It was also nice to meet Karl Vollmer, the Ampache lead developer :)

So we are quite excited about Mirabeau, work on it will continue during the summer and a first release should happen in september. I'm writing a little howto explaining how to easily try the current (work-in-progress) version of Mirabeau, it will land in the wiki in the coming days ;)

update: Slides are there

Mirabeau: tubing UPnP over the intertubes

Philippe Normand — 2009-06-29T21:05:12Z

UPnP used to be bound to local network. We're working around this with Coherence and Telepathy tubes to bridge 2 (or more) coherence instances over Jabber chatrooms. So the 2 screenshots below are a glimpse of what we will show at GDCS on the 7th of July :)

On Frank's desktop in Germany, 2 UPnP MediaServers showing up in his LAN. One is local (my media) and the other one is mine, in Spain. If you click on the image you'll see that the device UUID contains the tube string and that the media link is my IP in Spain.

Here is my desktop, showing my local MediaServer and Frank's server:

This is a early-stage prototype, there are still things to improve and new features to implement, like sharing a folder directly from Empathy with a single contact of the roster. For playback we can't yet do NAT traversal, so the Coherence IP address and port are currently hardcoded. We will implement ICE support later on. More to say during the talk :)

Elisa and Telepathy: experimenting with Elisa users socialization

Philippe Normand — 2008-10-28T10:07:50Z

Last weekend I started playing with Telepathy and its tubes in Elisa. What I prototyped is two plugins:

a Telepathy plugin able to:
- join a Multi-User Chatroom (over local-xmpp or standard Jabber)
- share a set of DBus Tubes in that room
- connect to other Tubes shared in the room and do remote DBus calls
a Recommended plugin able to:
- get a list of media recommended by people from the chatroom
- recommend a media to all people of the chatroom

The work is reallly early stage and I had issues connecting to a Jabber MUC, I need to debug it and eventually report to the Telepathy hackers :) Anyway, here's a little demo video showing off 2 Elisa users sharing Youtube video links over the local network.

NB: Yes I know, Elisa on my MacMini is running slowww, on the eeepc it runs better ;)

Many other cool features can be implemented following those principles:

share media with your IM roster
chat
stream videos (?)
media playback notifications over IM
and many things I haven't yet thought about :)

Elisa weekly (not that weekly) news #6

Philippe Normand — 2008-02-21T11:57:33Z

Hey been a while since last shot of Elisa news... Be not disapointed, much is happening! Let's see...

The whole team is firing up to cook an Elisa release candidate for tomorrow and final release should happen end of next week. What's new? The plugin management framework entered test stage, the server is coming along nicely and the client library became more robust thanks to Guido's continuous efforts. Integration in Elisa UI has been started. Elisa will check every hour for updates from the server and manage its plugin upgrades automagically with minimum user interaction. Benjamin has been working on drag&drop support (which was added in Pigment by LoÃ¯c). So we can now easily add new media locations in Elisa by "putting" them in the Elisa window, sweet :) Same goes for plugins, if you download some Egg files providing Elisa plugins and drag them to the Elisa window, they will be installed too!

Benjamin also worked on a benchmarking process. First time Elisa is launched a Pigment benchmark is started to see how fast the user machine is, if it handles the various OpenGL things Pigment supports. This is useful to warn the user if Elisa won't be able to run smoothly on his machine.

Florian brought a shiny new Slideshow plugin to Elisa, code is much cleaner and bugless this time, which is good news. He also fixed a good bunch of bugs in the frontend code.

Alessandro worked on Codeina (or CodecBuddy, or whatever its name) support for Elisa. It means that if Elisa isn't able to play a file because a codec is missing then a little program fires up and handles additional codecs installation, mostly without user interaction. In the future versions of Elisa we'll have deeper integration with Codeina and the codec installation UI will be managed by Elisa itself. Now Alessandro is busy preparing his FOSDEM talk, I cross fingers for you dude :)

LoÃ¯c is also preparing his talk for FOSDEM. He has been working on an impressive little application to show Pigment bling and play with mapping matrices and a webcam. I shall tell no more, be at FOSDEM this weekend!

Guillaume has been thinking about Pigment 0.5 and more specifically the rewrite of our current Python animation framework in C. He's investigating on the current solutions available to compare them... See his work on the wiki.

Elisa weekly news #5

Philippe Normand — 2008-01-29T10:54:04Z

Welcome to this new edition of Elisa weekly news. I'm not very regular on the timetable, but yet haven't reached the 3-weeks limit! :)

So what happened since last week? First off we've got Huge feedback from the release, good press coverage so far, especially an article on ars technica. The website is having trouble to keep up with the hits, we'll soon move it to a new server. Enthousiasts (or desperate, it depends) users keep flowing on the IRC channel at any time, this is exciting! Many thanks to Saviq, dev, hugolp and some others who form the first non-core-elisa support team. Many things happen on IRC, someone is building an Elisa live CD, another one did a plugin to list MythTV recordings and watch live-TV from the Myth backend. It's really nice for us to see people having fun with Elisa like we do every day at work :)

On the development side, Benjamin and Florian are designing a new API to replace the current media_provider API and improve the MVC framework to go even further in the modularization process. This new move is inspired from the REST architecture of the Web, among other things. I'm working with Guido on the Plugin Repository framework, we've got a (console) client/server prototype so far, it's coming along nicely and will very soon be integrated in the Elisa UI. Alessandro is doing some GStreamer development, hunting some bugs either in gst-python or directly in the GStreamer plugins. In the end we are getting some nice improvements inside Elisa :) He will also move the Elisa media_scanner in a separate plugin, out of the core.

LoÃ¯c released Pigment 0.3.4 and Pigment-python 0.3.2 last week. He also added ARGB support to the Pigment OpenGL plugin, meaning that we are now able to make even more bling inside Elisa, like apply color masks to drawables. He also added some API to hide/show the Viewport. Next he'll work on freedesktop startup specification support and minimize/maximize the viewport in the tray bar, everything towards better Pigment integration in the desktop! Guillaume is hunting an annoying race condition inside X.org's XCB library which makes Pigment based applications crash on some distributions like Fedora8.

Reinteracting with Pigment

Philippe Normand — 2008-01-20T19:45:13Z

ReInteract is a nice tool, I thought it could be a good idea to make a Pigment extension for it.

Repgm allows the reinteract user to integrate a Pigment canvas inside Reinteract, as shown in the screenshot below:

I'd have a made a screencast but my laptop would have died trying to keep up :) It's quite easy to test tho:

download ReInteract
download Repgm, put the 2 files inside reinteract working copy
run reinteract uninstalled:
```
./bin/uninst.py
```
play with repgm :)

The repgmtools is only intended for test/demo purpose, one can directly play with repgm.canvas() which returns a ReCanvas instance. ReCanvas inherits from pgm.Canvas and the ReInteract CustomResult class so as to nicely integrate in the reinteract UI. Once that canvas is created, any Pigment operation is possible:

adding images, text, ...
animate things and so on
play media with GStreamer

So this makes a nice tool for the Pigment wanabee eager to interactively learn how to use Pigment in Python!

update: Fixed svn link

Elisa weekly news #4

Philippe Normand — 2008-01-18T14:35:46Z

Heh no news since 2007 fall, something went wrong! In fact it was due to holidays, work overload and some unintended days off I had to take. Anyway, sorry about that, let's move onto EWN #4!

So, since christmas the Elisa team achieved good work, polishing Elisa and Pigment for releases which happened on Jan, 15th. Elisa 0.3.3 "Mayfly" got released, Pigment 0.3.3 "Gryffindor" and Pigment-Python 0.3.1 "Slytherin" were released! As you can see LoÃ¯c splitted the Python bindings part out of Pigment core, both projects have now quite separate release cycles and it's a lot easier to manage that way, developers interested only on the C/GObject API can follow Pigment-core development and Python developers will be interested to follow both :)

I won't cover details about the releases here, people can read the release links above. However I'm strongly advising people to give Elisa a fresh run. The new UI really blows away the end-user experience, we already got tremendous feedback from enthousiast users and it looks like we're moving in the right direction, let's stay in the path now :)

So we are now preparing next release cycle, we already found some bugs in the 0.3.3 version, but no show-stopper yet. I'm preparing the Debian packages, unofficial ones are already updated for Gutsy on i386 architecture, we'll soon support more architectures (like amd64). Official Debian packages needs some refreshing too, uploads to debian experimental should happen soon, next week I hope; followed by a sync request for Ubuntu Hardy.

The Elisa team recently welcomed Guido, a new Python developer who will first work on the Elisa Plugins management system to allow users to easily download and manage plugins from Elisa UI and to allow Elisa developers to upload new Elisa plugins in the upcoming community-driven website. That's one of highest priority tasks for the next Elisa release cycle, users (and developers!) have been waiting for it, we now have human resources to accomplish it. I'll most likely help Guido on that big thing.

The windows versions of Pigment and Elisa were not released for this cycle, we had some issues and no time to fix them properly, sorry for being vague :)

On the Coherence side, Frank released 0.5.0 version, congratulations to him! He's planning to do a presentation of the project at next FOSDEM, be sure to be there, UPnP is getting more and more interest these days.

That's it for the 3-weeks-weekly news, next round next week with some progress reports and good news on the Elisa front!

Elisa weekly news #3

Philippe Normand — 2007-12-23T12:54:26Z

During this pre-holiday week the Elisa team has been busy working on the new user-interface...

Florian hunted a bunch of memory leaks in the MVC and Observer/Observable frameworks. He also found some inside Pigment. This will lead us to a lighter (memory wise) Elisa application. Christophe is hidden below his "monton" of rush-hours-pre-holiday work too, thanks to him and Florian the Elisa UI is really eye-candy-rocking!

I finally committed the long-awaited Youtube plugin, it works quite well, using the GData API I previously blogged about. I also did some random fixes in the new frontend. Alessandro has been busy getting the new frontend to work on the Samsung Q1 (which has a nice and large touchscreen), so he polished mouse support for a bunch of widgets.

Benjamin worked on playlist display support in the new UI. So you can access current playlist from the "Audio" menu. It's easy to enqueue songs as well. It's not the final integration, but it at least shows that we are aware of some basic features missing in Elisa and that we are doing something about it :)

LoÃ¯c worked on Python bindings for the matrix transformations he committed previous week. This allows us to do even more bling inside Elisa! Guillaume fixed some Pigment bugs and deadlocks like usual at lightning speed, especially an annoying one about Texts regeneration, thanks Pigment dudes!

Lionel played with Pigment matrix transformations to implement some "loading animations" for the new UI, so that during long tasks (like Flickr requests), the UI remains responsive and displays something nice while the user is waiting useful stuff to be displayed :) Lionel is also continuing to hunt bugs and other oddities of the frontend.

On the Coherence front, Frank did some Rhythmbox backend hacking and continued to help Morty on the Last.FM backend. I still hope I'll be able to test that before end of the year. :)

That's all for this week. Next week should be pretty calm, happy holidays, merry Elisa Christmas!

Elisa weekly news #2

Philippe Normand — 2007-12-13T22:31:37Z

Welcome to this second edition of the Elisa weekly news :) So what have the Elisa team been up to this week?

Florian and I continued on the new frontend. It is in better shape, more usable, a bit less buggy but still has some memory management issues. The vertical list view has been polished, navigation issues have been fixed. The grid view was also improved, the only part remaining is the zoomed selector support. Right it's not zoomed and we use a red image, which is not very bling friendly. I also started to integrate mini widgets in the top bar, basically they will be menu shortcuts to search for content, switch between view layouts, notifications and access to the player. Right now only the latter has been done. Once the bigger issues are solved for that new frontend, we'll make it the default one. The Poblenou frontend will be deprecated.

Benjamin brought back audio visualization support in Elisa, meaning that a nice animation is now displayed on the screen when the user plays audio-only content. He also refactored the menu activities management into a single (but easily extensible) XML based menu activity. It is now used by the Raval frontend we're working on, and it's working quite well.

Alessandro did some GStreamer related fixes inside Elisa, mainly on win32 platform. He also started to give us a hand on the new frontend, focusing mainly on mouse support for the widgets.

LoÃ¯c implemented an API in Pigment to expose texturing matrix operations, allowing various kinds of transformations in the drawables, like rotation, stretching, shrinking and much more. He finished win32 related polishing work too.

Guillaume hunted some more Pigment bugs, like support for loading images with size inferior to 1023 bytes, fd leaks and various other oddities found during the development of the new widgets.

Lionel continued to fill the Trac website with many new tickets, milestones and components to develop in the future. He didn't have much time to help us but he's a good beta-tester :) He also created a mailing list for developers interested on the SVN activity. Mailing lists for Pigment will also be created very soon.

Some news about Coherence, it's important to talk about it, Elisa uses it quite a bit for all the UPnP related features and Frank, the project maintainer, is always very keen and responsive on our questions and feedback. So Coherence recently got a Rhythmbox backend, meaning that Rhythmbox can now act as a UPnP Content-Directory client and serve the media collection over UPnP. However you might need quite recent of versions of Rhythmbox and Coherence to get it working. A Last.FM backend is on its way too, but not checked in yet. This is really good news, Coherence interacts with more and more applications and online services!