Zaheer Abbas Merali

Alia and I have just got back from watching a preview showing of probably the funniest movie we’ve watched this year: Death at a Funeral. Highly recommended.

So I started working on working with DVB and encrypted streams at the end of last week. I have a DVB-S card (Technotrend S-1500) , a valid satellite cable, a CI daughterboard and a CAM that when given a valid viewing card should be able to decode encrypted streams. I spent quite a while with Kaffeine trying to get it working after verifying it works in the Dreambox. Kaffeine kept reporting some error code -2 which when I looked up pointed to a read/write error with the CAM. So I tried the work Alessandro has done in the SoC project this summer, and it just magically worked. I was impressed in a major way. It also works seamlessly and so allowed me to get flumotion-dvb working with hardware CAMs very quickly. If you want to play around, you will need CVS head of gst-plugins-bad and trunk of flumotion-dvb (along with trunk of flumotion of course).

Obviously, I have only tested all this with DVB-S. If someone is willing to send me a DVB-T card with a CI interface such as a Technotrend T-1500 and a CAM that supports top up tv/Setanta in the UK, I will happily test this for them and write up how to watch or stream a DVB-T channel with flumotion (encoded in Ogg/Theora/Vorbis of course).

Update: Of course I would take a DVB-C card (and a CAM that supports virgin media uk) also and try and get Virgin to install a tv package here so I can get DVB-C working.

Like many, I made use of the extra hour last weekend to extend my night out on Saturday. Alia and I were invited to an Eid party organised by a friend at a restaurant in Covent Garden. Of course with 18 months spent living in the centre of Barcelona and 0 days living in central London, my knowledge of the small roads in London leaves a lot to be desired. I decided with modern technology, I needn’t look on the map before I left with how to get to the restaurant. Alia was invited to a bridal shower of a friend of hers and would be coming back later so I was alone on the way. I decided beforehand to install an e-book reader for my Nokia 770 and a public domain book to keep myself entertained on the journey. Knowing central London and the parking situation especially on a Saturday night, I decided to take the tube into London (it helped knowing that on the way back I would have a lift). The tube was pleasant enough, I got to my local tube station and didn’t have to wait long for a train. In the train, there were a lot of weirdly dressed people. I realised later that the Saturday night just gone was the Haloween party night. Undeterred, I took out my Nokia 770 and started reading the book I had downloaded. I then realised first-hand what Josep meant when he told me about how great an experience it is reading e-books on the Nokia tablets. When I got to Covent Garden, I took out my Nokia N95 and went straight to the Maps application. I searched for the road that the restaurant was on and told it to plan a route there. The GPS lock was quick due to the use of A-GPS to get a quick fix. I followed the route with the application tracking me and reached the restaurant within 2-3 minutes. The last year way of doing this would have been to ask random people in the area if they knew where the road was and how to get there. With about 5 or 6 people asked on the route all giving me slightly different directions, I would have got there.

Since I got my Nokia 770 a few weeks ago, my main uses have been:

1. casual browsing and jabber IM
2. responding to Nagios alarms using the Terminal and openssh, wherever I am
3. testing the mosque’s audio streams using the Internet Radio application

The 1st and 2nd uses would be made much more efficient and less frustrating with a built-in keyboard. Also the GPS would be much better with a high-res screen like on the Nokia tablets than on the N95.

Thank you Bastien for the This is Anfield audio cd. I received it in the post this morning.

Update: I forgot to thank Iain for gifting it to Bastien in the first place!

I have booked my flights to London, August 31st is when I fly. Many have asked what I will be doing in London as work, so I am pleased to say that I will continue to work on Flumotion and GStreamer from London. There were other good possibilities but this was what I felt as best for me.

Alessandro Decina, my summer of code student, continues to do great work with DVB and transport stream work in GStreamer. I am really happy with what he has done and the community (not just the Freevo project where his project is registered) will benefit greatly from his work. His work has already allowed me to use GStreamer to stream a decrypted transport stream from an encrypted tv channel coming into my Dreambox 7025. Of course it still requires my viewing card from my satellite subscription for it to be able to decode.

Today is Alia’s and my 4th wedding anniversary. I have taken the day off work and will hopefully go out later tonight for a nice dinner.

The FSF are streaming the GPLv3 release event in Ogg theora with Flumotion. Currently it is using 90Mbit of bandwidth!

Pigment is relicencing from GPL to LGPL. In other news soon it will be fully working on Mac OS X also.

Alia and I plan to leave Barcelona and go back to London, after a whirlwind 18 month adventure, at the end of August/first week of September. No logistic planning for the move back has yet been done, but we will no doubt get on that soon enough. It has been hard to make this decision and Barcelona and Fluendo will always be considered a home for us. I have made no plans yet for what I will be doing in London when we move back but nothing has been ruled out yet.

The people of Barcelona and especially workmates at Fluendo will always be remembered for their genuine warmth towards us. In other news, we plan to be at Lugradio Live next weekend and Guadec where I should be giving a talk on: “GStreamer: more than just playback”.

Maintaining typo just became too time consuming and painful so I have moved back to Wordpress thanks to the migration scripts from Stuart Johnston. Some changes were needed and my tags and comments have not migrated but will look at them later. In the meantime I am back in blogland!

A cousin of mine merged the graffiti photos from here and made a panoramic image shown below: