Zaheer Abbas Merali

So, a recent feature I have added to flumotion-dvb is to be able to capture multiple channels from the same dvb adapter (as long as the channels are on the same multiplex). The screenshot shows both BBC1 and BBC2 being streamed from DVB-T in the UK. The flumotion flow config is on the right, totem and a gst-launch line playing the 2 streams at the top left and the flumotion admin UI on the middle left and pusleaudio volume control so i can choose which one I want to listen to at bottom left.

With the freeze of the GStreamer plugins modules coming tomorrow, I needed to test whether the bus messages for SI information was enough from mpegtsparse for any GStreamer app that wants to do DVB without resorting to non GStreamer based code.

So over the last 3 weeks on and off, I have been writing a DVB scanner that given initial tuning parameters (or if no data provided, by brute force) will go and find all channels on your antenna along with tuning parameters for each.

Yesterday, I got a GUI onto it with a player also. Screenshot:

It is written in python and I plan on making a Totem plugin that uses the code.

PS I do not watch Emmerdale, it just happened to be on when I took the screenshot!

Florian has some really funky photo viewing widget bling screencasted on his blog. It takes virtually no cpu on his machine which has an i915 and runs at about 50fps. Code seems to be here.

I would like to thank the people in Maemo who choose who gets on the N810 device program for choosing me and of course to Nokia to give out these discounts. This is the first one I applied for (did not apply for the 770 or the N800) and am looking forward to its release date. I do have the chinook sdk installed and running on my PC to play with in the meantime.

I would especially like to thank Quim whose birthday it is today. Happy birthday!

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.

I have justt released Istanbul 0.2.2 “Camp Nou, 21 Feb 2007″

This release is in memory of the win by the European Champions of 2005 (Liverpool FC) against the current European Champions (Barcelona) in the first leg of the last 16 of the Champions League at the Camp Nou in Barcelona. This release contains many major bugfixes and it is highly recommended to upgrade.

Features of this release

• Ability to select a window to record
• Ability to start a screencast from the command line

Support and Bugs

Istanbul uses Gnome bugzilla for bug reports and feature requests.

Developers

SVN is hosted on svn.gnome.org in module istanbul

Contributors to this release

• Zaheer Abbas Merali
• Frederic Peters
• Wouter Bolsterlee
• Marc-Andre Lureau

It seems Google has launched Code Search. It searches through source code even if it’s been packaged inside tarballs or is in svn or cvs. It even displays licence and programming language. I just did a search for “istximagesrc” which is used in Istanbul and got this. One word: awesome

Over the last week, I have been working on DVB support for GStreamer. Johannes had already made a good start with a port of 0.8 plugins that were in our sandbox. I cleaned it up a tad, fixed memory leaks etc. and also worked on a few changes and fixed a few bugs in the Fluendo transport stream demuxer (licensed under the MPL) to allow transport streams produced from DVB cards can be demuxed correctly. So the current status is that I have tested DVB with a DVB-T card in the office connected to an indoor aerial. I have also had it streaming with Flumotion into an Ogg stream (Theora video and Vorbis audio). You can follow the progress on bug #344987.

We have also been working hard on Flumotion and we had a release of Flumotion 0.2.2 yesterday (soon to hit Portage). Most of our work has however been on our 0.3.x code which has many feature improvements and architectural improvements. We are hoping to release an unstable version based on this very soon. I have already migrated our mosque streams to use this branch with no issues. On Fridays (and weekends), I have been working on a web admin UI for Flumotion. It uses Nevow which has an awesome feature that uses a persistent HTTP connection to allow the web server to send events to the browser without the browser needing to poll. I hear this kind of technique is known as Comet and is used in Google’s Chat feature inside GMail. Tomorrow I will blog with a screencast showing the web admin in action. For people eager to check it out, it is at https://core.fluendo.com/flumotion/trac/browser/flumotion/branches/webadmin-1.

Today I have released Istanbul 0.2.1 “Freedom to record speech”

This release is dedicated to the people (Christian, Jew, Muslim and other) who have died in the ongoing war in Lebanon and Israel. Everyone wants an immediate
halt to the fighting yet it is not happening, we can only plead by showing our distaste at this unnecessary bloodshed.

Features of this release:

• Re-factor of code to make it more modular and so easier to read and add new features.
• Live recording of audio synchronised in with the screencast video.
• Numerous bugfixes.

Contributors to this release:

• Zaheer Abbas Merali
• Remi Cardona
• John N. Laliberte
• Marc-Andre Lureu

You can download Istanbul 0.2.1 from http://zaheer.merali.org/istanbul-0.2.1.tar.bz2.

It records sound from your gconf set audio source, to change this use: gstreamer-properties or Desktop, Preferences, Multimedia Systems Selector.

Ebuilds will be in Portage shortly

I bought an Apple Macbook a couple of months ago and of course installed Gentoo on it. So almost everything works, including sleep, wireless, GL, Xv, audio output etc. Until today, I could not get the iSight working. Thanks to Ronald’s work on the driver, it now works great.

There was one thing I had to patch, the firmware extract tool. It was not navigating the usb buses properly. So I fixed it and I have put it online at http://dev.gentoo.org/~zaheerm/extract.c. This post just wouldn’t be the same without a cool screencast demo-ing the working iSight using Istanbul. So here is one: http://dev.gentoo.org/~zaheerm/screencasts/isight-screencast.ogg.

I will put an ebuild in my overlay for the driver and a cvs gstreamer v4l2 plugin (already in) so people can install it later.