Zaheer Abbas Merali

Thank you, Stefan for pointing me to Marc-Andre’s blog. The screencast is awesome, but it could do with actually having the sound from say gstreamer-properties and rhythmbox so you could hear the volume difference when he moves the sliders, so sound will be in my next release of Istanbul. The screencast also pointed out a bug in istanbul, it’s using 2 audio sinks while recording? I have no idea where but I await Marc-Andre’s bug report on Gnome Bugzilla under product Istanbul.

Istanbul is now in Gentoo, and I believe Debian/Ubuntu packages for 0.2.0 are coming soon. Hopefully someone will step up from the fedora, opensuse, mandriva, opensolaris and other communites to provide packages.

Update: I have been informed that Mandriva has 0.2.0 in cooker.

I have received lots of comments on my previous blog entry on the istanbul 0.2.0 release saying things such as:

• “giving one’s political opinion when it’s published world wide (Planet GNOME) is not a good idea”
• You know, not everyone has the same opinions as you do, so I’d appreciate it if you didn’t pollute Planet GNOME with your biased political crap
• Istanbul is great but please leave away your propaganda from Planet Gnome
• Regardless of my feelings on the issue, it was rather sneaky to put that line in a release announcement.

To all those people and others who share these views, this is what I have to say:

This is a weblog, mine in fact. We work on free software because it is our freedom to do so. Should I not be free to write my opinions on my own blog? Should Michael Meeks not be free to write about things in the bible on his blog?

Come on guys (and girls), get real. I did not even say anything in the slightest controversial. I did not condone any suicide bombings, in fact I stated that I felt for the Lebanese and Palestinans who have been bombed by planes. Do these people deserve to be bombed? If I had a blog on 12th September 2001 and I had said that I had felt sorry for the people of New York and Washington DC, should I get these kinds of comments saying to keep my opinions to myself?

So now, please feel free to give suggestions on what you want in Istanbul and I will listen to them. But I will now ignore comments that tell me to shut up. Yes, I promised that Istanbul will be in portage very soon. It is coming!

So today I released Istanbul 0.2.0, the best release of Istanbul ever. Thank you all for the help and encouragement. I feel for all my brothers in Lebanon and Palestine for the oppressive treatment given by Israel. It is totally uncalled for and hope the international community condemn Israel’s actions.

Istanbul is available for download at http://zaheer.merali.org/istanbul-0.2.0.tar.bz2 . A Gentoo ebuild will be in Portage very soon. I recorded a cool screencast annotated by gromit showing how to use Istanbul, it is available for download at: http://dev.gentoo.org/~zaheerm/screencasts/istanbul-screencasting-itself-annotated.ogg.
Plans for the next release include adding sound recording and integrating post-production edit functionality with PiTiVi.

Release notes for Istanbul 0.2.0 “Zinedine Zidane”

This release is a tribute to one of the best players of the last 10 years. He nearly moved to Liverpool at one point, and would have been made welcome by most fans. He also seems to have the media all with him, as evidenced after Italy won the world cup. There has been more coverage of Zidane than of Italy’s win.

Features of this release

• Completely revamped UI, no more preferences dialog.
• Use gconf to store settings.
• Ability to select an area of the screeen and only record it.
• Support for recording OpenGL using applications.

Support and Bugs

Istanbul uses Gnome bugzilla for bug reports and feature requests.

Developers

CVS is hosted on cvs.gnome.org.

Contributors to this Release

• Zaheer Abbas Merali
• Christian Rose
• Luca Bruno
• Kiddo (sorry I don’t know your real name)

With the 0.10 release of GStreamer out today, I have since Friday put GStreamer 0.9.7 ( aka 0.10 rc1 ) in Portage. Currently there are no apps
that take advantage of GStreamer 0.10 in portage. I am in the midst
of fixing some existing ebuilds in portage to only use 0.8 versions of
gstreamer and gst-plugins. This version of GStreamer is masked in
package.mask. Here are the important details:

Major changes affecting Gentoo:

• Gconf libraries are now in separate ebuild media-plugins/gst-plugins-gconf. This will please KDE users of GStreamer no-end!
• The need to gst-register in ebuilds after installing a plugin or after removing a plugin is gone! GStreamer 0.10 takes care of keeping its internal registry in sync automatically.
• Quite a lot of plugins are not yet ported, most notably the dvd plugins
• Much more stable in multi-threaded scenarios

Eclasses:

• gst-plugins10 - common gstreamer functions for ebuilds
• gst-plugins-base - externally dep’ed packages in -base should inherit
  this eclass
• gst-plugins-good - externally dep’ed packages in -good should inherit
  this eclass
• gst-plugins-ugly - externally dep’ed packages in -ugly should inherit
  this eclass

Ebuilds:

• media-libs/gstreamer - GStreamer core
• media-libs/gst-plugins-base - Libraries found in -base, as well as
  plugins in -base that dont dep on external packages
• media-libs/gst-plugins-good - Plugins in -good that dont dep on
  external packages
• media-libs/gst-plugins-ugly - Plugins in -ugly that dont dep on
  external packages
• dev-python/gst-python - Python bindings (gst-python)




• media-plugins/gst-plugins-ffmpeg - gst-ffmpeg
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-alsa
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-gnomevfs
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-libvisual
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-ogg
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-pango
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-theora
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-v4l
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-vorbis
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-xvideo
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-oss
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-esd
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-flac
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-gconf
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-jpeg
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-dv
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-libpng
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-raw1394
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-shout2
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-speex
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-a52dec
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-amrnb (* not done yet)
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-lame
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-mad
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-mpeg2dec
• media-plugins/gst-plugins-sidplay