David Schleef’s theora optimisation for the dsp in the OMAP3 will really make open video a reality for the N900 and other OMAP3 devices like Palm Pre/Motorola Droid. Thank you David and Mozilla for the work.
At the end of last week, I put packages for flv and ffmpeg gstreamer plugins into maemo extras-devel for fremantle (the version of Maemo that ships in the N900). With those packages, the N900 can play flv files from youtube and elsewhere but there was no app making use of it except the built in media player which one would have to write a mafw plugin for the different sites. So on Sunday afternoon, after a good round of golf (albeit some really crappy short putts missed) I decided to try and write a youtube browser and player. After 20 minutes (and code to parse youtube stuff borrowed from Canola2), I had a start. It would get the top rated videos list from you tube and display them in a pannable area as a list of buttons. Tapping a button would play the clip with GStreamer’s playbin2.
Then I thought maybe the app could be more useful to others with a little work, I gave the app a name: zoutube. I gave the app a crappy icon (icon designers feel free to contribute a nicer icon) and added debian packaging stuff. I made the app show a list of YouTube’s categories as well as Recently Features, Most Viewed, Top Rated, Most Recent as the front screen before it showed the videos. The next features I plan are:
Please try it out, it is in extras-devel if you have it enabled, it will appear as zoutube in the App Manager on your N900 under Internet and Networking. Also feedback welcome and appreciated. Screenshots here (video not in player screenshot because screenshotting on N900 does not show accelerated video overlay):
Yesterday lunchtime I wrote a simple GStreamer app in python to run on the N900 with the video embedded in a widget inside the app. I committed it inside gst-python git inside the folder examples. It just does videotestsrc ! videoscale ! ximagesink. It could have been videotestsrc ! xvimagesink but I wanted to grab a screenshot.
Code (with comments): http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-python/tree/examples/maemogst.py
So last week, I started writing a maemo fremantle widget in a few spare pockets of time. One thing got me stuck. I could not get the thing to be transparent. I tried looking at other widgets’ code but just couldn’t figure it out. Finally at the Extending Hildon Desktop BoF yesterday at the Maemo Summit, I got my answer: set the colormap of the window to be 32bit rgba.
Here is the code needed in the __init__ in a python widget:
colormap = self.get_screen().get_rgba_colormap() self.set_colormap (colormap)
In the expose event handler, you have to clear with the cairo context (which I had figured out last week) with code like:
cr = self.window.cairo_create() cr.set_source_rgba (1.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0) cr.set_operator(cairo.OPERATOR_SOURCE) cr.paint()
My flickr fremantle tag photoset shows the progression and what runs now is:
There is still a little work to do, like respecting theme colours and more accurate positioning of hour etc before I create a package to push into extras.