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:

• search
• show full description
• seek bar when playing
• download
• thumbnail of video

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):

Code (with comments): http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-python/tree/examples/maemogst.py

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.

Above (taken on Fri Oct 2 2009) was the last photo taken of me with the glasses I picked up and wore for the first time on my wedding day 6 years and 2 months ago. They have found their destiny to rest in peace just outside Barcelona in Spain. Yesterday I ordered a replacement pair.

The other project I have been working on is for a charity TV station who approached me to see if I knew of any open source playout server software. I didn’t but the playout server concept, we have in Flumotion as a playlist producer. So I ripped out the playlist producer code from Flumotion and made it render the graphics on screen and the sound through the soundcard. Of course this is not enough, the TV station want an overlayed logo. Initially I thought about using videomixer from GStreamer but on SD PAL, it is really CPU intensive. Then I thought, clutter would do this really easily. So I went on the clutter irc channel and asked for a simple example in pyclutter for playing a video with a custom gstreamer pipeline and overlaying an image on top. To my delight, someone wrote one on the spot and pastebin’d it for me. I integrated it all, tested it and kept Emanuele Bassi awake helping me by creating a jhbuild for clutter. Fedora 11 has only clutter 0.8.x which meant that it would not do the hardware colorspace conversion and also has an open bug with pyclutter segfaulting on “import clutter” on x86_64. I showed a proof of concept on a meeting on Friday evening and it worked nicely so Clutter/GStreamer/Gnonlin may well be powering a TV channel’s broadcast pretty soon. Thank you to the Clutter guys who helped me so much this week! The code for this project, I have pushed to github here: http://github.com/zaheerm/zplayout/tree/master. So the idea is that the output of the computer will be fed as SDI (either with an SDI output gfx card or through a DVI to SDI converter) and uplinked to the provider who would then put it in their hardware MPEG2 encoder and transport stream muxer and out onto the satellite itself. What the code now does, is watch a directory for playlist files which have entries saying something like file A is to be played at time x starting from y seconds into the file and for a duration of z seconds. The code then adds this into the GNonlin compositions and at the expected time it would start playing back. Clutter is doing the overlaying of the logo. In the future, playlist items would include live feeds from their studio through firewire or SDI input into the machine, live relay from DVB-S capturing a video feed and sending it out, and live titling, tickers etc. that could be done easily through Clutter I think. Pretty exciting stuff, I think. So thanks to the rest of the GStreamer and GNonlin guys for making this even possible, Flumotion for having a ready codebase to start from, the Clutter guys for having such an easy to code with platform for cool 2D stuff with video support and all their patient and great support for someone who has only listened to talks about Clutter at Guadec/GCDS and never got round to playing with it!

Video with Spykee moving controlled through navigation events coming from xvimagesink: http://zaheer.merali.org/spykee_gstreamer.ogv