Zaheer Abbas Merali

So I bought a Spykee wifi robot on Friday. Alia and I finished building it on Sunday. I wrote some code to control it and stream it via flumotion over the weekend and during evenings this week. Tonight I added audio support, so I can now stream video from the robot’s webcam and audio from the robot’s mic. Also with flumotion remote commands, I can move it about. Next step is to write a gtk admin UI page.

Screenshot from totem of video only:

Code pushed to github url: http://github.com/zaheerm/zspykee/tree/master

Dave, saying I was at Istanbul for a Liverpool fan is more like saying I was at the 5th Guadec not the 1st Guadec for a Gnome hacker

So I spent some time on the weekend porting GStreamer to S60. Using Martin’s excellent instructions on how to build for S60 on Linux.

Symbian have thankfully ported some libraries (though with caveats) to S60 for ease of porting “OSS” code. In their “OpenC” sdk, they have glib (including gobject, gmodule, gthread etc.), libpthread, libc and a few others. This has of course made the port to S60 possible.

A few hurdles have been the lack of poll(), glib being old (2.10), having to include and to have some definitions for which there is no mention in the docs.

I have got libgstreamer and libgstbase compiled (though I have put them in same lib). I have compiled the core elements: fakesrc, fakesink, pushsrc, typefind, filesrc, filesink, fdsrc, fdsink, capsfilter, tee, queue, multiqueue but I currently have the error in linking that it cannot find the libgstreamer dso.

Once I get an app compiled that does fakesrc ! fakesink, I will start putting up a git branch of my stuff.

So the recording was successful. The snippet that my brother in-law wanted, I put up on youtube here. It is my 2 nephews’ birthday card being read out. Jameel is 4 today and Jaabir was 2 on Sunday.

So while watching 24 after dinner tonight, Alia received a text from her brother in-law reminding her to record channel Five from 6am until 9am tomorrow morning. So naturally, I set it to record on my Sky HD box. However the Sky HD box is being recalled as it is one of the Pace ones that has an unknown fault that is not related to safety. The engineer is due to replace it tomorrow morning. Oh yes, I have been credited 3 months of free HD subscription for the inconvenience. One of the inconveniences is that the only way to get the recordings off the box is via a DVD recorder/VHS recorder connected over Scart.

Anyways that is not relevant to this story. Five is a TV channel that is Free to Air both on DVB-T and DVB-S here in the UK.  So I thought I’d record it on my computer. The natural choice is Gnome DVB Daemon from Sebastian which is a fantastic product from the Gnome GSoC 2008 (my mentoring of this project was very little to do with its success, Sebastian was an excellent student). However my current installation of Gnome DVB Daemon is broken and I didn’t have much time tonight. I started writing a crude one-time use python app with twisted to start recording at 6am and stop at 9am. Then it dawned on me, Flumotion can do this without me writing a single line of code. So I created a simple flow, with a dvb-ts-producer and a disk-consumer. The disk-consumer can take an ics file, so I generated one in Evolution with 2 events: a test event at 23:19 for 5 minutes and the real thing.

Flow file is here:

<planet name=”flumotion-test”>

<atmosphere>
</atmosphere>

<flow name=”default”>
<component name=”producer-video”
type=”dvb-ts-producer”
label=”producer-video”
worker=”localhost”
project=”flumotion”
version=”0.5.2.1″>
<property name=”polarity”>horizontal</property>
<property name=”frontend”>0</property>
<property name=”dvb-type”>S</property>
<property name=”adapter”>0</property>
<property name=”code-rate-hp”>5/6</property>
<property name=”frequency”>10773250</property>
<property name=”symbol-rate”>22000</property>
<property name=”program-numbers”>6335</property>
<clock-master>false</clock-master>
</component>

<component name=”disk-ts”
type=”disk-consumer”
label=”disk-ts”
worker=”localhost”
project=”flumotion”
version=”0.5.2.1″>
<eater name=”default”>
<feed alias=”default”>producer-video:default</feed>
</eater>
<property name=”directory”>/tmp</property>
<property name=”rotate-type”>none</property>
<property name=”start-recording”>False</property>
<property name=”ical-schedule”>/home/zaheer/fivetv.ics</property>
<clock-master>false</clock-master>
<plugs>
</plugs>
</component>

</flow>

</planet>

This created a flow, Here is a UI of flumotion-admin:

Anyways, now it is time to sleep.

I have seen many articles talking about Barack Obama and his middle name Hussein. None of them point out how much he should be proud (and America also to have a presidential nomination candidate) to have been named after such a great personality from the human race, Husayn Ibn Ali.

Just a few quotes about his personality from some heroes of humankind in one way or another about Husayn Ibn Ali:

Mahatma Gandhi: “My faith is that the progress of Islam does not depend on the use of sword by its believers, but the result of the supreme sacrifice of Husayn (A.S.), the great saint. I learned from Husayn how to be wronged and be a winner.”

Charles Dickens: “If Husayn fought to quench his worldly desires, then I do not understand why his sisters, wives and children accompanied him. It stands to reason therefore that he sacrificed purely for Islam.”

Thomas Carlyle: ” The best lesson which we get from the tragedy of Karbala is that Husayn and his companions were the rigid believers of God. They illustrated that numerical superiority does not count when it comes to truth and falsehood. The victory of Husayn despite his minority marvels me!”

We have just completed 2 months of mourning where every year we commemorate the inhumane massacre at Karbala on Ashura day (Muharram 10 in the Islamic calendar) of Imam Husayn (A.S.), his companions and his family (including a young baby who was murdered with a 3 pronged arrow) and his companions and also the torture of the women and children left over who were taken as prisoners with clothes ripped off them and earrings torn off them and made to walk chained from Karbala in Iraq to Kufa in Iraq and then Damascus paraded all along the way as captives and then imprisoned in Damascus. It is a very emotional period for all Muslims as we see the family of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) being butchered and treated worse than animals so soon after the death of the Prophet by so called Muslims.

It brings some parallels with some current day Muslims who terrorise innocents such as in the inexcusable events of 9/11, and maybe it should help Senator Obama to be an even stronger candidate to be commander in chief of the USA by sharing a name with such a great man.

We at Flumotion stream a lot of TV and radio channels by acquiring them from DVB (either satellite or terrestrial) with the help of gstreamer and flumotion-dvb. I was browsing through some blogs today and found this completely hilarious entry (showing that KabelBW, supposedly a big ISP in Germany) capture their channels for streaming for their “IPTV Service” with the analog output from Dreambox set top boxes.

So thanks to Christian Schaller, who bought a DVB-C card and allowed me access to his laptop, I committed support for DVB-C in GStreamer and Totem. So now just ATSC to go.

Christian blogged about this earlier.

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.

Jono, the real significance of the number 5 is the number of European cups (recently renamed to UEFA Champions League) that Liverpool FC have won (the last in Istanbul, in 2005). Hence the 5 stars in the below picture:

Last night, of course the team did us proud and beat Inter Milan 2-0. Inter are top of the Italian League, 11 points ahead of 2nd place and haven’t lost a game in the Italian league all season. They also hadn’t until last night lost any game in any competition since September 2007. But they were dominated on the pitch from the first second of the match until the last second, and the score could easily have been 4-0 or 5-0.

I was at the mosque last night while the match was going on, the first home champions league game I hadn’t been to this season. So I had taped ITV1’s coverage using GStreamer and DVB.

Pipeline used:

gst-launch-0.10 dvb://ITV1\ London ! filesink location=liverpoolintermilan.ts