Fresh Totem Plugins

Sadly I can’t attend this years GUADEC as it overlaps with my examination session. Nevertheless I had some spare time to do some useful, i.e. GNOME related, stuff.

Totem Arte Plugin 3.0.0:

I released a major update of the Arte+7 streaming plugin. Version 3.0.0 was ported to Gtk+ 3.0, Libpeas and GSettings and can now be used with Totem 3.x. I rewrote the parsing and loading of the video feeds to improve the robustness and the quality of the list of available videos. You can get the source tarball from here.

Totem Rotation Plugin:

Some videos that are created with hand held cameras or mobile phones are oriented in strange ways. I developed a plugin for Totem to adjust the orientation. The new orientation is stored as a GIO file attribute and it is restored the next time you watch the video. This completely new plugin is part of Totem 3.1.4.

Totem Arte Plugin 0.9.1

The Totem Arte.tv plugin project is still alive. After Arte changed their video streaming platform we had to switch from WMV to RTMP streams. RTMP support is finally available in the latest (version 0.10.20) gstreamer-plugins-bad release. Nicolas Delvaux added many additional features like GNOME proxy support and asynchronous thumbnail downloading.

You can clone the repository or download the latest tarball. Debian and Ubuntu packages are available too.

Enjoy watching Arte!

I am attending GUADEC

See you all in The Hague!

Totem Arte Plugin Update

About a week ago Arte.tv changed their video service, which broke the Arte Totem plugin. Arte.tv no longer provides WMV streams, only a Flash player and the video feeds are crippled. Exciting improvements. *grr*

But we found a workaround to access the old WMV streaming server. We’re back in business! Just update to the plugin version 0.8.4, from source, from Nicolas’ ppa or from Debian.

I don’t know how long this streaming server will be running. In the long run we will probably need a RTMP gstreamer plugin to play the Flash video content in Totem. HTML5 to the rescue!

Totem Arte+7 Plugin

I’m proud to announce the first stable release of the Arte+7 Plugin for Totem. It allows you to watch the streams listed on plus7.arte.tv with Totem in a convenient way. Sadly, this service is only available for users from France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland.

Thanks to everyone who tested it, sent me feedback and patches. Notable changes since my last post:

• Preferences are hidden in the preference dialogue and stored in gconf
• Streams can be searched
• Stream thumbnail images are cached to improve the start-up time
• I18n support (Nicolas Delvaux)
• German and French localization (Nicolas Delvaux)

You can download the stable totem-plugin-arte-0.8.tar.gz or pull it from gitorious.org/totem-plugin-arte. Nicolas created an Ubuntu package in his PPA for those of you who are too lazy to compile it. It would be nice if someone from a country not supported by the Arte streaming service, could test the plugin too, to check if it behaves reasonable in such a situation.

Totem Arte+7 Plugin

During the Christmas holiday I wrote a Totem plugin to watch video streams from the Arte+7 website. Sadly this service is only available for IPs from Germany, France, Belgium and Switzerland. Guillaume Desmottes released a similar plugin for Moovida some days ago, which I was not aware of when I started my project. Arte is the only TV channel that I watch regularly. I like their documentaries, the European news flash and the music magazine ‘Tracks’ (available in German or French).

You can pull it from here: gitorious.org/totem-plugin-arte. It’s probably the first useful Totem plugin implemented in Vala. Your feedback is very welcome.

GSoC 09: final report

All main goals of my project are implemented and work. Libchamplain can now draw maps from OpenStreetMap XML data with customized drawing rules. Watch this short screencast to see that editing drawing rules actually works ;-).

Known Issues:

• There is one known minor bug. Libmemphis can render tiles at any size, but only 256×256 can be used in libchamplain, because switching between map sources with different tile size causes memory corruption. Bigger tiles could lead to better drawing performance.
• libmemphis is copied into the champlain source tree.
• Some renderer (libmemphis) features are missing (e.g. point of interest data).

The Future:

I have not planned to disappear after the GSoC. I want to make sure that my code can be merged. First, I will push libmemphis to a release, so it can be removed from the champlain tree. Second, I will add some of the missing libmemphis parser/renderer features.

Las Palmas in OpenStreetMap

I blogged about the big improvements of the OpenSreetMap data of Las Palmas during GCDS. I wanted to visualize the changes with OSMdiff, but it didn’t work. Today I stumbled upon this service to export changes of an OSM area.

The result is astonishing. Nearly all data was changed during this period and nearly all contributions were made by one user, balrog-kun, wow! Well, some contributors are missing, because the export does not consider POI data.

GSoC Week 7 – Screencast

Last week I implemented the network-map-data-source and I added caching of rendered tiles, which improves the zooming and browsing speed a lot.

As everyone is creating a screencast at the SoC midterm, I feel the need to do one too. (but not in a proprietary format!)

Footnote: The Open Street Map data of Las Palmas was very poor before the GCDS. Only some fragments of streets without names were available. And now, nearly the whole city is mapped. Awesome work!

Hello Planet GNOME!

I want to thank Vincent for adding my blog. For those who don’t know me: I live in Schaffhausen (Switzerland) and I study computer science at ETH Zürich. I’m currently working on my Google Summer Of Code project, where I add local map rendering support for Open Street Map data to libchamplain. The roadmap can be found here.

GSoC Week 6
Due to the GCDS, I was only able to implement the basic functionality of the network-map-data-source. My next task is to add caching of rendered tiles.

GCDS
I left Gran Canaria yesterday. It was a great conference. Again, thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring me. See you next year!