Legacy AVI was fairly straightforward as we only need to do one seek to get the index. ODML AVI was somewhat messy because we had to perform multiple seeks as there can be multiple indexes spread across the file. As such, within the GStreamer framework, we have to handle the multiple seeks in the streaming thread rather than in the seek thread as we might prefer. This is because we cannot block the seek thread.

Check out the head commit of git master or the next release of GStreamer to try out this work. If you find bugs, file them on bugzilla as normal for GStreamer.

My brother got married.

FFmpeg finally has channel layout support for AAC and Vorbis. I’ve published my work-in-progress HE AAC v1 (Spectral Band Replication) code in FFmpeg’s Summer of Code repository (though it has nothing to do with Google SoC).

A collaboration focused on open source software between two universities in Umeå, Sweden and Vaasa, Finland called OpenKvarken held a seminar about VoIP and related technologies. I did two talks there titled: An Open Standard IPTV Implementation in MythTV and Improving FFmpeg for High Definition Video Conferencing.

The latter refers to ffmpeg-mt – multi-threaded decoding for macroblock-based codecs as developed by Alexander Strange. OpenKvarken should be funding the merge of this code into FFmpeg trunk.

I should be getting a new job with Collabora working to improve the quality of open source multimedia on the whole. It’s a very exciting venture for me and it may lead to more regular blog posts.

For what it’s worth, I would probably recommend that any every day desktop user use Mac OS X rather than Windows if you can’t stomach Linux and don’t have some tech savvy person to maintain a Linux machine for you. My parents have been using Linux for a couple of years and my Dad used to get my Mum to set the VCR. He doesn’t have a problem anymore though as I gifted him a DVR the other year and he’s quite happy using the EPG and hitting the record button to schedule a recording. Also, my Aunt and Uncle are using Linux. I’m infecting the world with more Linux users.

Anyway, the new machine and my experiences with it:

• Intel Core i7 920 (quad core 2.66GHz 8MB L3)
• 3x2GB Corsair DDR3 1333MHz CAS9 RAM
• Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard
• 2x1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 SATA hard drives
• LG DVD-RW
• Antec P183 case
• Corsair HX620W modular PSU
• Noctua NH-U12P SE1366 tower heatpipe CPU cooler

That’s all the new stuff and I’m using an NVIDIA GeForce 7800GT PCI-E graphics card I’ve had for a couple of years.

So, how did it fair in my OSes of choice? The main issue is the on-board NIC. These days, if you don’t have a network connection, your OS is not particularly useful. It’s so limiting to not be able to connect to any other machines outside the one you’re using.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s just a really awful choice of hardware on Gigabyte’s part for the EX58 series of boards, if the BIOS is doing something wrong, if it’s a bus issue, or if the drivers are just shoddy. For your information, the Gigabyte EX58 series of motherboards seem to use a Realtek RTL8111 with RTL8168 or RTL8169 that uses the PCI-E bus. All I know is that the on-board NIC does not work properly at all. In Windows, I had some difficulty installing the drivers and then, when installed, the interface would not recognise that I had connected a cat5 cable.

I didn’t want to use Windows anyway, I just wanted to see how well GTA IV performed on the Core i7. In Debian Lenny (Linux 2.6.26) and Ubuntu Jaunty (2.6.28), the on-board NIC sometimes appeared during installation and sometimes didn’t. When it had been detected and had the driver loaded, it didn’t seem to indulge any traffic.

Måns Rullgård, a prominent FFmpeg developer, has recently purchased a Core i7 machine too. He bought the Gigabyte EX58 Extreme and experienced the same issues. He gave up and used a spare PCI NIC he had. Thankfully I had an old 100Mbps 3com card lying around unused so I stuck that in and that seems to work.

With what else did I have problems? The usual Xorg ‘nv’ driver issues with my 7800GT. I look forward to that code being binned in all distributions. At least for my card it’s a piece of crap. It displays GDM mostly fine, with a few corrupt pixels, but then when arriving at the desktop, it is unusable. The cursor can be moved around, but clicking on things invokes no response. ctrl-alt-backspace doesn’t work (yes, I know about dontzap and it’s not that) nor switching to some other VT. It’s as good as hard locked, just with a cursor. Hopefully nouveau will be better.

You can see my previous post for my Hauppauge woes. Other than that, I think this machine runs very well. I have my 2x1TB drives set up with a mirrored boot partition (this doesn’t cause boot issues because the partitions can be read separately as if they had no mirror), a 6GB swap partition each (the kernel automagically stripes across the drives if you set them to have the same priority in fstab) and the rest is part of an LVM volume group.

Needless to say, it’s ridiculously fast and I shouldn’t need to upgrade for some years at least. Even one core of this Core i7 is multiple times faster than the Core Duo 1.83GHz I had been using. It’s immense.

I don’t think I managed to get the card working in Debian stable (lenny). However, the card was picked up and the two tuners were assigned devices when using Ubuntu Jaunty.

Unfortunately, it still didn’t pick up the IR device so the remote didn’t work. I spent quite some time trying to figure this out but eventually it was solved by simply compiling and installing new dvb modules from the v4l-dvb mercurial repository as there was some IR-related code missing from the dibcom 0700 source that is now present in the head of the mercurial repository.

I also added a file to block HAL from picking up on the IR device as this supposedly causes problems. I don’t know if it does, but I did it anyway. See here for information on the fdi file that blocks HAL.

Other than that, Ubuntu does a pretty good job of getting the LIRC settings right. The only thing that’s needed is a ~/.lircrc which I created from here.

And finally, to get the MythTV frontend to run without complaints (it has an aversion to pulseaudio at the moment) I had to disable pulseaudio completely.

If MythTV is too difficult to set up for you, I have also used me-tv and a fellow FFmpeg developer also works on a couple of programs with great potential called Showtime and Tvheadend. It functions in a similar way to MythTV in that you run Tvheadend as a DVR backend and then run Showtime as a graphical frontend for actually consuming the media. It does need some polish and some more features, but it’s sooooo easy to set up I will definitely be following it’s progress and maybe contributing to the code myself.

I have purchased one of the new slim Brenthaven cases designed specifically for the MacBook with their patented “CORE” technology that has protective corner pieces and side inserts. After paying £750 for this, I think a further £35 expenditure on such a carry case is a wise investment. Despite being slim, the case is quite weighty at about 0.725kg. This and the MacBook itself will take up the majority of mass I’m allowed for my hand luggage. Looking at the pictures of the case, it appears very well padded and a quick search around for notebook carry cases soon comes up with a recommendation for Brenthaven. If you’re lucky I’ll take some photos of it and do a bit of a product review when it arrives.

I’ve also had to look into travel adapters as us UK people all use 3-pin plugs while the rest of the world seems to use 2-pin in different forms. The European pins look rounded and the US ones are almost like two small knife blades with a ridge along the middle. I asked Nicole to see if she could find one for me and the ‘store’ she went into gave her strange looks when she mentioned a 3-pin to 2-pin US converter, almost as if they didn’t exist. Fun stuff. I’ve found a rather good looking and versatile adapter in Argos (good old Argos – Don’t shop for it, Argos it! ) that has surge protection and stuff. It’s not too expensive either at £10. A worthwhile investment I think as my family can use it too considering my parents go on a couple of holidays abroad a year.