Mirabeau: tubing UPnP over the intertubes
UPnP used to be bound to local network. We're working around this with Coherence and Telepathy tubes to bridge 2 (or more) coherence instances over Jabber chatrooms. So the 2 screenshots below are a glimpse of what we will show at GDCS on the 7th of July :)
On Frank's desktop in Germany, 2 UPnP MediaServers showing up in his LAN. One is local (my media) and the other one is mine, in Spain. If you click on the image you'll see that the device UUID contains the tube string and that the media link is my IP in Spain.
Here is my desktop, showing my local MediaServer and Frank's server:
This is a early-stage prototype, there are still things to improve and new features to implement, like sharing a folder directly from Empathy with a single contact of the roster. For playback we can't yet do NAT traversal, so the Coherence IP address and port are currently hardcoded. We will implement ICE support later on. More to say during the talk :)
526 hits / 7 comments
Mon Jun 29 23:05:12 2009 -- By: Philippe Normand
Python, sockets, GStreamer and the Garbage collector
Long time no blog, eh? Anyway I was today hooking up Telepathy Stream Tubes with GStreamer so that I could stream video over local-xmpp, go figure why... :)
Everything was fine:
on one side, offer a stream tube in a multi-user room and setup a pipeline like this one:
videotestsrc ! gdppay ! multifdsink
on client side, join the room and accept the tube, hooked into the following pipeline with a socket:
fdsrc ! gdpdepay ! xvimagesink
when server is notified of new client, add its socket fd in multifdsink and start playback
But it wasn't working, multifdsink was removing the fd by itself from the list and client wasn't receiving data. I spent some time this afternoon trying to figure out why and thought I might share the solution, if it can serve to anyone using multifdsink in Python. Because I wasn't keeping references of the client socket instances in my code, they were garbage-collected by Python, so the fd was becoming invalid, hence the rejection by multifdsink.
Keeping a list of the socket instances and cleaning it up when the sink emits the client-removed signal does the trick and I got my video streaming over local-xmpp working. Those Tubes are so much fun, thanks Collabora & Telepathy folks for this nice stuff!
108784 hits / 2 comments
Sat May 23 22:56:20 2009 -- By: Philippe Normand
Going to FOSDEM
I'll be at FOSDEM this year, arriving Friday afternoon and leaving a bit late on sunday night. Available to talk about free software and Elisa, over beers :)
1226 hits / 0 comments
Thu Feb 5 18:03:42 2009 -- By: Philippe Normand
Elisa and Telepathy: experimenting with Elisa users socialization
Last weekend I started playing with Telepathy and its tubes in Elisa. What I prototyped is two plugins:
- a Telepathy plugin able to:
- join a Multi-User Chatroom (over local-xmpp or standard Jabber)
- share a set of DBus Tubes in that room
- connect to other Tubes shared in the room and do remote DBus calls
- a Recommended plugin able to:
- get a list of media recommended by people from the chatroom
- recommend a media to all people of the chatroom
The work is reallly early stage and I had issues connecting to a Jabber MUC, I need to debug it and eventually report to the Telepathy hackers :) Anyway, here's a little demo video showing off 2 Elisa users sharing Youtube video links over the local network.
NB: Yes I know, Elisa on my MacMini is running slowww, on the eeepc it runs better ;)
Many other cool features can be implemented following those principles:
- share media with your IM roster
- chat
- stream videos (?)
- media playback notifications over IM
- and many things I haven't yet thought about :)
3982 hits / 2 comments
Tue Oct 28 11:07:50 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Coherence and Nautilus, UPnP a bit more on the desktop
Frank is at it again on his quest to make Coherence conquer the GNOME desktop. This time Nautilus is part of the game, allowing the user to easily share files over UPnP and easily select a MediaRenderer to play media files.
Checkout the video on his post, it is just awesome! Thanks Frank for all this work, hoping it will give ideas to others :)
2159 hits / 9 comments
Mon Oct 27 15:49:39 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Hiring at Flumotion
So Flumotion, sister company of Fluendo Embedded where I work, is looking for Python hackers. Thomas will be at EuroPython, so if you are interested in the available positions, be sure to get in touch with him!
Working at Fluendo is quite nice, conditions are great, people are nice and smart :) The office is growing quickly and Barcelona is at its awesomeness level!
So if you are familiar with Twisted, Python, GStreamer and dealing with high-traffic streaming (peaks at 6Gb/s these days), be sure to contact Thomas, don't be shy! If you are not familiar with these technologies but if you learn fast, contact Thomas anyway :)
2636 hits / 0 comments
Tue Jul 1 22:13:50 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
GUADEC
Anyone going to GUADEC-ES? I can't go to GUADEC this year for various reasons... Living in Spain, I'm wondering about GUADEC-ES ;) Might be worth the trip to Madrid, which I haven't visited yet. Maybe the occasion to do a little lightning talk about Elisa too.
update: holiday not granted by boss, I'm pissed. :(
2814 hits / 3 comments
Wed May 21 20:07:49 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Elisa on Windows and new resources for contributors
So our Windows developer strike force came up with a windows version of Elisa, Windows XP and Vista are supported. Check out the Elisa download page to find the alpha version of the installer. There are some issues, this is an alpha, you're warned :)
Alessandro and Olivier cooked 2 tutorials showing off how to develop new features for Elisa, by example. The API of the upcoming 0.5 branch of Elisa has also been published, it might evolve a bit but it's already a good starting point for motivated contributors out there :)
3208 hits / 0 comments
Fri May 9 17:36:22 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
On-going projects status report
Last time I blogged about Elisa was end of February in an ultimate attempt to keep up with the weekly news reporting idea. I miserably failed since then... Some people recently asked me some status on Elisa, so I'll do my best to deliver some periodic insider news of Elisa and the other projects I'm involved on ;)
March was the month of the Elisa organization changes, the bug tracker is slowly moving towards Launchpad, the code was moved to Bazaar branches (about 20 so far) and the code reviews process was officialized (mailing list and BundleBuggy). All these changes are meant to ease contributions to the project and increase its visibility in the FOSS world, we'll see how it goes :)
The team significantly grew up, we have 2 new developers working on the windows ports of both Pigment and Elisa, one QA manager working on improving the global quality assessment of the code we write and a new graphic designer, smashing his head on the UI ergonomy and look. This is quite amazing, at some point we needed a sheet of paper with names and assigned roles on the wall to keep up with new people arrivals!
So the whole team is mainly working on the upcoming 0.5 branch of Elisa, for which a first release is scheduled in june. Many architecture changes on the table, a revisited UI framework, some new plugins to drive more content to the end-user and the usual fixes. More details to come later about that.
Some news about Pigment, Loïc worked on the OpenGL|ES plugin and support for touchscreens. This opens up Pigment to a wide range of embedded platforms! The plan is to release a 0.4 version soon. Work is heading towards the Pigment 0.5 branch. Guillaume is continuing his efforts on the PAF animation framework, the API is coming along nicely, let's keep an eye on this promising project.
Last but not least both Pigment and Elisa will be presented at next GUADEC, be sure to attend!
2821 hits / 0 comments
Mon May 5 17:14:08 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand
Coherence strikes back
With a release per month, Coherence is evolving rapidly, the community is coming along, it's nice to see the IRC channel filling up with developers and users. Recently Frank added a backend for Tracker, it's a bit rough on the edges currently and publishes only the Music files over UPnP, but support for Videos and Pictures publishing will come soon! In the future, every media file you'll have on your desktop monitored by Tracker will be potentially available to the other devices of your living network via UPnP.
One nice use-case is to use Rhythmbox on one computer to play the media hosted on another desktop, transparently, with no headaches of setting up a network share. Work is currently being done towards a desktop applet called gcoherence meant to ease the configuration and setup of Coherence:
Another new feature of Coherence is a MediaServer backend for Ampache, a web-based audio jukebox system. I haven't tested that one yet, but Ampache looks like a nice toy to play with in the near future :)
Great stuff guys, keep up the good work :)
3175 hits / 6 comments
Sat May 3 17:15:38 2008 -- By: Philippe Normand