Base-Art - Elisahttps://base-art.net/2008-10-28T11:11:04+01:00Elisa and Telepathy: experimenting with Elisa users socialization2008-10-28T11:07:50+01:002008-10-28T11:11:04+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2008-10-28:/Articles/105/<p>Last weekend I started playing with <a class="reference external" href="http://telepathy.freedesktop.org">Telepathy</a> and its tubes in
<a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a>. What I prototyped is two plugins:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>a Telepathy plugin able to:<ul>
<li>join a Multi-User Chatroom (over local-xmpp or standard Jabber)</li>
<li>share a set of DBus Tubes in that room</li>
<li>connect to other Tubes shared in the room and …</li></ul></li></ul><p>Last weekend I started playing with <a class="reference external" href="http://telepathy.freedesktop.org">Telepathy</a> and its tubes in
<a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a>. What I prototyped is two plugins:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>a Telepathy plugin able to:<ul>
<li>join a Multi-User Chatroom (over local-xmpp or standard Jabber)</li>
<li>share a set of DBus Tubes in that room</li>
<li>connect to other Tubes shared in the room and do remote DBus calls</li>
</ul>
</li>
<li>a Recommended plugin able to:<ul>
<li>get a list of media recommended by people from the chatroom</li>
<li>recommend a media to all people of the chatroom</li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The work is reallly early stage and I had issues connecting to a Jabber <span class="caps">MUC</span>, 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.</p>
<p><span class="caps">NB</span>: Yes I know, Elisa on my MacMini is running slowww, on the eeepc it runs better ;)</p>
<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/lCIkO6DUXfM&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/lCIkO6DUXfM&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="425" height="344"></embed></object><p>Many other cool features can be implemented following those principles:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>share media with your <span class="caps">IM</span> roster</li>
<li>chat</li>
<li>stream videos (?)</li>
<li>media playback notifications over <span class="caps">IM</span></li>
<li>and many things I haven’t yet thought about :)</li>
</ul>
Elisa weekly (not that weekly) news #62008-02-21T12:57:33+01:002008-02-21T12:58:20+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2008-02-21:/Articles/96/<p>Hey been a while since last shot of Elisa news… Be not
disapointed, much is happening! Let’s see…</p>
<p>The whole team is firing up to cook an Elisa release candidate
for tomorrow and final release should happen end of next
week. What’s new? The plugin management framework entered …</p><p>Hey been a while since last shot of Elisa news… Be not
disapointed, much is happening! Let’s see…</p>
<p>The whole team is firing up to cook an Elisa release candidate
for tomorrow and final release should happen end of next
week. What’s new? The plugin management framework entered test
stage, the server is coming along nicely and the client library
became more robust thanks to Guido’s continuous
efforts. Integration in Elisa <span class="caps">UI</span> has been started. Elisa will
check every hour for updates from the server and manage its
plugin upgrades automagically with minimum user
interaction. Benjamin has been working on drag&drop
support (which was added in Pigment by Loïc). So we can now
easily add new media locations in Elisa by “putting” them in the
Elisa window, sweet :) Same goes for plugins, if you download
some Egg files providing Elisa plugins and drag them to the Elisa
window, they will be installed too!</p>
<p>Benjamin also worked on a benchmarking process. First time Elisa
is launched a Pigment benchmark is started to see how fast the
user machine is, if it handles the various OpenGL things Pigment
supports. This is useful to warn the user if Elisa won’t be able
to run smoothly on his machine.</p>
<p>Florian brought a shiny new Slideshow plugin to Elisa, code is
much cleaner and bugless this time, which is good news. He also fixed
a good bunch of bugs in the frontend code.</p>
<p>Alessandro worked on <a class="reference external" href="http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Multimedia/Codeina">Codeina</a> (or CodecBuddy, or whatever its
name) support for Elisa. It means that if Elisa isn’t able to
play a file because a codec is missing then a little program
fires up and handles additional codecs installation, mostly
without user interaction. In the future versions of Elisa we’ll
have deeper integration with Codeina and the codec installation
<span class="caps">UI</span> will be managed by Elisa itself. Now Alessandro is busy
preparing his <span class="caps">FOSDEM</span> talk, I cross fingers for you dude :)</p>
<p>Loïc is also preparing his talk for <span class="caps">FOSDEM</span>. He has been working
on an impressive little application to show Pigment bling and
play with mapping matrices and a webcam. I shall tell no more,
be at <span class="caps">FOSDEM</span> this weekend!</p>
<p>Guillaume has been thinking about Pigment 0.5 and more
specifically the rewrite of our current Python animation
framework in C. He’s investigating on the current solutions
available to compare them… See his work on the <a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/wiki/ExistingTimingFrameworks">wiki</a>.</p>
Elisa weekly news #52008-01-29T11:54:04+01:002008-01-29T11:54:28+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2008-01-29:/Articles/93/<p>Welcome to this new edition of <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> weekly news. I’m not very
regular on the timetable, but yet haven’t reached the 3-weeks
limit! :)</p>
<p>So what happened since last week? First off we’ve got Huge
feedback from the release, good press coverage so far, especially
an article on …</p><p>Welcome to this new edition of <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> weekly news. I’m not very
regular on the timetable, but yet haven’t reached the 3-weeks
limit! :)</p>
<p>So what happened since last week? First off we’ve got Huge
feedback from the release, good press coverage so far, especially
an article on <a class="reference external" href="http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/01/22/elisa-0-3-3-turns-linux-into-a-movie-theater">ars technica</a>. The <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">website</a> is having trouble to
keep up with the hits, we’ll soon move it to a new
server. Enthousiasts (or desperate, it depends) users keep
flowing on the <span class="caps">IRC</span> channel at any time, this is exciting! Many
thanks to Saviq, dev, hugolp and some others who form the first
non-core-elisa support team. Many things happen on <span class="caps">IRC</span>, someone
is building an Elisa live <span class="caps">CD</span>, another one did a plugin to list
MythTV recordings and watch live-<span class="caps">TV</span> from the Myth backend. It’s
really nice for us to see people having fun with Elisa like we do
every day at work :)</p>
<p>On the development side, Benjamin and Florian are designing a new
<span class="caps">API</span> to replace the current media_provider <span class="caps">API</span> and improve the <span class="caps">MVC</span>
framework to go even further in the modularization process. This
new move is inspired from the <span class="caps">REST</span> architecture of the Web, among
other things. I’m working with Guido on the Plugin Repository
framework, we’ve got a (console) client/server prototype so far,
it’s coming along nicely and will very soon be integrated in the
Elisa <span class="caps">UI</span>. Alessandro is doing some GStreamer development, hunting
some bugs either in gst-python or directly in the GStreamer
plugins. In the end we are getting some nice improvements inside
Elisa :) He will also move the Elisa media_scanner in a separate
plugin, out of the core.</p>
<p>Loïc released Pigment 0.3.4 and Pigment-python 0.3.2 last
week. He also added <span class="caps">ARGB</span> support to the Pigment OpenGL plugin,
meaning that we are now able to make even more bling inside
Elisa, like apply color masks to drawables. He also added some
<span class="caps">API</span> to hide/show the Viewport. Next he’ll work on freedesktop
startup specification support and minimize/maximize the viewport
in the tray bar, everything towards better Pigment integration in
the desktop! Guillaume is hunting an annoying race condition
inside X.org’s <span class="caps">XCB</span> library which makes Pigment based applications
crash on some distributions like Fedora8.</p>
Reinteracting with Pigment2008-01-20T20:45:13+01:002008-01-21T10:17:58+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2008-01-20:/Articles/92/<p><a class="reference external" href="http://reinteract.org">ReInteract</a> is a nice tool, I thought it could be a good idea to
make a <a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac">Pigment</a> extension for it.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://svn.pythonfr.org/public/pythonfr/pigment/">Repgm</a> allows the reinteract user to integrate a Pigment canvas
inside Reinteract, as shown in the screenshot below:</p>
<img alt="" src="http://base-art.net/static/repgm.png" />
<p>I’d have a made a screencast but my laptop would have …</p><p><a class="reference external" href="http://reinteract.org">ReInteract</a> is a nice tool, I thought it could be a good idea to
make a <a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac">Pigment</a> extension for it.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://svn.pythonfr.org/public/pythonfr/pigment/">Repgm</a> allows the reinteract user to integrate a Pigment canvas
inside Reinteract, as shown in the screenshot below:</p>
<img alt="" src="http://base-art.net/static/repgm.png" />
<p>I’d have a made a screencast but my laptop would have died trying
to keep up :) It’s quite easy to test tho:</p>
<ul>
<li><p class="first">download <a class="reference external" href="http://reinteract.org">ReInteract</a></p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">download <a class="reference external" href="http://svn.pythonfr.org/public/pythonfr/pigment/">Repgm</a>, put the 2 files inside reinteract working copy</p>
</li>
<li><p class="first">run reinteract uninstalled:</p>
<pre class="literal-block">
./bin/uninst.py
</pre>
</li>
<li><p class="first">play with repgm :)</p>
</li>
</ul>
<p>The repgmtools is only intended for test/demo purpose, one can
directly play with repgm.canvas() which returns a ReCanvas
instance. ReCanvas inherits from pgm.Canvas and the ReInteract
CustomResult class so as to nicely integrate in the reinteract
<span class="caps">UI</span>. Once that canvas is created, any <a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac">Pigment</a> operation is possible:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>adding images, text, …</li>
<li>animate things and so on</li>
<li>play media with <a class="reference external" href="http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org">GStreamer</a></li>
</ul>
<p>So this makes a nice tool for the Pigment wanabee eager to
interactively learn how to use Pigment in Python!</p>
<p><strong>update</strong>: Fixed svn link</p>
Elisa weekly news #42008-01-18T15:35:46+01:002008-01-18T15:36:14+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2008-01-18:/Articles/91/<p>Heh no news since 2007 fall, something went wrong! In fact it was
due to holidays, work overload and some unintended days off I had
to take. Anyway, sorry about that, let’s move onto <span class="caps">EWN</span> #4!</p>
<p>So, since christmas the Elisa team achieved good work,
polishing Elisa and Pigment …</p><p>Heh no news since 2007 fall, something went wrong! In fact it was
due to holidays, work overload and some unintended days off I had
to take. Anyway, sorry about that, let’s move onto <span class="caps">EWN</span> #4!</p>
<p>So, since christmas the Elisa team achieved good work,
polishing Elisa and Pigment for releases which happened on Jan,
15th. <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com/2008/01/16/elisa-033-available-to-the-masses/">Elisa 0.3.3</a> “Mayfly” got released, <a class="reference external" href="http://lists.fluendo.com/pipermail/pigment/2008-January/000001.html">Pigment 0.3.3</a>
“Gryffindor” and <a class="reference external" href="http://lists.fluendo.com/pipermail/pigment/2008-January/000002.html">Pigment-Python 0.3.1</a> “Slytherin” were
released! As you can see Loïc splitted the Python bindings part
out of Pigment core, both projects have now quite separate
release cycles and it’s a lot easier to manage that way,
developers interested only on the C/GObject <span class="caps">API</span> can follow
Pigment-core development and Python developers will be interested
to follow both :)</p>
<p>I won’t cover details about the releases here, people can read
the release links above. However I’m strongly advising people to
give Elisa a fresh run. The new <span class="caps">UI</span> really blows away the end-user
experience, we already got tremendous feedback from enthousiast
users and it looks like we’re moving in the right direction,
let’s stay in the path now :)</p>
<p>So we are now preparing next release cycle, we already found some
bugs in the 0.3.3 version, but no show-stopper yet. I’m preparing
the Debian packages, <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com/packages">unofficial ones</a> are already updated for
Gutsy on i386 architecture, we’ll soon support more
architectures (like amd64). Official Debian packages needs some
refreshing too, uploads to debian experimental should happen
soon, next week I hope; followed by a sync request for Ubuntu Hardy.</p>
<p>The Elisa team recently welcomed Guido, a new Python developer who
will first work on the Elisa Plugins management system to allow
users to easily download and manage plugins from Elisa <span class="caps">UI</span> and to
allow Elisa developers to upload new Elisa plugins in the
upcoming community-driven website. That’s one of highest priority
tasks for the next Elisa release cycle, users (and developers!)
have been waiting for it, we now have human resources to
accomplish it. I’ll most likely help Guido on that big thing.</p>
<p>The windows versions of Pigment and Elisa were not released for this
cycle, we had some issues and no time to fix them properly, sorry for
being vague :)</p>
<p>On the <a class="reference external" href="https://coherence.beebits.net/">Coherence</a> side, Frank released 0.5.0 version,
congratulations to him! He’s planning to do a presentation of the
project at next <a class="reference external" href="http://fosdem.org/2008/"><span class="caps">FOSDEM</span></a>, be sure to be there, UPnP is getting
more and more interest these days.</p>
<p>That’s it for the 3-weeks-weekly news, next round next week with
some progress reports and good news on the Elisa front!</p>
Elisa weekly news #32007-12-23T13:54:26+01:002007-12-23T13:56:43+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2007-12-23:/Articles/90/<p>During this pre-holiday week the <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> team has been busy working on
the new user-interface…</p>
<p>Florian hunted a bunch of memory leaks in the <span class="caps">MVC</span> and
Observer/Observable frameworks. He also found some inside
Pigment. This will lead us to a lighter (memory wise) Elisa
application. Christophe is hidden below …</p><p>During this pre-holiday week the <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> team has been busy working on
the new user-interface…</p>
<p>Florian hunted a bunch of memory leaks in the <span class="caps">MVC</span> and
Observer/Observable frameworks. He also found some inside
Pigment. This will lead us to a lighter (memory wise) Elisa
application. Christophe is hidden below his “monton” of
rush-hours-pre-holiday work too, thanks to him and Florian the Elisa
<span class="caps">UI</span> is really eye-candy-rocking!</p>
<p>I finally committed the long-awaited Youtube plugin, it works quite
well, using the <a class="reference external" href="http://base-art.net/Articles/87/">GData <span class="caps">API</span> I previously blogged about</a>. I also did
some random fixes in the new frontend. Alessandro has been busy
getting the new frontend to work on the Samsung Q1 (which has a nice
and large touchscreen), so he polished mouse support for a bunch of widgets.</p>
<p>Benjamin worked on playlist display support in the new <span class="caps">UI</span>. So you can
access current playlist from the “Audio” menu. It’s easy to enqueue
songs as well. It’s not the final integration, but it at least shows
that we are aware of some basic features missing in Elisa and that we
are doing something about it :)</p>
<p>Loïc worked on Python bindings for the matrix transformations he
committed previous week. This allows us to do even more bling inside
Elisa! Guillaume fixed some Pigment bugs and deadlocks like usual at
lightning speed, especially an annoying one about Texts regeneration,
thanks Pigment dudes!</p>
<p>Lionel played with Pigment matrix transformations to implement some
“loading animations” for the new <span class="caps">UI</span>, so that during long tasks (like
Flickr requests), the <span class="caps">UI</span> remains responsive and displays something
nice while the user is waiting useful stuff to be displayed :) Lionel
is also continuing to hunt bugs and other oddities of the frontend.</p>
<p>On the <a class="reference external" href="https://coherence.beebits.net/">Coherence</a> front, Frank did some Rhythmbox backend hacking and
continued to help Morty on the Last.<span class="caps">FM</span> backend. I still hope I’ll be
able to test that before end of the year. :)</p>
<p>That’s all for this week. Next week should be pretty calm, happy
holidays, merry Elisa Christmas!</p>
Elisa weekly news #22007-12-13T23:31:37+01:002007-12-14T15:20:17+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2007-12-13:/Articles/89/<p>Welcome to this second edition of the Elisa weekly news :) So
what have the Elisa team been up to this week?</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://blog.boucault.net/">Florian</a> and I continued on the new frontend. It is in better
shape, more usable, a bit less buggy but still has some memory
management issues. The vertical list …</p><p>Welcome to this second edition of the Elisa weekly news :) So
what have the Elisa team been up to this week?</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://blog.boucault.net/">Florian</a> and I continued on the new frontend. It is in better
shape, more usable, a bit less buggy but still has some memory
management issues. The vertical list view has been polished,
navigation issues have been fixed. The grid view was also
improved, the only part remaining is the zoomed selector
support. Right it’s not zoomed and we use a red image, which is
not very bling friendly. I also started to integrate mini widgets
in the top bar, basically they will be menu shortcuts to search
for content, switch between view layouts, notifications and
access to the player. Right now only the latter has been
done. Once the bigger issues are solved for that new frontend,
we’ll make it the default one. The Poblenou frontend will be deprecated.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="http://ben.amasoean.de/">Benjamin</a> brought back audio visualization support in Elisa,
meaning that a nice animation is now displayed on the screen when
the user plays audio-only content. He also refactored the menu
activities management into a single (but easily extensible) <span class="caps">XML</span>
based menu activity. It is now used by the Raval frontend we’re
working on, and it’s working quite well.</p>
<p>Alessandro did some GStreamer related fixes inside Elisa, mainly
on win32 platform. He also started to give us a hand on the new
frontend, focusing mainly on mouse support for the widgets.</p>
<p>Loïc implemented an <span class="caps">API</span> in <a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/">Pigment</a> to expose texturing matrix
operations, allowing various kinds of transformations in the
drawables, like rotation, stretching, shrinking and much
more. He finished win32 related polishing work too.</p>
<p><a class="reference external" href="https://guij.emont.org/blog">Guillaume</a> hunted some more Pigment bugs, like support for loading
images with size inferior to 1023 bytes, fd leaks and various
other oddities found during the development of the new widgets.</p>
<p>Lionel continued to fill the Trac website with many new tickets,
milestones and components to develop in the future. He didn’t
have much time to help us but he’s a good beta-tester :) He also created a <a class="reference external" href="http://lists.fluendo.com/mailman/listinfo/elisa-commits">mailing list</a> for developers interested on the <span class="caps">SVN</span> activity. Mailing lists for Pigment will also be created very soon.</p>
<p>Some news about <a class="reference external" href="https://coherence.beebits.net/">Coherence</a>, it’s important to talk about it,
Elisa uses it quite a bit for all the UPnP related features and
Frank, the project maintainer, is always very keen and responsive
on our questions and feedback. So Coherence recently got a
<a class="reference external" href="https://coherence.beebits.net/wiki/RhythmBox">Rhythmbox backend</a>, meaning that Rhythmbox can now act as a UPnP
Content-Directory client and serve the media collection over UPnP. However you might need quite recent of versions of Rhythmbox and
Coherence to get it working. A <a class="reference external" href="http://last.fm">Last.<span class="caps">FM</span></a> backend is on its way
too, but not checked in yet. This is really good news, Coherence
interacts with more and more applications and online services!</p>
Elisa weekly news #12007-12-06T21:46:31+01:002007-12-07T11:09:57+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2007-12-06:/Articles/88/<p>This is the first post on <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> news, I’ll try to make one per
week and cross-post it on the mailing list too. So, what’s going
on these days in Elisa world? Let’s see… :)</p>
<p>Florian, Christophe and I are currently working on a new user-interface (yeah <em>yet …</em></p><p>This is the first post on <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> news, I’ll try to make one per
week and cross-post it on the mailing list too. So, what’s going
on these days in Elisa world? Let’s see… :)</p>
<p>Florian, Christophe and I are currently working on a new user-interface (yeah <em>yet</em>
another one!). We first improved our <span class="caps">MVC</span> framework to ease the
development of Controllers, Views, Transitions between Views and
dynamic switching of Views. The code is in better shape now! You
can track progress of that new frontend on its <a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/elisa/trac/milestone/plugins.bad.raval_frontend-0.1">dedicated
milestone</a> scheduled for January. So far we have the menu
navigation support, one vertical list (with scrollbar) and a Grid
view able to display large menus in an attractive style. By the
way that new frontend is usable with the mouse, hence on touchscreens!</p>
<p>We’ll then focus on the Player Controller/View, the contextual
actions menu (what you can do while browsing menus) and the
Slideshow view which needs some love too.</p>
<p>Unfortunately developing a new <span class="caps">UI</span> like this takes time, we had to
reimplement some <a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/">Pigment</a> Python widgets and create new ones, but
hopefully most of them are reusable, we boxed the Elisa specific
ones directly in Elisa. You can find the Pigment widgets in the
<a class="reference external" href="https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/browser/trunk/libs/pypgmtools/widgets">pypgmtools.widgets</a> package.</p>
<p>On the other hand Benjamin and Alessandro have been working on
the media scanner and the database support. Thanks to them Elisa
is now faster at analizing multimedia files via <a class="reference external" href="http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org">GStreamer</a> and
the code is more maintainable.</p>
<p><span class="caps">DVB</span> related work is currently stalled, we finally got <span class="caps">DVB</span>-S at
the office, Benjamin struggled with drivers for his card and did
some GStreamer patches. Elisa-wise there’s a plan for Live-<span class="caps">TV</span> and
<span class="caps">EPG</span> management but it’s not fully implemented yet.</p>
<p>Lionel and Loïc have respectively spent time on porting Elisa and
Pigment on win32, there are still some issues to be sorted out,
but they are both confident :) More to come about that on next episode.</p>
<p>Guillaume is fixing annoying issues in Pigment like
image-cloning, rendering tests, text font height fixes and plenty
of other things that used to bother us.</p>
<p>Loïc, between 2 win32-battles have commited a <span class="caps">GTK</span>+ widget,
allowing developers to embed Pigment inside <span class="caps">GTK</span>+ applications,
I’m sure he’ll talk about it soonish :)</p>
<p>So this is what we are currently working on, there’s so much more
to come, stay in touch!</p>
Elisa at GUADEC2007-07-23T22:40:50+02:002007-11-16T09:38:19+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2007-07-23:/Articles/86/<p>So I attended <a class="reference external" href="http://guadec.org"><span class="caps">GUADEC</span></a> for the second time… Was quite nice,
interesting talks about the <span class="caps">GNOME</span> desktop, <a class="reference external" href="http://online-desktop.org/wiki/Online_Desktop">Online</a>, <a class="reference external" href="http://pyrodesktop.org/Main_Page">or</a> <a class="reference external" href="http://guadec.org/node/534">not</a>. It
was also good to see people I often discuss with on <span class="caps">IRC</span>, Jabber
or by mail :)</p>
<p>The <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> talk went fine, but afterwards many people kept asking
about our …</p><p>So I attended <a class="reference external" href="http://guadec.org"><span class="caps">GUADEC</span></a> for the second time… Was quite nice,
interesting talks about the <span class="caps">GNOME</span> desktop, <a class="reference external" href="http://online-desktop.org/wiki/Online_Desktop">Online</a>, <a class="reference external" href="http://pyrodesktop.org/Main_Page">or</a> <a class="reference external" href="http://guadec.org/node/534">not</a>. It
was also good to see people I often discuss with on <span class="caps">IRC</span>, Jabber
or by mail :)</p>
<p>The <a class="reference external" href="http://elisa.fluendo.com">Elisa</a> talk went fine, but afterwards many people kept asking
about our embedded plans for the project. So yes this is one of
the Elisa goals, we plan <strong>at some point in a far future</strong> to see
how we can integrate Elisa in dedicated set-top-boxes. But
there’s nothing real yet, nobody’s really working on that. Right
now the whole team is working to get a rock-solid Elisa deployed
on as many desktops as possible, including various Linux
distributions (Debian, Suse, Fedora, Mandriva and Ubuntu),
MacOSX, OpenSolaris and soon Windows.</p>
<p>The community aspect is also the key. In one year we managed to
build a small (but growing!) user community. Developers are now
getting more familiar with Elisa and <a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/">Pigment</a> APIs and we are
doing our best to include every contribution in both projects.</p>
<p>So guys, I repeat, just to be sure I’m understood this time:
Elisa is not only about Embedded world. We think about you, yes
you, the Desktop user :)</p>
Pigment needs testers2006-12-13T22:39:46+01:002007-11-16T09:37:58+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2006-12-13:/Articles/81/<p><a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/">Our C/GObject/Python rendering/animation framework bling engine</a> behind <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a> is progressing and getting better after each Loic’s commit. And so we need people to actually give it a try and help us to fill the <a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/wiki/GPUSupport"><span class="caps">GPU</span> list support</a> page to be able to fix potential issues and …</p><p><a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/">Our C/GObject/Python rendering/animation framework bling engine</a> behind <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a> is progressing and getting better after each Loic’s commit. And so we need people to actually give it a try and help us to fill the <a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/wiki/GPUSupport"><span class="caps">GPU</span> list support</a> page to be able to fix potential issues and/or enhance Pigment’s rendering performances. This list may also help people in quest for a good 3d graphics card suitable for Elisa. So far the recent nvidia ones running on the proprietary drivers are the most suitable. Let’s hope that <a class="reference external" href="http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/">Nouveau</a> drivers will be usable soon :-)</p>
<p>On Elisa front we are preparing new plugins, internationalization, linux packages and enhanced UPnP support thanks to an on-development Python/UPnP framework to be released very soon.</p>
<p><strong>update</strong>: The UPnP framework named <a class="reference external" href="https://coherence.beebits.net/">Coherence goes public</a></p>
Elisa 0.1.02006-11-08T21:19:07+01:002007-11-16T09:37:48+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2006-11-08:/Articles/79/<p>It’s been 4 months since the first alpha release of <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a>, the Python/GStreamer/OpenGL MediaCenter developped by <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com">Fluendo</a>. It was time for a fresh release :)</p>
<p>Since <span class="caps">GUADEC</span> we’ve been working on separating the rendering, widget and animation frameworks in a separate project named <a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/">Pigment</a>. It’s hard …</p><p>It’s been 4 months since the first alpha release of <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a>, the Python/GStreamer/OpenGL MediaCenter developped by <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com">Fluendo</a>. It was time for a fresh release :)</p>
<p>Since <span class="caps">GUADEC</span> we’ve been working on separating the rendering, widget and animation frameworks in a separate project named <a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/">Pigment</a>. It’s hard to be really objective since I’m part of the development team but I have to say we really have spent some time discussing the architecture and how to implement it efficiently. Basically there’s a C/GObject plugin based rendering engine (called render), a Python binding library (pyrender) and the pure Python widget framework relying on pyrender and including a damn powerful animation framework. Believe me it’s really easy to get in touch with all this! For instance have a look at this <a class="reference external" href="https://core.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/browser/trunk/examples/pigment/stream.py">60-lines simple video player</a> and not speaking of the animation framework ;) We really believe other projects can benefit from Pigment and hope they will!</p>
<p>Speaking of Elisa, excepted for the skin, the global architecture didn’t changed much, we still use Setuptools for the plugins framework and we are happy with it! Two new plugins appeared, one <span class="caps">DAAP</span> client and a Flickr pictures browser. I prototyped a Youtube plugin which might be part of next release which will be less than 4 months away from now :) We’ll also start working on the <span class="caps">PVR</span> features really soon. Much bling to come!</p>
Elisa, first alpha release!2006-07-10T15:00:12+02:002007-11-16T09:37:36+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2006-07-10:/Articles/73/<p>After nearly 4 months of active development, the first alpha
release of <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a> pops up in the intraweb. This is a MediaCenter
application developed in Python using technologies like Twisted
for networking and loop, OpenGL for rendering and <a class="reference external" href="http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/">GStreamer</a> for
multimedia playback. The project is funded by <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fluendo.com/">Fluendo</a>.</p>
<p>If you …</p><p>After nearly 4 months of active development, the first alpha
release of <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a> pops up in the intraweb. This is a MediaCenter
application developed in Python using technologies like Twisted
for networking and loop, OpenGL for rendering and <a class="reference external" href="http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/">GStreamer</a> for
multimedia playback. The project is funded by <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fluendo.com/">Fluendo</a>.</p>
<p>If you want to see how it looks like, checkout the <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fluendo.com/elisa/screencast.php">screencast</a> i
made using the amazing <a class="reference external" href="http://live.gnome.org/Istanbul">Istanbul</a> tool and rendered using the
<a class="reference external" href="http://www.flumotion.net/cortado/">Cortado</a> applet. A big thank you to Istanbul’ author, Zaheer, for his great work, especially for OpenGL apps capture support!</p>
<p>If you’re not a Java fan, go checkout videos on <a class="reference external" href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3318494455519177805">GoogleVideo</a> and <a class="reference external" href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XXpw8hpJodo">YouTube</a>!</p>
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/XXpw8hpJodo"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/XXpw8hpJodo" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="600" height="350" bgcolor="#000000"></embed></object><p>Basically the version we are releasing is the one that was showed
during <a class="reference external" href="http://guadec.org/">Guadec</a> 3 weeks ago. It has basic working features (see
details on website), but the code is still quite unstable and
tends to crash sometimes ;) Don’t hesitate to try it out anyway, we
already had some interesting feedback and few developers start to
show up on our <span class="caps">IRC</span> channel.</p>
Back from Guadec2006-06-29T23:43:32+02:002007-11-16T09:37:25+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2006-06-29:/Articles/72/<p>So Guadec 2006 was a great event! I met lot of nice people, we
really had fun. And by the way, life in Spain seems pretty
cool :) The last event i participated was the
Python/Gstreamer/… Hackfest organized by Edward Hervey (i
think). It was really nice, we had some …</p><p>So Guadec 2006 was a great event! I met lot of nice people, we
really had fun. And by the way, life in Spain seems pretty
cool :) The last event i participated was the
Python/Gstreamer/… Hackfest organized by Edward Hervey (i
think). It was really nice, we had some time to discuss and hack
a bit. Also <a class="reference external" href="http://www.lugradio.org">LugRadio</a> guys were there, Jono and friends took five
minuts to interview me about <a class="reference external" href="http://www.fluendo.com/elisa">Elisa</a>, i think it will be
broadcasted in Episode 22 of the season 3, or so … :)</p>
<p>I’ll upload more pictures after some sleep.</p>
Guadec 20062006-06-28T12:21:52+02:002007-11-16T09:36:55+01:00Philippe Normandtag:base-art.net,2006-06-28:/Articles/71/<p>Blogging from Guadec :) We’re spending a great time here at
Vilanova! I finally met the co-workers from Fluendo Barcelona,
very cool people. My lightning talk about <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a> went quite well,
people seemed impressed, we are demoing our
Python/Gstreamer/Twisted/OpenGL MediaCenter at the Fluendo booth.</p>
<p>Fluendo party monday …</p><p>Blogging from Guadec :) We’re spending a great time here at
Vilanova! I finally met the co-workers from Fluendo Barcelona,
very cool people. My lightning talk about <a class="reference external" href="http://fluendo.com/elisa/">Elisa</a> went quite well,
people seemed impressed, we are demoing our
Python/Gstreamer/Twisted/OpenGL MediaCenter at the Fluendo booth.</p>
<p>Fluendo party monday evening was awesome, especially the free
alcohol streaming and the beach was nice too! Tuesday evening was
buffet party + france/spain football match + open-source music
band.. Quite original evening, i’m not a soccer fan, but when
France wins, i have to be :)</p>
<p>Took some pictures, available in my <a class="reference external" href="http://base-art.net/photos/guadec2006/">gallery</a>, i’ll probably
upload some on friday. We’ll be back at Lyon thursday evening,
hopefully ;)</p>