Planet Banshee

Banshee 1.5.5

2010-03-11T19:16:42+00:00

We released Banshee 1.5.5 – aka 1.6 RC 1 – yesterday, with a lot of bug fixes, polish, and a couple new features.

Gapless Playback / Playbin2

Banshee now uses the playbin2 GStreamer element. With this comes support for gapless playback, which is the default now for users with GStreamer > 0.10.25.2.

Grid View

We are debuting a new grid mode for our custom list widget, visible in the modified Album browser. It will be used for Videos, Audiobooks, and more in future releases.

Album browser, now as a grid

YouTube Extension

This extension shows YouTube videos in the Context Pane related to what you're playing, and lets you watch them within Banshee. You can enable it in the Extensions tab of the Preferences dialog.

Contextual YouTube videos

Banshee Community Extensions Update

We also released Banshee Community Extensions 1.5.5, including five new extensions: CoverWallpaper, LiveRadio, Magnatune, Telepathy, and Ubuntu One Music Store (not ready for users yet).

The Mirage shuffle/fill by-similar mode has been greatly improved. It's smarter, now looking for tracks similar to the last several you've played, and dissimilar from ones you've skipped.

Enhancements and Fixes

Improve search responsiveness on large libraries
Add icons for Nexus One and Audiobooks
Play Queue item count, size, duration now ignores old tracks
Muinshee fixes: disable Auto-DJ, allow reordering, hide previous song
Fix a very common, SQL-related crash in 1.5.4
Fix saving equalizer settings in culture-invariant way
Jumping to a source's prefs via its context menu works again
Usage data not submitted more than every 48 hours
Fix repeatedly resyncing some files to a device b/c transcoded
Clear the redo stack on shuffle mode change
Accept feeds with empty title
Uri encode file location queries, making them work properly
Fixes to the OS X build

Plans

We are now string frozen in preparation for our 1.6 release on March 31st - so translators, full steam ahead! We might do a RC 2 in a couple weeks for additional testing and fixes. File bugs for any issues you find, and help us make Banshee 1.6 the best release ever!

Banshee 1.5.5, aka 1.6 RC 1 is out!

2010-03-10T14:26:04+00:00

Banshee 1.5.5 was just released, including gapless playback, a grid album browser, and a YouTube extension! It contains lots of good bug fixes as well - those of you burned by the 1.5.4 SQL crash will be pleased with the additional QA given to this release. Get it now!

Plan your writing

2010-03-10T13:46:43+00:00

I’ve been meaning to follow-up on Shaun’s recent bog post about “Explain More” when writing user help. Zonker’s blog post this morning on how to write an interview finally motivated me to get this blog post done.

One of my favorite sayings in a work environment is “Plan the work and work the plan”. This applies to writing as well.

One of the two major takeaways I had last year after attending the first Writing Open Source conference was the importance of planning. At least for me, almost of all the heavy lifting and hard work is done in the planning phase. (Not that writing and editing are easy either, but the planning for me is where my brain works the hardest).

When I was in school, especially high school, all of my English teachers required an outline when writing a term paper. School was fairly easy for me and I’d just write the paper and then do the outline. Oh, how I wish I had listened to them and learned those skills then!

It’s fascinating to me reading novels and then reading about or listening to an author talk about the years they spent researching their book. After last year, it’s finally clicked for me. (Having just finished io9’s recent book club selection, The Windup Girl, by Paolo Bacigalupi I found his answers in the book club Q&A session fascinating, especially his research on Thailand and the Thai culture).

Planning your writing will help you connect with your readers, stay on message and help you faster. (Faster isn’t always better but you may spend less time getting stuck or if you do get stuck, be able to write the next section that you’ve planned and come back and finish where you were stuck).

Whether it’s user help, a blog post or an interview, spend some time thinking about what you want to write about and who your audience is. Your readers will thank you.

Docky has been removed from Do!

2010-03-08T03:00:10+00:00

Tonight I finally pushed the revisions to bzr that removed Docky from the Do source tree. For a while now Docky has been being developed as a stand alone application separate from Do. The two projects were limiting one another, so a decision was made to split them out. In the future there will be some of docky <–> do integration, but for now Docky is going to be the most kick ass Dock you’ve ever seen, and Do is going to be the most kickass launcher/everything-else-do-does you’ve ever seen.

In Ubuntu Lucid you can install Docky from the software center, otherwise the source is available at http://launchpad.net/docky. Today is the start of a new day in Do, development is going to start rolling again, and there should be a new kick ass release in the coming months. We’ve let things slide, but we’re kicking it back into gear.

Anything but the buttons, or how I learned to stop clicking and love Do

2010-03-07T19:42:35+00:00

I know this is a controversial opinion, but I want to be one of the few to publicly announce that they love the window controls on the left side of the window. They’re so slick looking! It takes about 10 minutes to adjust to the change, but the beauty is worth it. A very small price to pay for a major improvement of the look and feel of the desktop.

Now, for those who don’t want to adjust (which is fine, really!) I have a prescription for what ails you. Yes, this is a shameless plug, no this is not snake oil. This is real jawn which will make your left-side-window-controlled hell-of-a-life into the garden of eden you never dreamed it could be. 40 virgins? No.. Jimmy Hendrix and Neil Peart (yeah, I know he’s not dead, just bear with me) jam sessions? No… This isn’t religion, magic, mysticism, mass hysteria, or Minnesota swap gas. This the Do window manager plugin.

No video support? Try youtube.

And here’s a youtube version, if you’re not down with HTML5.

You can install it from apt://gnome-do and apt://gnome-do-plugins. Thw window manager plugin is enabled by default in Lucid (and maybe Karmic?)!

One Week to Banshee 1.5.5

2010-03-05T07:16:28+00:00

Banshee 1.5.5, aka 1.6 RC 1, will be released Wednesday, March 10th. Close on the heals of 1.5.4, it will mostly contain bug fixes, including a common crasher in 1.5.4, faster searching of large libraries, and displaying a warning if syncing will remove lots of files from a device.

Banshee Metrics

2010-03-03T18:25:25+00:00

Last Wednesday we released Banshee 1.5.4, which included an opt-in feature to submit anonymous usage data. Over 500 people have already opted-in!

Interesting Stats
They are primarily getting Banshee through the Ubuntu PPA, with a moderate number building from source or using other distributions — including 20 OS X users.

383	Ubuntu
33	source-tarball
27	openSUSE/SLED
22	git-checkout
20	OS X
16	Gentoo

They are using Banshee in 36 locales, across 30 languages. Keep in mind the Preference to opt-in is (so far) only translated into 9 languages.

223	en-US
51	en-GB
41	de-DE
35	unknown
21	ru-RU
18	it-IT
14	fr-FR
12	en-CA
11	en-AU
11	es-ES
9	pl-PL
8	pt-BR
6	es-CL
5	es-MX
5	nl-NL
5	sv-SE

About half have the Banshee window maximized, enable ReplayGain support, show the bottom-left cover art, and show the context pane.

I'm still working on better ways to analyze the data and extract actionable information. I plan to have distribution graphs and such soon. In the meantime, I've posted some more stats here. As we get more submissions, add more data points, and get better analysis, we will be able to identify options nobody uses and optimize Banshee for real-world users.

Lemon Shallot Vinaigrette

2010-03-01T17:20:48+00:00

Feeling like an arugula salad today, I needed to also use up two shallots before they went bad, so I concocted this delicious lemon shallot vinaigrette. As the arugula is gone, I may finish the dressing with some fish tonight.

I rarely measure anything in the kitchen, so all values are approximate.

Ingredients:

2 shallots
1 cup + 2 tbsp olive oil
1 cup chopped fresh parsley
2/3 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2 large lemon
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp freshly cracked pepper

Method:

Finely dice the two shallots, sauté over medium heat in the two tablespoons of olive oil until slightly browned and translucent.
Finely chop the parsley for easier blending.
Juice half the lemon, and gather about a teaspoon of zest.
Combine all ingredients into a food processor and emulsify.
Chill and serve.

Enjoy!

The Day the Saucers Came

2010-02-25T23:38:30+00:00

Neil Gaiman continues to be one of my favorite authors (and tweeters). I bought a print of his poem “The Day the Saucers Came” in 2007 when it first came out and finally have gotten around to having it framed. (And I have #69 of 750 made, a nice low number!)

“The Day the Saucers Came” was originally published in Neil Gaiman’s short story collection, “Fragile Things” and was one of my favorite stories included. The fact that it became the first print available illustrated by Jouni Koponen was even better.

Banshee 1.5.4 Released

2010-02-25T01:13:04+00:00

Banshee 1.5.4, aka 1.6 beta 5, was released with several new features and many fixes, including equalizer presets, Nokia N900 support, opt-in/anonymous usage-data collection, and support for the new Banshee Community Extensions sub-project. Get it now!

Banshee 1.5.4

2010-02-25T01:12:50+00:00

Banshee 1.5.4 is out, with cool new features and lots of fixes! This is our fifth release in preparation for our big 1.6 release at the end of March.

Banshee Community Extensions

We have made a 1.5.4 release of Banshee Community Extensions as well. This includes the Alarm Clock, Lyrics, and Mirage extensions, and several others.

Mirage Similarity Engine

The Mirage extension has been modified heavily, dropping the old “Automatic Playlist Generator” in favor in integration into the playback controller – adding shuffle-by-similar, and into the Play Queue Auto DJ – adding fill-by-similar. Mirage calculates the acoustical similarity between two songs.

Play Queue Auto DJ, fill by similar

Anonymous, Opt-in Usage Data

Under Preferences, you can choose to "Improve Banshee by sending anonymous usage data" back to the Banshee developers. This collects information on what version you're running, what OS, library size, slow SQL queries, and a whitelisted subset of your preferences. This information will help us choose better defaults and see what parts of Banshee are used most and can be improved.

The 30+ people running a development version of Banshee and already submitting data are using 11 different language locales, have a median screen resolution of 1440x1024, and a median music library size of 5k songs. I'm working on some analysis/viz software to crunch the data - stay tuned!

Other Notable Improvements

Wikipedia context pane extension enabled by default
Add support for Nokia N900 phones
Coverart for unicode artist/albums now supported
Dropped glade-sharp dep; GNOME 3.0 ready
Add columns showing track sample rate and bits per sample
Option to sort an artist's albums by year, not title
Fixes to GIO backend
Many crash/startup fixes for OS X build
Fix several memory leaks

More Information

As always, check the release notes for more detailed information, screenshots, and download links. Thanks to everybody who made this release happen!

Making my bed

2010-02-20T19:05:16+00:00

I’ve made a resolution to make my bed every day. This post is for public accountability of this resolution. I know that most people reading this will never be near my bed, but if we’re chatting at some point please ask me how it’s going and give me a hard time if I say I’ve been slacking.

No that’s not my bed.

Jan-Feb 2010 Record scores

2010-02-19T19:42:32+00:00

I’ve been spending too much money on records recently so I’ve decided to give myself a soft-limit of $50/month to spend on records. At the end of each month I’ll do a post of what I got with my $50 that month. I say soft limit because if I come across a copy of SUNN White 1 for less than $100, I might buy it despite my $50 limit. I’ve already gone over that limit for February, so I won’t be buying any new records this month except for $1 porch sale/thrift store records.

2010 has been a good year for record hunting. Here are my 2010 record scores for January and February.

The Facedowninshit record is on yellow, too. Unfortunately, my record player broke the other night! I guess I’ll be scouring craigslist this weekend trying to find a new turntable.

Banshee Community Extensions

2010-02-18T06:20:08+00:00

Introduction

Writing a Banshee extension and getting it into users' hands has never been easier. We have started a new sub-project called Banshee Community Extensions (BCE), collecting various existing extensions under one source repo, bug tracker, and autobuild setup.

Its source is hosted on gitorious, dramatically lowering the barrier to committing and sharing your code publicly.

This centralization makes things easier on translators and packagers, too. And users get access (without manually downloading/installing) to the fruits of the extension community's labor.

Creating a Working Extension in Minutes

It's ridiculously easy to make a new extension. Install Banshee 1.5.3 (including the devel package), or build/install the latest from git master instead. Then,

git clone git://gitorious.org/banshee-community-extensions/banshee-community-extensions.git
cd banshee-community-extensions
./create-extension Foo
make run

This creates, builds, and runs Banshee with your extension. Go to Edit » Preferences » Extensions to enable it, and see it appear:

We already have seven extensions migrated, and one brand new one!

AlarmClock
Awn
ClutterFlow
LCD
Lyrics
Mirage
RadioStationFetcher
StreamRecorder

And, we have 13 maintainers already!

We have bleeding-edge openSUSE/SLED packages available, and Ubuntu packages should be ready in time for Banshee 1.5.4 next week.

If you've been putting off some extension idea you've had, delay no longer! Read the full Extension Writers Guide, and get started today!

Thanks

Thanks to Chow Loong Jin (aka hyperair, our fearless Ubuntu packager) for broaching the idea behind BCE, and to Bertrand Lorentz for teaming with me to get things to this state - in just two weeks!

GNOME Sysadmin team update

2010-02-13T03:32:34+00:00

(This is reposted from an email earlier this evening)

Hi all, I wanted to give you a brief update on the GNOME Sysadmin team.

Last April, Owen sent out an email outlining changes to the Sysadmin team and a goal of hiring a part-time System Administrator to help coordinate the Sysadmin team. (And we’re getting closer to be the goal every day!)

Last year John Carr oversaw the team and the Sysadmin team was able to work on a number of improvements to the GNOME infrastructure, including a Bugzilla upgrade, installing a CRM system and web analytics application for the Marketing team and Plone, a CMS for a new www.gnome.org.

In October I volunteered to help with coordinating the team as John stepped down and with a new year starting a couple other members have indicated they don’t have time to help right now as well.

We have lots of improvements planned for this year such as bringing a brand new server online (thanks to Jeff Schroeder’s donation!) and migrating services from older servers to the new one, Git and Damned Lies integration, integrating all GNOME servers with Puppet and scoping Tomboy Online. That’s just to name a few – we also have a number of tasks open in Bugzilla in the sysadmin component.

We are looking for two volunteers to join the team to help with these projects and more. As Owen mentioned last year, team member responsibilities include:

Attending the IRC meetings
Regularly spending time handling routine tasks
Volunteering for infrastructure development projects as needed

We have a number of projects planned for this year, so that 3rd bullet is important!

If you are interested in joining the team, please join the gnome-infrastructure mailing list and introduce yourself, why you want to join and any relevant skills or experience you have. It is helpful if you have been active in other GNOME teams and can have someone vouch for you. (We are talking about giving you root access to GNOME servers, after all!)

If you have any questions, please feel free to send me an email, email the infrastructure list or stop by the #sysadmin IRC channel on GIMPNet IRC.

Cutting the Cable, Part 3 (or Why Customer Service Matters)

2010-02-09T01:01:45+00:00

I followed through and canceled my DirecTV service today. My MythTV / Boxee setup has been running great the last couple of weeks and I kept DirecTV through yesterday just as a backup as I hosted a Super Bowl party.

This all started due to extremely poor customer service from DirecTV. My high-def DVR was dying in November, specifically the hard drive, as I could hear it grinding from twelve feet away over the sound of my speakers and the buffering and audio / video playback was terrible.

I had to reboot my DVR every 2-3 days, and performance would be better, then degrade. Calling DirecTV, they made me jump through a number of hoops to diagnose it which resulted in it taking almost a month and three phone calls before they agreed to replace it. Now, I don’t own this HD-DVR receiver – I lease it from DirecTV. When I first signed up for DirecTV 11 years ago you had to buy your hardware, now you just lease it from them for $5 / month.

They finally agreed to replace it, but they were going to charge me a $20 shipping & handling fee. My wife runs a small business out of the house, and I know it doesn’t cost $20 to ship one of those, especially in bulk. To say I was livid that I had to pay to get a receiver repaired that they own is an understatement. Each time I called in, they also tried to “upgrade” me on the last receiver that I actually owned – so I’d have to pay them another lease fee. I always told I’d only upgrade if it was a DVR, not just a standard receiver, and they always declined. (I had been able to take advantage of this a couple years ago, so I know they can upgrade old receivers to a DVR).

I emailed and called their customer service to complain – and their response was: “Sorry, that’s our policy”.

So now they’ve lost a customer. I may have had their lowest tier of service, but I also bought the March Madness and NFL Sunday Ticket packages each year, so from a revenue per customer standpoint I was above average.

When I called to cancel, they offered me $20 per month off for the next twelve months and a free DVR upgrade. Too little, too late. When they asked why I was cancelling, I said poor customer service for my HD-DVR experience this past November. So the customer service rep processed my cancellation, and then let me know I’d be receiving a box with pre-paid shipping to send my HD-DVR back to them. Where exactly was this pre-paid box when I needed to get it repaired? (The state of Washington is suing DirecTV over hidden fees).

What gets me is the focus DirecTV, cable companies and cell phone companies have on customer acquisition rather than keeping existing customers happy. Even though I had already contacted them and complained they weren’t willing to do anything about it until I actually cancelled. In my opinion, they need to keep a balance between these two groups of customers. This wasn’t the first customer service incident I’ve had with them over the years, but enough was enough. Thanks to innovations like Boxee I can make up some (but not all) of the content I’ll be missing from going over-the-air only. A loyal customer will pay dividends – do you think I’ll be recommending DirecTV to friends in the future?

The Mutliplayblog today published the results of a survey measuring customer satisfaction levels in satellite, cable and telco TV subscriptions:

Low Perceived “Value for Money” among all Digital Pay TV customers

Virtually across the board—and irrespective of platform—respondents reported low satisfaction in the metric of `Value for Money.’ There was very little measurable difference by platform among respondents, and in all cases, fewer than 22% of respondents felt the service “exceeded” or “greatly exceeded” expectations of value for money.

This is among the most important findings of study, as it underlines the vulnerability of pay television in its current state. Indeed, in a report published in 2008, we found that over 50% of US digital pay television customers would be willing to scale back or completely drop their television service if household budgetary circumstances dictated.

I highly recommend reading the rest of the blog post, as these companies are at a tipping point. We’ve seen it in the music industry, the video industry is feeling it, and now pay TV services will be feeling the pressure as technological innovations will put their business models at risk. Will they embrace their customers and these new technologies or will they become extinct? First they need to look in the mirror and see if they’re keeping their existing customers happy before trying to sign up more. And I’ve already had a few people ask me about my setup and express interest in ditching pay TV…

Banshee + GNOME 3.0

2010-02-08T23:35:57+00:00

I spent a little time this weekend doing one of the things I’ve wanted to do for years – eradicate one of the oldest files in Banshee: banshee-dialogs.glade.

The vast majority of Banshee’s UI is custom widgetry that is laid out dynamically at runtime. The main window and the preferences dialog hasn’t been restricted by Glade for a couple of years, but all the other dialogs were defined in part in Glade:

Open Location
Seek To
Import Media
Smart Playlist Editor
Error list dialog (very unlikely anyone has ever seen this)
Last.FM Station Editor

These were all fairly simple dialogs in Glade — mostly consisting of a table, some static labels, and placeholders to pack in custom widgets at runtime (e.g. the import source combo box in the Import Media dialog, or the actual query builder UI packed in the Smart Playlist Editor dialog).

Old Banshee Glade Dialogs

These are now fully defined in code, allowing the dialogs to derive directly from BansheeDialog, which provides extra common functionality for dialogs on top of Gtk.Dialog.

The big take-away here is no longer depending on the deprecated libglade/glade-sharp libraries (well, almost — later this week Gabriel will port Muinshee — an alternative Banshee client in the image of Muine, but not a core component). Additionally, I removed our dependency on libgnome/gnome-sharp, which is also deprecated.

This means that Banshee 1.5.4 will be GNOME 3.0 ready. The last thing to do is implement a udev hardware backend. We already have partial DeviceKit support, and GIO support. However, we don’t take a hard dependency on HAL. The removal of the last Glade file represents the eradication of any hard obsolete GNOME 2.0 dependencies. Exciting!

As a quick aside: what was really nice about the porting from Glade to C# was the use of C# 3.0 features – specifically type inference and object initializers. This permits interface construction using a more terse syntax than available in C# 2.0, yielding improved readability and organization. For instance:

    var table = new Table (2, 2, false) {
        RowSpacing = 12,
        ColumnSpacing = 6
    };

    table.Attach (new Label () {
            Text = Catalog.GetString ("Station _Type:"),
            UseUnderline = true,
            Xalign = 0.0f
        }, 0, 1, 0, 1, AttachOptions.Fill, AttachOptions.Shrink, 0, 0);

Bring it on, GNOME 3.0. We are ready!

GNOME Journal #18 – Multimedia released!

2010-02-05T23:33:33+00:00

Just in time for your weekend reading pleasure, GNOME Journal #18 is out. Issue 18 is a special edition focusing on Multimedia & GNOME, as well as recap of the recent Boston Summit.

Writing Multimedia Applications in Vala by Jim Nelson
Pitivi by Jono Bacon
What’s new with Banshee by Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier
An interview with Jonathan Thomas, creator of the OpenShot video editor by Paul Cutler
Boston Summit Recap by Jason Clinton

This issue features four (4!) new authors and the GNOME Journal team is thankful for their contribution. We also couldn’t have done it without our editors: Stormy Peters, Sumana Harihareswara, and Jim Hodapp.

Go read it now!

Banshee 1.5.3 and the return of OS X support

2010-01-30T00:18:05+00:00

The Banshee community is proud to announce the availability of Banshee 1.5.3! With a slew of new features and bug fixes, and a fully refreshed Mac OS X build, this is another solid release on the road to 1.6 (due out on March 31st).

Gabriel highlights a number of new features and improvements on his release announcement blog:

A new sync device from playlist option
Audiobooks library extension
Library-folder watcher extension
eMusic importer/downloader extension
GIO file backend supporting non-local files

Additionally, 75 bugs were fixed since the last release. Read the 1.5.3 release notes to learn about additional new features and improvements.

Mac OS X Release

What’s particularly exciting to me is the return of the OS X releases. I have completely overhauled our OS X build, and we no longer take a framework dependency on Mono or GTK – these dependencies are bundled as part of the binary distribution of Banshee on OS X.

If you have OS X 10.5 or newer (Intel only), you can simply download and run Banshee – nothing else needs to be installed.

This gives us greater flexibility to refine and polish Banshee for OS X. For instance, I started working on a new GTK theme that uses the flexible Murrine engine. Currently the Mono framework installation uses Clearlooks.

There’s still a lot to do on the OS X build, so if you’re interested in hacking on the platform backend, it’s now easier than ever to do so:

Install XCode
Clone Banshee from GNOME git
Run ./bootstrap-bundle at the top of the checkout

This process will magically build everything that Banshee requires, and from there hacking on Banshee is just like it is on Linux. I recommend using MonoDevelop of course to get real work done though.

Enjoy!

Update: There was a lame bug preventing startup of Banshee 1.5.3 on OS X. This has been fixed and the DMG image has been respun. If you had problems running the release, download the updated image. My bad ya’ll!

Banshee 1.5.3 Released

2010-01-27T22:16:24+00:00

Banshee 1.5.3, aka 1.6 beta 4, was released with several new features and many fixes, including device sync-from-playlist, type-ahead find, library watching, and more! Get it now!

Banshee 1.5.3

2010-01-27T22:14:24+00:00

We've just released Banshee 1.5.3, containing a lot of exciting new features and bug fixes.

New Features:

Sync device from playlist option
Type-ahead find in track, artist, and album lists
Optional cover art in lower-left corner
Cover art editable via drag-and-drop and right-click
Audiobooks library extension
Library-folder watcher extension
eMusic importer/downloader extension
GIO file backend, supports non-local files

Read the 1.5.3 Release Notes for the full scoop and some screenshots of the new features.

This release is what will become Banshee 1.6 and be picked up by distros; your help testing it and filing bugs is important and appreciated!

Try It

You can get packages for your distro, grab the source tarball, or follow the bleeding edge by trying it from git master.

Aaron worked hard to bring back the OS X build this release, too.

Digg It!

Banshee Release Schedule

2010-01-25T23:24:49+00:00

We are aligning Banshee's release schedule with GNOME's, at least for the next few months. Banshee 1.6 will be released the same day as GNOME 2.30, and we'll have three beta releases before then.

1.5.3 - Jan 27 - Wednesday!
1.5.4 - Feb 24
1.5.5 - Mar 10 - String Freeze
1.6.0 - Mar 31

I'm excited to try switching our schedule from feature and whim driven to time-based; I think it will be felt positively by everybody: contributors will know when their work will reach people, translators will have time to translate, and users can stop wondering what mixture of magic and bribes will cause a release to finally happen.

Subscribe to the Banshee development calendar, find out how to help test the latest Banshee, and/or contribute your creativity and sweat!

Cutting the Cable, Part 2

2010-01-24T21:53:44+00:00

A few weeks ago I blogged about buying the hardware to set up a MythTV PC to record off air high def TV and integrate it with Boxee.

The hardware arrived and I’ve been working on on the setup off and on over the last few weeks. Some random thoughts:

The HD Homerun tuner is pretty cool. Fedora has the HD Homerun configuration tool in their repos. Installing that through PackageKit and yum made it easy to test out that it was working and had a good signal.
I had to install MyTV 3 times before I could get it to work. On a vanilla Fedora 12 install and then adding MythTV from the repos, only one tuner of the HD Homerun would work. Trying Mythdora, my MythTV front ends on my desktop PC and my laptop wouldn’t connect. Also there was a nasty bug in Mythdora’s kernel that wouldn’t let me mount a NFS share. Using Mythbuntu everything just worked.
Schedules Direct is a pretty cool service. I remember hearing about the story a couple years ago when it all went down, but when Zap2It started charging users for the scheduling data, a group of MythTV users started Schedules Direct and licensed the data. $20 / year is more than reasonable to pay to get all the scheduling data.
I love the fact that I can browse to the IP address of the MythTV PC from any computer and see the scheduling data and record a show. It took a few minutes to find the setting to only record new episodes, but it’s there!
Obligatory screenshot:
The first recordings I made were the second night of the 24 season premiere and an episode of How I Met Your Mother. A one hour recording is about 6 GB.
I only have a 100GB hard drive in the MythTV backend, so I mounted my NAS via NFS . I would then in Boxee use the File Browser and surf to my tv recording directory. One downside to this method is that MythTV records the file, such as last week’s 24 as 1091_2010011819000mpg. The File Browser also displays a PNG file so it’s easy to tell what show is what, but it’s not intuitive at all.
There are plugins for XBMC, such as MythSExx and MythicalLibrarian that will rename your TV recordings into a S01E01 format and create a symlink for you to make it easier to browse your recordings. I couldn’t get the former script to run, but I didn’t spend a lot of time troubleshooting either.

And then yesterday while idling in #boxee on Freenode IRC, user SpaceBass mentioned that MythTV support was working for him in the Boxee Beta. There are a number of threads in the Boxee forums that the “mythtv://” protocol doesn’t work – but it appears to be working now.

In the Boxee settings, add a manual souce, and make it: myth://IPADDRESS where IPADDRESS is the IP address of your Myth backend and give the source a name – I used “DVR”.

Now use the File Browser in Boxee and when you first choose it you’ll have a list of your sources:

Select DVR and you’ll be presented with “All Recordings”, “Guide”, “Live Channels”, “Movies” and “TV Shows”:

Note: Guide doesn’t work for me.

If you choose “All Recordings” you’ll see everything that MythTV has recorded:

(TV Shows and Movies will just show the MythTV recordings based on those filters). I haven’t looked into using MythTV’s built-in commercial skip as Boxee has a 30 second skip that just works too. I also like that Boxee remembers to resume where I left off watching if I stop playback.

To watch Live TV streaming from your Myth backend to Boxee, choose Live TV from the menu I mentioned above. You’ll be presented with a list of TV channels by station ID, not number:

And here’s a screenshot of the NHL game on NBC in HD earlier this afternoon:

There are two bugs I’m experiencing that I need to spend some time with:

When playing back a recording or starting a live TV stream, it will sometimes start as if it’s being fast-forwarded, including the audio. Hitting pause and then unpausing fixes it.
I think this may be related to signal strength as I’m seeing it on NBC and CBS, but not Fox, but I’m seeing jagged edges around an object, such as a person, when it’s moving quickly. If it’s a fairly static image, there are no jagged edges. But even someone quickly sitting down will have the distortion. But I don’t see this problem when accessing the recording from a Myth frontend on another computer, so it needs more investigating.
My other theory is it could have something to do with saving the content on the NAS and not on a hard drive in the Myth backend, so I bought a larger hard drive to throw in there too. I’d also rather have it on a hard drive than the NAS just to save wear and tear.

I’m almost done – if I had to guess, I’m about a week away from telling DirecTV to pound sand. I’ll poke at the distortion issue some more and install that hard drive when it arrives but this has been a pretty cool project to work on so far.

GNOME Odds & Ends

2010-01-22T22:09:54+00:00

A few different things going on:

Tomboy documentation is almost done in Mallard. I’ve really enjoyed using the Mallard syntax – so much less complex than Docbook. Every time I have to look up an element reference, I shake my head and think, “Duh! That makes so much more sense I should have figured that out!“. Nice work Shaun.
I triaged some docs bugs in GNOME Bugzilla. Want to get involved with the GNOME Documentation team but don’t know where to start? This wiki page has a list of projects looking for help with their documentation.
We had a Marketing team meeting earlier this month and we’re having another next month.
We’ll be having Sysadmin Team meeting soon too. (Surprise Sysadmin team members!)
We’re having a Snowy meeting tomorrow. I know it’s short notice, but I love the potential of Tomboy Online – if you can’t attend I’ve volunteered to post the log and meeting minutes. We need web designers, web developers, ~~CouchDB folks~~ (whoops!) – you name it there’s probably a role for you. Come get in on a project at the ground level! GNOME needs a web service likes this.
Rumor is we’ll have the beginnings of Banshee documentation showing up next week, stay tuned. (Though I have no idea where these rumors start, really!)
We’re in the final throes of pushing out a new GNOME Journal. Soon, I promise you, soon!

2.29 Release Notes

2010-01-20T14:05:38+00:00

It’s that time when we need to start thinking of all the new cool and exciting features that GNOME 2.30 will bring. If you’re a GNOME Developer, please add a brief description of new features or benefits to the Release Notes page on live.gnome.org.

Thanks!

GNOME Accounts

2010-01-20T01:37:42+00:00

Martin Pitt mentions in his latest blog post that it took only 4 hours to get a GNOME git account after requesting it.

And that’s all do to the work of one person: Andrea Veri.

I’ve done some poking around on the status of the Accounts Team and whether it’s active or not, but after Jeff Schroeder on the Sysadmin team sponsored Andrea last month, Andrea joined to help out specifically with GNOME Accounts and has done an awesome job. He’s cleaned up Request Tracker, stayed on top of new requests, and helped with some outstanding and older requests. (And a big thanks to Olav and Jeff and everyone who has helped mentor Andrea).

I can’t thank Andrea enough for all of his help and chances are if you’ve requested git access, mango password resets or anything else Accounts related in the last month, it was Andrea helping you.

A follow-up on GNOME 3 myths

2010-01-17T16:03:42+00:00

Friday I wrote a blog post kicking off a wiki page on debunking GNOME 3 myths. The dozen or so comments left on that blog post highlight perfectly why we need a wiki page that debunks myths – and it’s a good place to start to add to the wiki page. (And refine it, I think some of the comments are valid).

If you’re a GNOME developer, please give the GNOME 3 Myths page a look over and add any questions that you have been asked.

Thanks!

Debunking GNOME 3.0 Myths

2010-01-15T13:44:37+00:00

Change is hard. People go through six predictable stages as they adjust to change, which I learned at a former company. From Changecycle.com:

People react, respond and adjust to change in a sequence of six predictable stages. The Change Cycle model identifies the thoughts, feelings and behaviors associated with each stage of change.

Loss
Doubt
Discomfort
Discovery
Understanding
Integration

With GNOME 3.0 coming out later this year, there is certain to be fear, uncertainty and doubt associated with the changes in GNOME’s user interface and applications.

Diego had an awesome idea that we should start a PR campaign and / or meme to start debunking this myths. It’s best to get out ahead of these things, and with that I give you: Debunking GNOME 3.0 Myths.

Please consider this page just a stub at the moment, but if you have heard of any misconceptions around GNOME 3.0 or you’re a developer on a project and have an idea or myth to debunk, please add it! It will take all of us through the year to keep this page up to date and help our users and journalists informed of what the changes in the GNOME experience entail.

Thanks in advance!

GNOME Marketing Team Meeting Today

2010-01-14T15:27:06+00:00

I probably should have blogged this sooner, but the GNOME Marketing Team is having a meeting today at 22:00 GMT / 17:00 US EST.

The meeting will be held in #marketing on GIMPNet IRC. The agenda is here.

See you there!

Cutting the cable

2010-01-07T22:31:46+00:00

I’m an entertainment junkie. I own hundreds of music CD’s, books, movies and am an early adopter of Blu-Ray. My usual routine once my two youngest children are in bed at 8 pm is to plop down on my couch, put my notebook on my lap and use that while watching my pretty 60″ TV.

I’ve received my TV content from DirecTV for the last ten years since we built this house – primarily because I’m a huge (American) football fan, and my team, the Green Bay Packers, are out of market where I live and DirecTV has a monopoly on the NFL package to be able to watch my team.

I’ve been happy with the television service (even though it’s the most compressed of all high-def signals) but their customer service is atrocious. About once a year I have a run-in with them that gets my blood boiling, but the other 364 days of the year I don’t have to think about them – it just works.

Almost a year ago I got a great deal on a Mac Mini and bought it to try out Boxee. I’ve ripped my music and movie collection to my NAS and Boxee gave me the ability to stream that straight to my TV plus their collection of Internet content I could stream as well, such as The Daily Show, Hulu and more. My best friend uses Plex, and both Plex & Boxee are based on the XBMC upstream code which does an awesome job of playing back any file you throw at it.

I’ve loved Boxee – the user experience has only gotten better from the Alpha to the Beta that launched today (the screenshots don’t do it justice). I’ve thought about, but never very seriously, getting rid of DirecTV and going Internet only. With Netflix streaming (both in Boxee and on my Xbox 360), Hulu and other apps available in Boxee, there’s a lot of content I can get if I’m willing to be patient for DVD releases of my favorite shows that I can’t watch in real time.

And then in early November, my DirecTV high-def DVR started to die. And it was a painful experience having to call in to their tech support once a week, rebooting my box every few days until they finally agreed to swap it out a month later (I pay $5 / month to lease the box from them – I don’t even own it!) I was pretty frustrated with the entire process, and this is a long enough story as it is, so I won’t go in to all the details, but when I received my bill in early December and found out they charged me $20 to replace the box, I was livid. They never bothered to inform me of the charge or asked for permission in charging me, and you may think “It’s only $20!” – but when I called to ask them to refund it, they refused – so I asked them to refund my $100 monthly charge for November as my box didn’t work and I didn’t feel that I received the service I paid for and they still refused, I started to think about all these options.

After a long conversation with my wife on the advantages and disadvantages of not having cable or satellite (she doesn’t watch TV anyway) I’ve decided to cut the cord. I’m lucky enough to have a nice HDTV antenna on my roof right next to the satellite dish and all the coax terminates at one spot in the basement, so re-wiring won’t be tough.

We spend just under a $100 month on DirecTV (cheapest package, 3 boxes for 3 TVs, DVR service and HD service). I figure with a small investment in buying some new hardware it will pay itself back in 3 months (considering I had already bought the Mac Mini a year ago):

HD Homerun: Dual tuner off-air HD tuner with a network jack that any PC in the house can connect to for watching or recording live TV: $150
HD amplifier & terminators: $35
Digital converter boxes for the other 2 TVs in the house to get off-air: $20 each off Ebay
Elgato EyeTV PVR software for Mac: $80 (maybe, see below)

The one kink in my plan is I realized that if I buy the EyeTV to record TV on to the Mac Mini it can only record one show at a time, even though I have a dual-tuner HD Homerun. There are a few shows like NBC Thursday night comedies and Fringe on Fox that I like that air at the same time, so that’s a challenge. One of the major reasons I bought the HD Homerun is the fact that’s dual tuner but also that it has a network jack and works on Linux. One option is to install MythTV on an older computer and use that. MythTV has native support for the HD Homerun and I can mount my NAS via NFS and just point Boxee at it, though there are some questions whether Boxee and XBMC can read the .nuv files that MythTV records in.

It’s a pretty cool time seeing these convergence devices come to life. The Internet is evolving to add video content, whether it’s TV shows like Hulu or movies & DVD on Netflix. CES is happening this week and seeing the Boxee Box, Popbox and Iomega set top boxes only support this point. There are still some challenges – I’m going to have to give up watching my favorite football team, live sports on ESPN, and waiting to watch some of my TV shows until they release on DVD, but I think it’s worth trying.

The content companies are going to have to evolve. They’re going to need better customer service and better ways to allow consumers access to content. (And I’m willing to put up with the movie studios stupid rental window on Netflix if it means more streaming content). My hardware arrived today and now I’m off to start installing all this stuff….