Le blog de Olivier Crête » Gnome

GUPnP 0.18 (and GSSDP 0.12) harmful to VoIP calls

ocrete — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:18:02 +0000

Due to unintentional behavior breakage in the newest versions of GUPnP and GSSDP, the UPnP NAT traversal in all VoIP applications that use Farsight2 is currently broken. This includes Empathy, Pidgin, aMSN, etc. I advise distributors to just stay with the older GUPnP 0.16 (and GSSDP 0.10) releases until this is sorted out. For those who care, the details are on bugzilla.

Update: I’ve released GUPnP-IGD 0.2.1 that works around these problems.

Desktop Summit 2011

ocrete — Fri, 05 Aug 2011 08:55:26 +0000

Just like everyone else on Planet GNOME,

You are all cordially invited to my talk: Improving the quality of video calls on the Free Desktop. I will try to explain why Skype’s video calls look so much better than ours and what I’ve been doing to fix it, and how there is much more to do.

Now that WebRTC and RTCWeb are coming, it is more critical than ever that we can have good quality video calls in the GNOME platform so we can stay relevant.

I’d also like to thank my employer, Collabora, for once again sponsoring my trip. And don’t forget the Collabora party on Tuesday night!

GnomeICU is no more

ocrete — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 04:29:01 +0000

On July 9, 2000, my first patch to a Free Software project was accepted. It was a patch to fix a small bug in GnomeICU, which was then the best ICQ client for GNOME. From there, I contributed a few more patches, then a lot more, then I re-wrote the protocol backend (to use the newer protocol) and before you knew it, I was the co-maintainer. The original author left, another maintainer joined, then left, and, in 2004, I was left as the only active maintainer. Then I lost interest and became the unmaintainer. I haven’t made a release since 2007, or written any code to justify one, so with GNOME 3 coming up, and after many years of non-maintenance, I have to admit the truth, GnomeICU, as a project, has died many years ago.

There were some changes left in the git tree, along with many translation updates, so I made a last release, for anyone who cares. To my surprise, we still get between 50 and 150 downloads per month from Sourceforge, hopefully it will be useful to some.

It was a fun project, I spent countless nights having fun programming, and I hope other did too. I learned a lot about programming, communities, etc. But more importantly, I’ve met some amazing people like Vincent Untz (rumor is that I committed his first patch to a GNOME project), Seb Bacher and even Philippe Kalaf.

Adventures in the shell

ocrete — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 06:48:29 +0000

After months of envy, I decided that since GNOME 3 is to be released in almost two weeks, it was time to try it out. I must say that is is pretty damn cool. Yes, it has a few annoying bugs and glitches, but nothing out of the ordinary for a first release. It is definitely going in the right direction.

That said, we’re in 2011, and it’s still impossible to use OpenGL on two monitors without tearing. How incredible is that! The thing is, my second monitor is a 50″ Plasma TV and I really hate tearing there when I watch a movie. So when I have two monitors, I want the VSync to be on the second monitor. Luckily NVidia (yea sorry) has an environment variable to select which monitor an OpenGL application syncs on, the annoying thing is that this has to be set before the application is started. So after a little messing around with Looking Glass (which is pretty amazing), I was able to set the variable into the shell and have it re-exec itself. After getting that to work, I couldn’t resist writing an extension to do it for me. Be warned that if you switch screens at runtime, you also want to apply the patch from bug #645408 for now.

Update: I’ve been informed by our very own Daniel Stone that free drivers are better and can actually do the VSync correctly.

GnomeICU at the forefront of tabs

ocrete — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 15:36:11 +0000

There seems to be this new fad at adding tabs, but GnomeICU has had them for years, since 2002. You guys are like sooo late.

Summer of Code

ocrete — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:21:31 +0000

Students! There are only a few days left (until Monday) for you to submit your Google summer of code applications. This year, I’m hoping to mentor students working on Farsight 2 or on integrating Farsight in various applications. The most interesting project I’m proposing this year is adding plugins for the various non-free protocols to Farsight (see details), MSN is particularly easy since most of the reverse-engineering has already been done, its just a matter of coding it. GStreamer has a page on how to write a good application (hint hint, Farsight’s project are part of GStreamer this year!). I’m also a mentor on Gnome & Gentoo in case anything interesting is proposed there, so if you have good idea, go submit them now, time is running out!
Update: Google has extended the application period for one more week, so there’s still time… And we already have a good applicant for MSN, but please do apply for Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, etc!

Farsight at fosdem

ocrete — Sun, 24 Feb 2008 13:37:21 +0000

Its my first time at fosdem, and I’m really impressed by the sheer size of the conference, every European Free Software developer seems to be here (its really nice to see old friends and meet new people, there just seems to never be enough time to see them all!). Also too many talks at the same time, too many interesting things to see! I also got to give my Farsight 2 talk (slides here) and the talking part when pretty well I think, but the demo sucked. We never got the network to work properly (not trying it more than 5 minutes before the talk ended up not being a good idea). So I had to do it locally with one camera and 2 test sources, its sad, considering how well it worked at linux.conf.au (see the LCA video to see it work). Also considering how many bugs I fixed since LCA and that I even got h.264 to work.

A Peek at Farsight 2

ocrete — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 18:41:26 +0000

First, this is my first post on Planet Gnome, so I’ll introduce myself. I’m one of the developers of GnomeICU and Farsight. I work for Collabora, mostly on Farsight and related things. For those who don’t know, Farsight is the GStreamer based audio/video conferencing framework used in Telepathy. Its most prominent platform is currently Nokia’s Tablet, but its coming to a desktop near you soon.

For the last two months, I’ve been working on a complete redesign of Farsight, in an effort we call Farsight 2. The new generation RTP plugin is based on the excellent RTP implementation by Collabora’s own Wim Taymans. With it, we gain some exciting new features, most prominently A/V synchronization and multi-party conferencing. Also, the first generation wasn’t designed with video in mind and it wasn’t nice, but this time we’re trying to make it right. It’s now a GStreamer element that implements an interface, so it can easily be used in GStreamer based applications to give some of the integrated features Telepathy is designed for. I’m also trying to have nice unit tests, so we can try not to have the same kind of regressions we keep on fighting with Farsight 1. We also want to keep the API as simple as possible and well documented.

This week, I’ve finally reached an important milestone.. it works! So I had to make a screencast (sorry for cutting it a bit short at the end and no, its not slow, its the screencast thats 10fps):

For those who want to try, you need the CVS HEAD of gst-plugins bad, and for the demo gui, a patch to gst-python. Then you can try my git tree. It’s all very new, so if it breaks, you keep the pieces. I’d also like to thank Philippe Khalaf and Youness Alaoui who worked a lot on the design and all the people who wrote the code that was carried over from previous versions of Farsight.

Update: Oops, the git repository was not fetchable by http, its now fixed… Updated again: now we have a gitview and git server, so I’ll let the link point there instead

GUADEC 2007

ocrete — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 16:16:49 +0000

Last week was GUADEC in Birmingham, it was really fun, I got to see some old friends and also meet many people that I only knew from IRC, including many Collaborans, they really are a nice bunch. And even some Gentoo developers! There were lots of interesting talks, great Ale (and Pimm’s!).

Nokia also released a Developer Preview of the new RTCOM software which includes the latest version of Farsight. So you can now do calls to SIP services on your Nokia N800. We hope many people try it and find the interoperability problems before the next release. Many SIP implementations are at best barely standard and we’ve end up finding subtle problems with many services with tested.

See you all next year in Istanbul!!

Birmingham

ocrete — Sat, 14 Jul 2007 18:19:30 +0000

Je suis arrivé à Birmingham cet après-midi pour GUADEC, on reste dans le Etap Hotel avec plein plein d’autres Gnomeurs. Durant l’après-midi, on a fait un tour du centre de la ville, c’est plein de batiments récent. Rien de bien extra-ordinaire à visiter pour le touriste en moi. Donc je suis dans le lobby de l’hotel, où il y a du free wifi avec les Gnomeurs!