Archive for August, 2010

Lightspark 0.4.4 released

Archi­tec­ture of the pro­posed upcom­ing Advanced Graph­ics Engine

Lightspark 0.4.4 has been released today. Thanks a lot to all the peo­ple that made this release pos­si­ble. Beside the usual amount of bug fixes sev­eral new fea­tures have been included

  • Local­iza­tion sup­port (using gettext)
  • Action­Script excep­tion han­dling support
  • More robust net­work handling
  • Streams con­trols (Play/Pause/Stop)

It should be noted that, although now video streams con­trols are sup­ported they’ll be not usable in most YouTube videos as mouse event dis­patch­ing to con­trols is still clob­bered by miss­ing mask­ing support.

Lightspark now sup­ports local­ized error mes­sages, but we miss trans­la­tions! So I’d like to invite any user (non devel­op­ers included) will­ing to help Lightspark to con­tribute the trans­la­tion for his/her native language.

I’d also like to give some insight what is being worked on for the next release (0.4.5). First of all the plug­inized audio back­end is now mature enough to be merged upstream, this is the first step toward sup­port for mul­ti­ple audio back­ends. That said any­way Lightspark will always focus on func­tion­al­ity and not on the amount of back­ends offered. We’ll work to offer a very small num­ber of fully work­ing backends.

In the mean time we’re also dis­cussing a new faster and more pow­er­ful graph­ics archi­tec­ture. My pro­posal is a mixed software/hardware ren­der­ing pipeline, some­how inspired by mod­ern com­posit­ing win­dow mangers. Sta­tic (defined in the SWF file) and dynamic (gen­er­ated using Action­Script code) geome­tries will be ren­dered in soft­ware using cairo and exploit­ing the thread pool to be scal­able on multi core archi­tec­tures. The result­ing sur­faces and decoded video frames (if any) will be uploaded using Pixel Buffer Objects to offload the work to the video card (this usu­ally involves a DMA trans­fer). OpenGL will then be used to blit the var­i­ous ren­dered com­po­nents on screen, while apply­ing fil­ters, effects and blending.

That’s all folks. As always test­ing from as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble is crit­i­cal for the suc­cess of the project, so please try out this release and report any crashes/weird issues and any­thing you don’t like. I’d like to put an empha­sis about this: never assume a bug is already known. If you hit a crash take a look at launch­pad bug tracker. If your issue is not already reported, please do it!


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Lightspark 0.4.4 released

Archi­tec­ture of the pro­posed upcom­ing Advanced Graph­ics Engine

Lightspark 0.4.4 has been released today. Thanks a lot to all the peo­ple that made this release pos­si­ble. Beside the usual amount of bug fixes sev­eral new fea­tures have been included

  • Local­iza­tion sup­port (using gettext)
  • Action­Script excep­tion han­dling support
  • More robust net­work handling
  • Streams con­trols (Play/Pause/Stop)

It should be noted that, although now video streams con­trols are sup­ported they’ll be not usable in most YouTube videos as mouse event dis­patch­ing to con­trols is still clob­bered by miss­ing mask­ing support.

Lightspark now sup­ports local­ized error mes­sages, but we miss trans­la­tions! So I’d like to invite any user (non devel­op­ers included) will­ing to help Lightspark to con­tribute the trans­la­tion for his/her native language.

I’d also like to give some insight what is being worked on for the next release (0.4.5). First of all the plug­inized audio back­end is now mature enough to be merged upstream, this is the first step toward sup­port for mul­ti­ple audio back­ends. That said any­way Lightspark will always focus on func­tion­al­ity and not on the amount of back­ends offered. We’ll work to offer a very small num­ber of fully work­ing backends.

In the mean time we’re also dis­cussing a new faster and more pow­er­ful graph­ics archi­tec­ture. My pro­posal is a mixed software/hardware ren­der­ing pipeline, some­how inspired by mod­ern com­posit­ing win­dow mangers. Sta­tic (defined in the SWF file) and dynamic (gen­er­ated using Action­Script code) geome­tries will be ren­dered in soft­ware using cairo and exploit­ing the thread pool to be scal­able on multi core archi­tec­tures. The result­ing sur­faces and decoded video frames (if any) will be uploaded using Pixel Buffer Objects to offload the work to the video card (this usu­ally involves a DMA trans­fer). OpenGL will then be used to blit the var­i­ous ren­dered com­po­nents on screen, while apply­ing fil­ters, effects and blending.

That’s all folks. As always test­ing from as many peo­ple as pos­si­ble is crit­i­cal for the suc­cess of the project, so please try out this release and report any crashes/weird issues and any­thing you don’t like. I’d like to put an empha­sis about this: never assume a bug is already known. If you hit a crash take a look at launch­pad bug tracker. If your issue is not already reported, please do it!


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Getting things GNOME and Remember the milk: call for testers!

Aloha planet,

as you may know, Get­ting Things GNOME is a todo-manager soft­ware that, among other things, can syn­chro­nize the things-you-really-should-be-doing-instead-of-reading-this-post with var­i­ous sources.

One of its most pop­u­lar fea­tures is the abil­ity to syn­chro­nize with Remem­ber the Milk.

For the next release of GTG, I’ve writ­ten a new ver­sion of that syn­chro­niza­tion, with fea­tures a vari­ety of nice things. Among those:

  • back­ground sync (set up once and for­get about it)
  • sup­port for RTM recur­rent tasks
  • roll­back­ing of par­tial syncs
  • on-the-fly sync from GTG to RTM

Before releas­ing that, how­ever, I’d like to do have it well tested,  to ensure that no harm is done to your pre­cious todo items, so.. I’m look­ing for testers!

If you have the 5 min­utes nec­es­sary and you’re inter­ested in try­ing new stuff even before it hits a PPA, execute

tar czf gtg_backup.tgz .local/share/gtg/  #just in case, backup of your gtg install (if any)
sudo aptitude install bzr
bzr branch lp:~gtg-user/gtg/all_the_backends_merge_requests  gtg_backends
cd gtg_backends
./scripts/debug.sh -d #this lauches a debug version of GTG that doesn't touch your own GTG tasks

And go to Edit->Backends to start (your exist­ing GTG tasks won’t be touched, so you’re safe).

You’re more than wel­come to play with the other back­ends as well (and report bugs, as they should be ready for being released as well). Those are, at the moment:

  • twit­ter
  • identi.ca
  • tomboy
  • gnote (needs devel­op­ment ver­sion of gnote)
  • launch­pad
  • local file

If you find a bug, please report it to https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gtg (link­ing this post).

If you don’t fine any, leave a com­ment here, so we can know that we’re good (^_^).

Thanks!

12 Comments

Getting things GNOME and Remember the milk: call for testers!

Aloha planet,

as you may know, Get­ting Things GNOME is a todo-manager soft­ware that, among other things, can syn­chro­nize the things-you-really-should-be-doing-instead-of-reading-this-post with var­i­ous sources.

One of its most pop­u­lar fea­tures is the abil­ity to syn­chro­nize with Remem­ber the Milk.

For the next release of GTG, I’ve writ­ten a new ver­sion of that syn­chro­niza­tion, with fea­tures a vari­ety of nice things. Among those:

  • back­ground sync (set up once and for­get about it)
  • sup­port for RTM recur­rent tasks
  • roll­back­ing of par­tial syncs
  • on-the-fly sync from GTG to RTM

Before releas­ing that, how­ever, I’d like to do have it well tested,  to ensure that no harm is done to your pre­cious todo items, so.. I’m look­ing for testers!

If you have the 5 min­utes nec­es­sary and you’re inter­ested in try­ing new stuff even before it hits a PPA, execute

tar czf gtg_backup.tgz .local/share/gtg/  #just in case, backup of your gtg install (if any)
sudo aptitude install bzr
bzr branch lp:~gtg-user/gtg/all_the_backends_merge_requests  gtg_backends
cd gtg_backends
./scripts/debug.sh -d #this lauches a debug version of GTG that doesn't touch your own GTG tasks

And go to Edit->Backends to start (your exist­ing GTG tasks won’t be touched, so you’re safe).

You’re more than wel­come to play with the other back­ends as well (and report bugs, as they should be ready for being released as well). Those are, at the moment:

  • twit­ter
  • identi.ca
  • tomboy
  • gnote (needs devel­op­ment ver­sion of gnote)
  • launch­pad
  • local file

If you find a bug, please report it to https://bugs.edge.launchpad.net/gtg (link­ing this post).

If you don’t fine any, leave a com­ment here, so we can know that we’re good (^_^).

Thanks!

12 Comments

Lightspark 0.4.3 final release

I’m offi­cially announc­ing Lightspark 0.4.3. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing fea­tures as been added since the RC and a good amount of bug fixes thanks to user reports. The aggre­gate changelog since 0.4.2 is huge! Here it is:

  • Liq­uid lay­out support
  • Faster ren­der­ing of the input layer
  • Reduced mem­ory consumption
  • Sup­port for H263/MP3 videos
  • Smoother play­back of audio and video
  • Fall­back on Gnash for older clips

Many users asked why vimeo, hulu and many oth­ers video shar­ing sites don’t work while youtube does. The answer is, although flash based video play­ers looks sim­ple a lot of action script code is actu­ally being exe­cuted under the hood. Sup­port for youtube has been a pri­or­ity given it’s huge pop­u­lar­ity but I’d like to clar­ify that lightspark is not a youtube spe­cific hack and that over time sup­port will come for any site.

As a way to help new devel­oper join my effort I’d like to launch a “site adopt­ing” cam­paign. Devel­op­ers that are will­ing to work on lightspark, but are scared by the com­plex­ity of the chal­lenge can choose a site using flash that is important/useful for them and work to imple­ment the needed fea­tures. To help them I’m most always online in the #lightspark IRC chan­nel and avail­able to tutor them.

As a clos­ing news, after the last post a radeon user helped to shed some light over the ati related issues. radeon users are urged to upgrade at least the mesa 7.8.2 to try lightspark as the sup­port for the needed GL fea­tures got def­i­nitely bet­ter. Keep report­ing bugs if any­thing is not work­ing even after the upgrade. More­over, I’ve dis­cov­ered today that fire­fox older than ver­sion 3.5.11 will not work as it misses a needed plu­gin inter­face, so keep your sys­tems updated!


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22 Comments

Lightspark 0.4.3 final release

I’m offi­cially announc­ing Lightspark 0.4.3. A cou­ple of inter­est­ing fea­tures as been added since the RC and a good amount of bug fixes thanks to user reports. The aggre­gate changelog since 0.4.2 is huge! Here it is:

  • Liq­uid lay­out support
  • Faster ren­der­ing of the input layer
  • Reduced mem­ory consumption
  • Sup­port for H263/MP3 videos
  • Smoother play­back of audio and video
  • Fall­back on Gnash for older clips

Many users asked why vimeo, hulu and many oth­ers video shar­ing sites don’t work while youtube does. The answer is, although flash based video play­ers looks sim­ple a lot of action script code is actu­ally being exe­cuted under the hood. Sup­port for youtube has been a pri­or­ity given it’s huge pop­u­lar­ity but I’d like to clar­ify that lightspark is not a youtube spe­cific hack and that over time sup­port will come for any site.

As a way to help new devel­oper join my effort I’d like to launch a “site adopt­ing” cam­paign. Devel­op­ers that are will­ing to work on lightspark, but are scared by the com­plex­ity of the chal­lenge can choose a site using flash that is important/useful for them and work to imple­ment the needed fea­tures. To help them I’m most always online in the #lightspark IRC chan­nel and avail­able to tutor them.

As a clos­ing news, after the last post a radeon user helped to shed some light over the ati related issues. radeon users are urged to upgrade at least the mesa 7.8.2 to try lightspark as the sup­port for the needed GL fea­tures got def­i­nitely bet­ter. Keep report­ing bugs if any­thing is not work­ing even after the upgrade. More­over, I’ve dis­cov­ered today that fire­fox older than ver­sion 3.5.11 will not work as it misses a needed plu­gin inter­face, so keep your sys­tems updated!


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, ,

22 Comments

Lightspark 0.4.3 RC1

Today has been pub­lished the first release can­di­date of Lightspark 0.4.3. Source tar­balls are avail­able as usual from launch­pad. Pre­build pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Mav­er­ick are avail­able from the PPA as usual.

The new fea­tures in this release are

  • Faster ren­der­ing
  • Reduced mem­ory consumption
  • Sup­port for H263/MP3 video (using FFm­peg)
  • Smoother audio and video playback

Be sure to try this out and report bugs in launch­pad and our irc chan­nel (irc://irc.freenode.org/lightspark). Users of radeon cards (and the open source radeon dri­ver) are espe­cially invited to try lightspark. Many radeon users com­plained about crashes and weird ren­der­ings which are often caused by miss­ing fea­tures in the dri­vers. It would be nice to gather as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble on working/non work­ing cards to open a unique bug report upstream.

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17 Comments

Lightspark 0.4.3 RC1

Today has been pub­lished the first release can­di­date of Lightspark 0.4.3. Source tar­balls are avail­able as usual from launch­pad. Pre­build pack­ages for Ubuntu Lucid and Mav­er­ick are avail­able from the PPA as usual.

The new fea­tures in this release are

  • Faster ren­der­ing
  • Reduced mem­ory consumption
  • Sup­port for H263/MP3 video (using FFm­peg)
  • Smoother audio and video playback

Be sure to try this out and report bugs in launch­pad and our irc chan­nel (irc://irc.freenode.org/lightspark). Users of radeon cards (and the open source radeon dri­ver) are espe­cially invited to try lightspark. Many radeon users com­plained about crashes and weird ren­der­ings which are often caused by miss­ing fea­tures in the dri­vers. It would be nice to gather as much infor­ma­tion as pos­si­ble on working/non work­ing cards to open a unique bug report upstream.

Flattr this

, , ,

17 Comments

Getting Things GNOME!         —         GSoC review (#11)

Hello planet!
I’m back from GUADEC. It was my first con­fer­ence about open source and it was great.
I’ve found par­tic­u­larly inspir­ing the talk by Guil­laume Desmottes about Telepa­thy and Epiphany, which can be great to extend GTG pos­si­bil­i­ties in col­lab­o­ra­tion.
The talk by Jake Edge about pro­mot­ing free soft­ware projects was also very inter­est­ing, in par­tic­u­lar for the young Lightspark project (that went com­pletely unno­ticed for a few months before show­ing up on planet GNOME).

Thanks to the excit­ing talks and peo­ple at GUADEC,   the GTG team (even the peo­ple who were not there!) has been work­ing fer­vently on a nice rewrite of some parts of GTG core, along with a lot of unit-tests. Hope­fully, a lot of bugs will be closed thanks to this, and GTG will be nicer to code.

Some of the GTG peo­ple at GUADEC. From left to right: Bertrand Rousseau, Karlo Jez, Lionel Dri­cot and me.

As for my Google Sum­mer of Code on Get­ting Things Gnome sup­port for mul­ti­ple back­ends, this week has seen:

  • a port of my Evo­lu­tion plu­gin as a back­end (that was the last one planned)
  • refac­tor­ing of the Twit­ter plu­gin to get autho­riza­tion through Oauth (using  the tweepy library, thanks Tante for the hint)
  • docs, docs, docs

Next week, I’ll keep doc­u­ment­ing and test­ing. I should also write a guide on how to write new back­ends. See you next week!

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Getting Things GNOME!         —         GSoC review (#11)

Hello planet!
I’m back from GUADEC. It was my first con­fer­ence about open source and it was great.
I’ve found par­tic­u­larly inspir­ing the talk by Guil­laume Desmottes about Telepa­thy and Epiphany, which can be great to extend GTG pos­si­bil­i­ties in col­lab­o­ra­tion.
The talk by Jake Edge about pro­mot­ing free soft­ware projects was also very inter­est­ing, in par­tic­u­lar for the young Lightspark project (that went com­pletely unno­ticed for a few months before show­ing up on planet GNOME).

Thanks to the excit­ing talks and peo­ple at GUADEC,   the GTG team (even the peo­ple who were not there!) has been work­ing fer­vently on a nice rewrite of some parts of GTG core, along with a lot of unit-tests. Hope­fully, a lot of bugs will be closed thanks to this, and GTG will be nicer to code.

Some of the GTG peo­ple at GUADEC. From left to right: Bertrand Rousseau, Karlo Jez, Lionel Dri­cot and me.

As for my Google Sum­mer of Code on Get­ting Things Gnome sup­port for mul­ti­ple back­ends, this week has seen:

  • a port of my Evo­lu­tion plu­gin as a back­end (that was the last one planned)
  • refac­tor­ing of the Twit­ter plu­gin to get autho­riza­tion through Oauth (using  the tweepy library, thanks Tante for the hint)
  • docs, docs, docs

Next week, I’ll keep doc­u­ment­ing and test­ing. I should also write a guide on how to write new back­ends. See you next week!

No Comments