I promoted the ogg-support 0.9 to Extras repository. Feedback is welcome.
I’ve also managed to get the tags (except for the album) to show up in Metalayer Crawler. But that code isn’t even in SVN yet.
Kilikali shows all the tags properly and based on the GStreamer debug prints the MLC also gets the album tag but for some reason doesn’t write it to ~/.meta_storage SQL db.
Too bad the MLC is closed source so I can’t debug further why it rejects the album tag.
I added the Theora support back to ogg-support and uploaded the source packages to extras-devel builder.
I didn’t change the mimetypes though, so all *.ogg files are seen as audio files even though they may contain video streams as well. I quickly transcoded the Big Buck Bunny video to lower resolution ogg containing Theora video and vorbis audio. The Media Player was able to show it although I should have used even lower resolution (and lower audio bitrate).
Comments are welcome.
Thanks to Movial Kilikali got a modern UI and looks quite nice now:
Kilikali development has moved to a GIT tree (branch generic-2) hosted by linux.onarm.com.
Although the UI got improved and the playback on n8×0 got fixes there are still some bigger task to be done. E.g. adding single files, adding directories recursively and skipping unknown media types. Integration with Light Media Scanner has also been discussed.
I finally compiled ogg-support for Diablo too. It’s available through the maemo downloads page.
I don’t know why the Chinook version didn’t work in Diablo any more. And I didn’t really want to start debugging why the Maemo’s mime libraries and the closed source Metalayer Crawler don’t want to work with the mimetypes copied from a desktop system. So, now there’s only one mimetype: audio/x-vorbis and no support for speex or theora anymore. On the good side, e.g. File Manager can now start OGGs to Media Player.
New feature is a Control Panel plugin to ignore the OGGs from the Maps application. After installing ogg-support wait several minutes for the Metalayer Crawler to finish and then start the CP plugin. Metalayer Crawler seems to be much much slower if you have the Media Player open while it indexes the files.
ARM (and Movial) has published a new site that provides Open Source components, middleware and utilities used to build a Linux Mobile software stack on ARM.
All components (applications, libraries, etc) are in GIT repositories. The build tool is called Matrix. Matrix clones all components under one directory and compiles them with a single command. With another command you get JFFS2 image although that’s not as simple as it should be.
ARM would like to get all contributions directly to upstream instead of providing large code dumps and states that developers are encouraged to participate in discussion forums and developer community of respective components used on this site. That’s why there are no new mailing lists nor forums available for the platform. There is #matrixhelp (#matrix was taken) on irc.ipv6.oftc.net for Matrix related issues though. Developing the components is convenient if you are familiar with GIT. It’s easy to test if your patch works and send it to the upstream project.
One of the supported hardware platforms is n8×0 which is nice as it’s commonly available. The downside is the closed source nature of it. There are two projects, example-project and Kaze that has n8×0 configured as one target platform. Kaze has XFCE desktop instead of Matchbox desktop that the example-project uses.
Kaze boots but most features need still work. WLAN works without encryption but WEP and WPA encryptions need to be fixed. ALSA works with alsa plugins through the DSP but the closed source DSP tasks need to be copied to the build system. Kaze has normal X.Org instead of Xomap, so there’s no XV extension, only stubs.
There was (again) some discussion on #maemo about gcc options regarding VFP usage so I decided to make a simple test with different gcc options using the Maemo’s cs2005q3.2-glibc2.5-arm toolchain. Nothing new here for people already familiar with the floating point stuff.
In the test I compiled a very simple test code with different -mfpu and -mfloat-abi options, -O2 and -march=armv6 were given in all cases. The asm code is linked in the table. The code is a simple for loop which could be optimized to one round but based on the results it looks like the gcc didn’t do this kind of tricks.
Although you can ask the default options from the gcc I decided to test also without the options. The test was run on n810 and results are in the table below.
GCC none hard soft softfp none 0m 31.11sLooks like the default for -mfpu is vfp and the default for -mfloat-abi is soft.
There are three different values, one takes some seconds, one takes some tens of seconds and one takes some minutes.
This was expected as there are three different ways to do floating point math. In the slowest one the kernel emulates the fpu after cpu has run into undefined floating point opcode. This is extremely slow as there are a lot of context switches. A faster way to do the floating point math without the hardware is to let the gcc to compile the floating point math to the binary itself (and something in libgcc?). The fastest way is to use the VFP hardware.
Light Media Scanner now uses libivorbis (Tremor) instead of floating point libvorbis. Ogg-support now depends on newer build of libivorbis that exports the symbols needed by LMS.
There’s now ogg-support-lightmediascanner meta package which depends on lightmediascanner0-ogg for easier installation with the Application Manager.
Unfortunately all other issues with ogg-support still remain.
The ogg-support is listed as the The Pearl for OS2008, thanks! :)
Even though the ogg-support has got nice ratings in the download page, it doesn’t work perfectly on the OS2008. Most of the issues has some sort of workaround so I decided to make a summary post of them.
Ogg-support breaks VOIP calls
Ogg-support adds Speex voice codec to the system and it seems that the VOIP client advertises it as the first choice. If both parties have it installed, it’s selected. But. The VOIP engine (or whatever) doesn’t know or just refuses to use Speex, so the VOIP stream is not actually sent, properly at least.
If you delete the Speex’ GStreamer plugin, the calls seems to work nicely.
All Oggs from Map are listed in Media Player
The Metalayer Crawler adds all known media files to the Media Player’s Library. With ogg-support also Ogg files are recognized and added to the Library. Problem is that the Map application includes almost 2000 Oggs with N810 so they are added to the Library too.
A workaround is mentioned in the ogg-support’s help forum. It requires editing the SQL database after the files are added to the Library.
File Manager doesn’t launch Media Player for Oggs
I had to modify the mime type XML a bit to get File Manager to recognize videos and audios in Ogg container separately instead of just showing all *.ogg files as e.g. audio/x-vorbis. To be specific I had to remove the *.ogg pattern from the XML file.
It seems that the hildon_mime_open_file() in libhildonmime doesn’t launch the file without the *.ogg pattern tag in XML.
No workaround for this one.
PS. Many problems are reported in the Internet Tablet Talk’s forums. I don’t follow those frequently so please notify me in the garage’s forums about possible bugs, issues or workarounds. I do get a instant mail notification about those. Thanks.
Thanks to Joni Valtanen the Media Player should now play Oggs without restarting the device.
As another minor change I added NoDisplay to ogg-support’s MP’s .desktop file to prevent it from showing in the menus.
I added initial support for the built-in Media Player. It’s untrivial to get everything working properly as the FileManager, the Metalayer Crawler, and the Media Player are all close source applications and their behaviour is not really documented anywhere.
The change log:
Known issues:
The Crawler did fill in the artist etc. for my ogg files at one point, but I don’t know why. If you have any hints for these issues, I’m all ears :)
PS. The MP now plays oggs with Theora video and Vorbis audio too :)
I’ve been wanting to run things on OMAP’s DSP processor since the day I tested an OMAP1510 development board some years ago. Finally after a Proof of concept G.711 dsptask mail by Simon Pickering I decided to cut’n'paste that and try.
It seems to work decently although is has some minor and some major issues. They are probably solvable but at least didn’t work out of the box for me. For upgrading your application to match the Chinook’s APIs it’s stable enough, imo. Although I’m not sure which new APIs the Chinook alpha SDK includes, in addition to the new Hildon Desktop.
The Navigator application menu has a new big look. I’m sure some people will love it and some hate it, as usual. The menu behaviour seems a bit odd, like it remembers my last position in the menu when I reopen it, but is buggy.
Some of the old apps work, some not. I could get screen shots with my screen grabber, I could play OGGs with kilikali but although evince started up, it just jammed there. Mirage didn’t even start. And I couldn’t find File Manager from anywhere. Opera works OK when started from the application menu but the Hildon Desktop crashes when I try to open the Browser menu from Navigator. The most important app, osso-xterm, luckily works :)
Connectivity (wlan, bt, usbnet) seems to work.
Power saving, on the other hand, does not. Or at least for some reason the battery didn’t last even for a day when it lasts easily several days on the latest official release. I might have had the usbnet running though which can affect the situation.
