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My Media System

Rage

So by accident I was looking through Rasterman’s blog and found out that he has been developing a menu system for movie playback using the E17 libraries.

I downloaded the demo movie and was fairly impressed with the nice effects. So off I go to download the thing to evaluate the good and bad things about it. It turns out to be pretty snappy on my machine but also really buggy. It is probably at the same stage bug wise as mms was 2-3 years ago. I think the lesson I learned was that you can do some cool stuff with gstreamer and that using the E17 could be cool, so I’m definitely going to look into that.

Other than that it was a cool tech demo of some of the things E17 is capable of and it that regard it did a fantastic job.

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HTPC My Media System

The future of HTPCs

So I was thinking today about what the future of home theater PC’s and where mmsv2 (or actually the next big version) fits into this.

I’ve come to the conclusion that what is really missing currently is integration. Your HTPC just stores the media and doesn’t really interface with the rest of the world. You don’t want to use your remote control to tag and organize your image collection. You want your HTPC for presentation, sort of like when you do a presentation. It should be slightly more advanced but not much. Instead the advanced jobs should be done on a regular PC and the synced with the HTPC.

This brings up the next question. How do we get there? I think firstly the interface should be designed with this in mind and then for the most used application, such as F-spot, a plugin could be written in that app to synchronize with mms.

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Personal

Back again

So I’m back in Denmark. It was very hot on that little island and it seems the heat has followed me all the way back. Anyway I have my first exam of this semester tomorrow so I haven’t been doing much else for the last couple of days than reading up on that material. I wanted to apply the no-X SDL patch (with some modifications) for mmsv2 but haven’t found the time yet. After the exam tomorrow I’ll probably get it done.

Categories
Books

A world without time

I just finished the wonderful book: A world without time by Palle Yourgrau. What I really liked about the book, other than introducing me to the work of Gödel, was the philosophical angle on the theory presented including on the relativity theory and quantum mechanics. An excellent review of the book.

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Books

Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society

I just finished reading Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society by James Boyle. It’s really an excellent book which brings up a lot of different subjects to shed more light and from new angles to the touchy subject of the property rights. The book is a bit heavy on legal terms but I managed to get through it 🙂

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My Media System

News from 1.1.0 land

So I have been fixing 1.1.0 to try and get rid of enough bug so that people can actually start to test it. Currently I’m fixing the Movie plugin. I found a much better way to integrate movie playback (tv viewing) between mms and mplayer so that will be available soon. What is great about it is the tighter integration (no need to define keys for mplayer specifically, just use the mms ones) and much better performance than what was possible using the old approach (the code in current patch-118). Anyway I’ll publish it soon, it just needs a little more tweaking.

Categories
On the web

Crazy patents

Found a list of crazy patents today. Some of them are really funny, such as the Religious Meditation Apparatus and Vehicle mounted toilet seat.

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My Media System

Great new stuff for the 1.0.7

A lot of nice things has happened in the 1.0.7 branch of mmsv2. A new graphical audio mode has been implemented (screenshots) and today I finally got a chance to look into the kcachegrind tool which I mentioned in an earlier blog post. I found two major sources of performance degration and fixed them. Performance should be a lot better for image heavy stuff (pictures and graphical modes) and for large folders/playlists.

In other news Fredrik Wikström has implemented a plugin so that one can write python scripts for the next big release of mmsv2. This is really one of the coolest things anyone has contributed to mms and I’m really psyched to find out what things people will produce using it.

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Personal

Reached a milestone in my rating of movies on imdb

I’ve been watching quite a lot of movies lately and not to long ago I rated the 200th movie on imdb (yeah for nice round numbers :)). I really like imdb a lot. It’s very easy to find information about movies and the rating seems to be very fair (well at least most of the time :)). It is a lot better than what you find then looking at the cover of movie at the video store (How anyone can give Brothers Grimm 5/5 stars is really beyond my comprehension ;-)). Here you can see the ratings.

Categories
My Media System Personal

mmsv2 coming to EFIKA

Seems my project proposal for porting mmsv2 to the ppc machine EFIKA got approved so they will be sending me one of the machines. Really looking forward to getting this device, it seems like a really nice low-powered computer.