VLC gets a New Face
I do a bit of development with VLC for my work and for fun. I’m just a baby multimedia hacker, but hunting for bugs in VLC and writing new features has given me a ton of experience in wading through giant code bases, as well as tons and tons of experience searching for hard to find bugs using debugging tools like valgrind or gdb. Its also given me a good opportunity to understand how digtial multimedia works, and actually understand complex code like encoders, muxers, etc. All that aside though, I mostly deal with using VLC to stream things, and have always had reservations about the GUI that VLC used. The current stable uses a wx interface, and any of you who have used VLC know what this looks like. Its not overly obtuse, it doesn’t look bad, and its fairly intuitive, but wx isn’t widely used enough in any platform that VLC has a native look and feel. Other problems, mentioned in this blog post by the VLC developer j-b explains a bit more of why Qt is taking over WX in VLC. In case you don’t know what VLC looks like on linux/windows, heres a screenshot of the old wx interface (stripped of the window borders)
I’m happy to report though, that VLC has migrated to a Qt based gui that I have to say, is a lot nicer. The basic controls haven’t moved much, but the subtle changes here and there give it a much nicer feel than it used to have. You have to grab a nightly build in order to see the new changes, but that can easily be grabbed here. Look out though, some things might not work, remember nightlies are experimental/unstable versions! Anyway, here’s a picture of the shiny new interface VLC sports.
In addition to the new interface, there are many other new features that have been incorporated in the 0.9 release. Reworked filters provide for better A/V modifications on the fly ( I helped out a bit with the audio transcoding chain 
). There’s still the same support for any codec you can imagine (almost, of course), as well as support for advanced audio streaming features like RTCP (used to sync A/V data over a network) as well as many other new backend improvements that are extremely useful if you do any serious A/V streaming work. There will probably be another blog post in the near future about all the goodies power users get with VLC 0.9
Currently, the code base is in feature freeze, and all dev’s are encouraged to pin down and eliminate outstanding bugs before the alpha versions of VLC go out in a few weeks. I’m real excited about the new features coming out in the 0.9 release, so expect great improvements over the 0.8.6x releases that you’ve been seeing for the past few years. The Swiss army knife of media players is finally getting a shiny new veneer without sacrificing any of the power under the hood!
New Triangular Tessalations for Compiz
I actually coded this up a few weeks ago, and published the code, but didn’t tell anyone about it, so I figure its past due to try to get the word out. Basically, in addition to the being able to break the window into hexagonal and rectangular shapes, using my triangular tessellation code found in the extra-animations plugin, Compiz can now break up the window into triangular shapes. Its just best if you take a look at the video, though.
This effect is used currently in the explode and leaf spread effects. I also added hexagonal tesselation to the leafspread effect, a deficiency that was bothering me for a while. If you want these (and all my effects) grab the code I’ve written, compile, and install. Its located at git://anongit.compiz-fusion.org/users/kdubois/extra-animations. I wrote some brief instructions on how to compile things here. Unfortunately, I don’t have any easy to install packages anywhere (yet), so compiling the extra-animations plugin is required to get the added animations. I’m currently have some other sweet effects I hope to get out in short order, so check back soon! 
Have fun with the tessellations!
Banshee 1.0, A Great Gnome Media Player
Banshee 1.0 was released in the recent past, and I just got around to installing it to give it a whirl. All in all, I’m impressed.
I’ve been an Amarok user for the last few months, and before that I used Rhythmbox. I have an mp3 collection that makes load times and organization an important quality in a music library. Lately, I’ve grown to appreciate playlists more and more, and also like little things that look up artist or song information using 3rd party internet databases.
Banshee is a great media player, no question about that. I appreciate most the speed at which banshee does things. I’ve heard that banshee has been optimized for fast loading times of massive music collections, and on the whole, I would agree that banshee is capable of very fast load times. This release adds support to last.fm, a music playing web service that I’ve only recently come to appreciate. You can tune into last.fm streams right from within Banshee. It of course has podcast and radio support, which is always a plus. It also has options for dealing with CD’s. I’ve never dealt with CD’s, so this feature isn’t a big boon as far as I’m concerned, but I can see that the CD support in Banshee is pretty user friendly. One last thing that I really appreciate in Banshee is the little panel beneath the list of your library that will suggest similiar artists to the currently playing track, as well as give you other helpful information, like the other favorite tracks you’ve played by the current artist.
There are some things I’d like to see in Banshee that I think are lacking. First of all, configuration is limited, compared to the almost overbearing preferences dialog in Amarok. Second of all, I kinda grew accustomed to the main panel being a playlist, and the side panel being a drop down menu containing my music collection. It makes it easy to find a song and add it to a working playlist queue. In Banshee, the main panel is your music collection, and in order to create a playlist you have to mess around with dragging the song into a small playlist icon in the side panel. Its not the most intuitive way to create playlists, but its perfectly usable. I’ve heard that Banshee has mountable mp3 player sync support, but I haven’t found it yet…
Banshee’s UI is pretty good overall. First of all, and most importantly, its nice to see a powerful media player for GNOME environments. Amarok is natively for KDE, and it does clash a bit with the feel of the overall GNOME desktop. I really appreciate the “mini mode” where you can reduce the window to a small, simple user interface that has the basic media functions ( play/pause, track name). Banshee uses the system tray, so closing the main interface minimizes it the the taskbar. I like this, you can hide it away, while still having it playing what you want. Its simple, and pretty easy to use, most people can figure it out in no time flat.
All in all, Banshee is worth a try. You can grab it from here for your distro. It looks like a lot of hard work has gone into this player, and its loads better than the previous versions, as far as I can remember. Congratulations have to go out to the Banshee team for a good 1.0 release! You may just like it enough to make it your primary media player!
Storming My Last Windows Stronghold
With getting rid of my WM6 smartphones, I’m happy to say I’m now 100% Windows free!
I had a two year contract with Sprint, that recently expired. Due to anger over their new contract policies, I’m not going back. I originally purchased a HTC Apache with Sprint two years ago. It had what I was looking for in a phone at the time, it could organize my data, play music, and make calls. It even had a slide out keyboard for texting. It may have been a bit bigger than most people would tolerate, but it was built solid, and was a very good phone, albeit based on Windows Mobile.
A year and a half into my two year contract though, I brought the Apache into the Sprint store because the little 2.7mm headphone jack’s had a spotty connection. To fix this problem, they replaced my old Apache with the upgraded version, the HTC Titan. Its pretty much the exact same phone, just slimmer and slicker. Both were good phones, both did pretty much just what I wanted them to do. However, there were 4 things that I couldn’t stand about these phones.
- Windows Mobile. I got my Apache just as I was starting the switch to Linux full-time, and thought I could live with it. I had a Windows CE PDA (a dell Axim) that I loved back in high school. There were many things that annoyed me about Windows Mobile. For instance, you can’t easily close a program. Clicking the X in the corner just minimizes it. You have to navigate into the control panel to shut a program down. It would also lock up from time to time, requiring a hard reset, but this wasn’t an unreasonable amount. Explaining to my friends why I need to reboot my phone before I could use it was always an awkward experience. Lastly, and most importantly, as an open source advocate, it always killed me a little inside that my phone ran Windows.
- Lock Down. Windows Mobile is a descendant of Windows CE, and both are locked down to the point you cant see straight. I didn’t mind this at first, but once I learned to code, and experienced the freedom OSS systems gave to someone who knew the machine, the limitations of the phone’s system drove me nuts. There were hacks out there to get this or that new feature, but they were always just reverse-engineered cracks of the software, so I never really bothered.
- Incompatiblity with Linux. Back when I took windows totally off my machines, it killed me that I could no longer sync my contacts, calendar, and tasks up with my desktop. My phone lost its usefulness as a pda when it could not hook up to my computers anymore. I know there are ways to work around this nowadays, but 2 years ago when I tried, and failed, there were no easy ways to sync it up. To rub salt in the wound, I had to buy a little SD->USB converter to continue to use my phone as my mp3 player. Smartphones are more useful when they can talk to a real computer.
- HORRENDOUS INTERFACES. This was the worst. There are so many quirks and ugly things that Windows Mobile phones do that it deserves its own blog post. For instance when a text message showed up, it would show it to me, in tiny 10pt font, I would read it, and the notification would disappear. It would then mark the message unread, even though I already read the pop up! Worse yet, every little thing you want to do requires the stylus. You have to practice long and hard to hit the little 10×10pixel controls the phone uses. One handed, finger -based operation? No way. Text input without the slide out keyboard was slow and mildly frustrating. In order to find contacts, you either had to fuss with a 10×10px scroll bar, or use hardware buttons to slowly scroll through the list. Finding a contact that started with “M” would take forever. All in all, the interface was so bad that by the end of 2 years, it drove me crazy simply using my phone. Even the dinky little free phone AT&T gave me is nicer to use than my smartphone.
So I switched from Sprint to AT&T and dumped my Window Mobile phones. I’m using the free phone AT&T gave me until they start shipping Openmoko Freerunners! to the United States! I’m very excited to get a Linux based, open source smartphone, and am already thinking of things I can do to help out the openmoko community. They’re set to take [American] orders starting July 4th.(Celebrate American Independence Day by bringing a little freedom to your phone 
)
I’m soooo happy to be 100% Windows free, and I’ll let you all know how getting the freerunner goes!! :D
So Long Sprint
I was planning on staying with Sprint. I had every intention. For two years, good service, no problems, excellent coverage. My contract was up, so I needed to renew it. I wanted to get the new Samsung Instinct with my new plan. Sure, its a proprietary OS, its likely to have no applications, but it had a touch driven input, and looks pretty slick, and had all the features I wanted. Its rated very very highly on cnet (in the Top5 Cell Phones) and everywhere else, so I was pretty excited to get it. I figured I could sell my HTC Titan, use the subsidy from signing a new plan, and break even buying the Samsung Instinct and keep the same plan I had. My happy little strategy was about to be shattered.
I go into the store, happy as can be, expecting to walk out with a shiny new phone. Upon declaring my intention to get the phone, I was lethargically and offhandedly informed by a slack-jawed sales associate that I had to get the “Unlimited Everything” plan for $70-$100 a month. I’m used to paying $40, and thats all I really have budgeted for phones per month. The extra charges were mostly for unlimited internet on the phone, a feature I’ve survived without for two years. I immediately started looking for loopholes to get the phone without doubling my monthly rates. Over the two year contract, the higher rates would cost me about one thousand dollars more. I suggesting buying it from a third party. No good. I suggested just activating it without the stupid data plan. Didn’t fly. A complicated scheme was forming in my head to buy the expensive plan, cancel it, not return the phone, and then sign up for my old plan, when the salesman tells me they wont even activate this phone unless I have a data plan. I decried Sprint and angrily marched out of the store, frustrated.
I, a loyal customer of 2 years, was sent out in the cold due to the draconian, anti-consumer, hostile business tactics employed by Sprint in a ploy to get more money from their shiniest little plastic cash cow. What really irks me though, is when I asked for a justification for this policy, they told me “In order to enjoy the Sprint Instinct phone to its maximum potential, you must get the Simply Everything Plan”. Straight from a script. Rehearsed, even. You know what? I don’t need some phone company telling me how to use hardware I purchase with my own money. Sure, I realize this phone is decked out to do the latest and greatest things on the internet. I realize that my phone’s ability will be limited without a data plan. I accept that. I want this phone for its good looking touch screen interface, and music playing ability. Both of those features are unmatched in any other Sprint phone. Telling me I can’t purchase the phone because I don’t want a data plan is just the same as telling me I can’t buy a Ferrari because I won’t drive it 200mph to work in the morning. As hardware that I am the full owner of, I decide its use and I decide what potential I want actualized in the course of its service to me!
The Instinct is Sprint’s flagship phone. Its designed to go head to head with the iPhone. The only thing Sprint has done to make the Instinct like the iPhone is to employ hostile tactics to pander its customers into plans they don’t need. Dangle a crisp carrot in front of the cart, and relax as the cart bumbles down the road to ill-gotten profit. Well, this donkey isn’t having any of it. Sprint, we’ve had a good run, but I’m leaving. Its not me, its you.