eean

At work there's a computer with a bad hard drive. There's also a blazing fast Linux server. The easy solution should be to just boot up a livecd that gives the list of local XDMCP servers. Despite this easy demand, I haven't yet found one. I tried Thinstation, it seems to be a bit more powerful then I want. I really don't want to find out and pick which hardware to put on the ISO, that seems so Linux-from-the-90s (though maybe is needed for some really thin clients, I don't know). One of the prebuilt ISO's hangs on loading X.



I was able to use a Ubuntu disc that was laying around, that however loads the desktop before GDM (where the menu option to the XDMCP list is). Too much of a hassle for something that has to be done every time the computer boots. Every LiveCD distro I've every used loads a desktop on boot, instead of KDM or GDM. Someone in #knoppix actually pointed out that Knoppix has a "press a button" easy setup for running a network-boot server. Which is neat, but not at all what I need.



Does anyone know of a livecd that perhaps has a boot time option to load a XDMCP broadcast client? Preferably one of the "just works" livecd's like Kubuntu or Kanotix or something of that sort.

Release Candidate

I just released the Dragon Player release candidate. It really is the release candidate, it works just fine as far as I know. But I'm not foolish, it probably has some problems that only a wider release will discover. The only identified problems so far is that I forgot to bump the version and the README still calls it "Video Player." I used Harald Sitter's Amarok (but very generic) release script, I was able to include i18n in this release for the first time. There's about 20 translations, which surprised me. Thanks to all the translators! I plan on the 2.0 final version to being out soon, certainly before Hardy feature freezes in mid-February.

Solid Magic

One of the nifty additions in this release is that the "Play Disc" button is now smarter then just playing the DVD at /dev/dvd. Using the KDE pillar Solid, it gets a list of all optical media. If there's more then one, it gives the user a little select menu. The main issue this addresses is that some users have more then one DVD drive. Now they can put the DVD in either and Dragon Player will play it. Also there is no longer a need for separate "Play VCD" and "Play DVD" buttons like Codeine had, since Solid identifies the type of disc.



The Solid API takes a little bit to get used to, but it actually makes a lot of sense. You ask Solid for a list of Solid::Device's. Device has a template as() method, that actually returns pretty much any of the other relevant Solid classes. So in my case, I use Solid::OpticalDisc to identify whether its a DVD, audio CD or VCD or just data and then Solid::Block to get the device path (eg /dev/hdc) to give to Phonon.

Gentoo and Xine dev (and part-time "Amarok Helper") Diego wrote an interesting blog about memory usage. Or, at least interesting to folks like me who somewhat regret never having had a operating systems class. He discovered that any Xine client (which includes Dragon Player or any KDE4 app that makes a sound) wastes 1.7mb of RAM thanks to libvorbisenc.



Using his cowstats script, I profiled Dragon Player:

File name                                                       | .data size | .bss size  | .data.rel.* size


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/playDialog.o                          0            1            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/videoWindow.o                         0           17            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/mainWindow.o                          0           17            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/actions.o                             0            1            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/playlistFile.o                        0            1            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/fullScreenToolBarHandler.o            0            1            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/stateChange.o                         0            1            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/theStream.o                           8            9            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/fullScreenAction.o                    0            1            0


src/app/CMakeFiles/dragon.dir/main.o                                0            8            0

Not too shabby. Also not so important, Dragon Player isn't a library. I just profiled libamarok which is loaded by all the various Amarok plugins so potentially could be an issue. It had 46k copy-on-write sections total, but out of the dozens of files 40k is a variable in the crashhandler, which is a kind of scary piece of code since it has to work while the rest of Amarok is crashing. So I'll let someone else work on that.

Awesome release everyone!



Having KDE4 officially released is making my life easier. Thanks to everyone's favorite MOTU Harald Sitter, Dragon Player is now in gutsy-backports. I've just pointed this out on the Dragon Player website. And Long-time Rokymotioner Enr1x has created an AUR for Dragon Player. So all this makes Dragon Player easy to install, I can't wait for Amarok 2 to reach this point! Dragon Player 2.0 final will then be released in a couple of weeks probably

.

I do plan on working a bit more on subtitle/audio channel issues to make sure it works cleanly. I do feel that I'm spending probably a lot of time on this feature, but I suppose it isn't a surprise given that its one of the few features where I can't just hook up to a Phonon signal and rely on Kretz's code to do all the work for me. And once KDE 4.1 is out, I'll be able to tear most of even this code out.



So as my Dragon Player TODO list has mostly been reduced to testing a couple of things, its time to get back into Amarok 2 code. Hydrogen will be proud of me. I've identified podcasts as really the remaining "why I still have Amarok 1.4 open" issue. Bart has worked a lot with it already, I'll have to see what he has done so far.

As promised, Dragon Player 2.0 beta1 has been released.



Bug reports and feedback appreciated. Especially on the volume slider, I'm not sure I like having the extra toolbar button.



There's a few more items on the TODO list (mainly double checking stuff works) and then a 2.0 final release can be made.



I've also updated the Codeine kde-apps page to reflect the name change. Now to update the Freshmeat entry (not sure people actually still use Freshmeat though, but it can't hurt.)

So Dragon Player is moving into kdereview for at least a couple of weeks before perhaps moving on to KDE Multimedia.



To update your SVN checkout do:

svn switch svn://anonsvn.kde.org/home/kde/trunk/kdereview/dragonplayer



There should be a beta release soonish. I consider Dragon Player mostly ready for a 2.0 release, just a bit more polish and some more testing (which is where the beta would come in).