Amarok Blog

Entries from February 2009

Friday, February 27. 2009

Amarok Power User Feature: ... Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 14:58

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Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning

A long-requested feature has been a way to decouple Amarok's collection scanning from its GUI. There are various use-cases for this. For one, it can actually help us with debugging, by allowing us to control the inputs into the scan parser. For another, many people have all of their music stored on a single machine, and would like to do the scanning locally where it's fast instead of on their e.g. laptop running Amarok, where it's over wireless and slow.

Yesterday and today (as of r933010) I put half of the solution into trunk. I say half, because full collection rescans are now supported in batch modes, but I am still working on the methodology for incremental scans (I have a few ideas, but have to sort out which is the most reasonable/doable/makes the most sense). Below, I'll explain how to do it. Keep in mind that this is designed to be (lightly) scripted, not done by hand...so it can be done by hand (which I did during testing) but it has some safeguards in place so that if you script it, and forget about it, Amarok still works normally. However, there are actually some interesting things you can do now if you script the scanner...

One important thing to note: the scanner requires various bits of Amarok code, mainly centering around the extra taglib plugins we support. So you're unlikely to have it work on a machine that doesn't have A2 installed, and certainly won't be able to compile it without the rest of the Amarok source, although you may be able to get it to work in a binary-only fashion with just kdelibs and taglib...YMMV.

So, here's the flow:

Run amarokcollectionscanner with the -b or --batch option. Although this doesn't directly modify the output, it sets some internal flags (some for safety, some to enable other options). The output goes to stdout; save this output as amarokcollectionscanner_batchfullscan.xml (yes, it must be that specific filename). You'll probably want to use the -r flag too...check --help for more options.
Cool feature: if your scan is of files that have a different mount point on the local machine than the machine that will be using the output, add the --rpath option and give it the mountpoint of the directory on the consuming machine. For instance, if on the local machine your music is at /opt/music, and this directory (music) is mounted as /mnt/music on the remote machine, run amarokcollectionscanner from /opt and use --batch --rpath /mnt/music.
Cool feature: You can scan multiple directories and simply append the output to the end of the file from step #1. Yes, directly append, including the xml version/encoding header. Amarok's scan manager will detect and handle this. You can even scan directories that are not defined as collection directories in Amarok (these entries will work fine, but the next time you do a full rescan from within Amarok without using the saved output, they will be gone).
Place the amarokcollectionscanner_batchfullscan.xml file in your Amarok data dir. Usually, this is ~/.kde4/share/apps/amarok.
Trigger a full rescan from inside Amarok (in Settings->Collection). It should be super-fast. :-) Note that this step deletes the amarokcollectionscanner_batchfullscan.xml file. This is on purpose, so if you want to keep re-using it, you'll have to keep copying it over.

As you can see, it's designed for scripting, but it's not terribly complicated even to do by hand. I'll post more as I get incremental scanning working, and will at some point put a Wiki page up that has all of these instructions in a less transient form.

Continue reading "Amarok Power User Feature: Batch-mode collection scanning"

Wednesday, February 25. 2009

Camp KDE videos: Come and get 'em Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 09:41

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Camp KDE videos: Come and get 'em

After a month's delay, they're done.

In the interim (after the delays mentioned in my last post on this topic), my poor, underpowered desktop machine has endured transcode after transcode (from the original source material) and my Internet connection upload after upload as I tried to figure out just why Blip.tv wouldn't work with X or Y. (In fact, I can quantify these: X is Vorbis/Theora, which produced awful audio and very desynchronized audio/video upon their conversion to .flv; Y is a lot of things related to the original anamorphic encoding of the videos, which Blip.tv can't handle, and finding the right combination of settings and flags and adjustements to make the aspect ratios come out so that everyone didn't look like Gumby®.)

This was followed by a few days of uploading; Blip seems to max out uploading speeds somewhere between 100kbit and 200kbit, so uploading almost 6GB of data, one chunk at a time, took a bit.

The end result is thirteen videos, each Xvid-encoded (at least it's OSS, although patent-encumbered...see Vorbis/Theora problems above) with a Matroska container. You can get to them through my show or to individual videos directly (these might not be in strict as-presented order):

Enjoy! Continue reading "Camp KDE videos: Come and get 'em"

Monday, February 23. 2009

#kde-soc Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 16:21

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#kde-soc

Just a note to make people aware that #kde-soc exists. There's basically no activity in there right now, which is rather expected, but as SoC-related activities pick up steam so will the channel. Continue reading "#kde-soc"

Tuesday, February 17. 2009

More Goo! Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen in freespirit at 05:34

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More Goo!

Some people might think that we have had more than enough "OMG WORLD OF GOO IS GREAT AND RUNS NATIVELY ON LINUX!!!" posts... Well, they are wrong! So here is another one!

I just bough the game, and the post-demo levels are just as crazy, inventive and plain fun as the levels in the demo. So go buy the game already. Lets prove that there is a viable marked for high quality games on Linux: http://2dboy.com/

And while you are at it, grab the free soundtrack as well: http://kylegabler.com/WorldOfGooSoundtrack/

Now back to playing Wo... uhm.... Working! yeah, Working, thats it..

Sunday, February 15. 2009

World of Goo Posted by Seb Ruiz in sebr at 17:20

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World of Goo

A community service announcement:

World of Goo has been released for Linux.

It’s a wonderfully enjoyable puzzle game which has been awarded multiple awards across for the PC, Mac and Wii versions - and it has recently become available for Linux. It’s cheap, DRM & region free, and if you buy it you’ll not only be supporting indie game developers but also the gaming linux environment.

Why not try the demo?

Saturday, February 14. 2009

OpenSolaris, Qt and Game Development Posted by Alejandro Wainzinger in xevix at 17:02

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OpenSolaris, Qt and Game Development

Overview

A group of 3 other people and myself were charged with making a game for a class this trimester, which is essentially a Final Fantasy clone with a few quirks localized to our university. In thinking of a toolkit, I thought to myself "what event-driven toolkit provides a graphics system and paint system complete and robust enough to make this happen?" Naturally Qt came to mind. The professor suggested some Java toolkits, including SWT, but my experiences with SWT have not been at all good, so I decided to give Qt a shot. Another perk of Qt over SWT is how easy it is to learn and use, since my 3 team members are not familiar with it.

After a few days of playing with Qt tutorials on the Graphics framework and studying KDE games code, I had a small but working prototype of one of the modes of our game, where the character explores the scene of a level.

Things to notice that were easy to do:

- Creating a graphics item from a graphic file
- Moving it around
- Having it change form
- Collision detection with walls
- Dragging of the view to see different parts of the scene

Deployment

Before proceeding I had to make sure that the program would run on the target platform of the school servers: SunOS 5.10 (Solaris). Now Qt is a cross-platform toolkit, and binary builds of it are provided for Linux, OS X, and Windows, but not for Solaris (that I could find here).

Having recently installed VirtualBox after hearing lots of good things about it, I decided to give Solaris a spin as a virtual machine. There was a bit of confusion for me at the beginning with so many possible distros to choose from, but luckily since only 2 of them are supported by the KDE Solaris team, that narrowed it down. They prefer using SXCE, so I gave that a shot, but unfortunately some bug where X would show up but then freeze on the live dvd stopped me short (I figured it was an issue of running in a VM or something). Then I tried OpenSolaris 2008.11, which installed fine

Then the problem became that the instructions on the wiki for compiling using OpenSolaris were a bit lacking, a problem I have since mended with some updates based on my experience. After much strife with getting the environment set up just right, compiling was not a big deal, thanks to the awesome efforts of the KDE OpenSolaris team. I ran into some issue with a Qt example not compiling, and hacked it up to fix it, since it didn't much matter, and voila, Qt was on the system, and my previous example in the youtube video worked.

From here, I had a few options (as I saw it):
- build Qt as static, deploy a static binary
- build Qt as shared library, ask school admins to install Qt on servers
- build QtJambi, port to Java, deploy as jar

Since building Qt as static was not supported by the KDE Solaris team, I decided to give QtJambi a shot, and ported my example to Java. Unfortunately the QtJambi build specfile provided didn't work too well, and went into an infinite recursive make loop.

When at last I had almost given up, I discovered that the shared library approach doesn't actually require the system to have Qt installed on it, just that the necessary .so shared object files be deployed with the program itself, and to use a script to launch the program (a script which simply adds current directory to linker path).

A simple ldd resulted in this:

libc.so.1 => /usr/lib/libc.so.1
libQtGui.so.4 => /opt/foss/qt4/lib/libQtGui.so.4
libQtCore.so.4 => /opt/foss/qt4/lib/libQtCore.so.4
libCrun.so.1 => /usr/lib/libCrun.so.1
libm.so.2 => /usr/lib/libm.so.2
libglib-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libglib-2.0.so.0
libpng12.so.0 => /usr/lib/libpng12.so.0
libSM.so.6 => /usr/lib/libSM.so.6
libICE.so.6 => /usr/lib/libICE.so.6
libz.so.1 => /usr/lib/libz.so.1
libXrender.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXrender.so.1
libXrandr.so.2 => /usr/lib/libXrandr.so.2
libXfixes.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXfixes.so.1
libXcursor.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXcursor.so.1
libXinerama.so.1 => /usr/lib/libXinerama.so.1
libfreetype.so.6 => /usr/lib/libfreetype.so.6
libfontconfig.so.1 => /usr/lib/libfontconfig.so.1
libXext.so.0 => /usr/lib/libXext.so.0
libX11.so.4 => /usr/lib/libX11.so.4
libgthread-2.0.so.0 => /usr/lib/libgthread-2.0.so.0
libnsl.so.1 => /lib/libnsl.so.1
libsocket.so.1 => /lib/libsocket.so.1
libexpat.so.1 => /usr/lib/libexpat.so.1
libXau.so.6 => /usr/X11/lib/libXau.so.6
libpthread.so.1 => /lib/libpthread.so.1
libmp.so.2 => /lib/libmp.so.2
libmd.so.1 => /lib/libmd.so.1
libscf.so.1 => /lib/libscf.so.1
libuutil.so.1 => /lib/libuutil.so.1
libgen.so.1 => /lib/libgen.so.1
libXevie.so.1 => /usr/X11/lib/libXevie.so.1
libXss.so.1 => /usr/X11/lib/libXss.so.1

Wow, that's a lot of shared objects! According to the Qt deployment guide though, all of the X libraries could and should be avoided to be packaged. I did end up adding other ones though, one by one, as I saw necessary until the program finally ran without a linker error. The bad news is this blew the total package up to 30 MB or so. Oh well, so be it, it ran!

And now...?

And now the real development can begin. There's only a few weeks to work on it, but that should be plenty. It won't be a terribly fantastic game as a result, but it was an interesting adventure, and more importantly proves the point that Qt is an awesome toolkit, and that there are quite a few options open for deployment.

Thanks to the KDE Solaris team for helping me with getting things building, I'd be nowhere without your help (in particular: szt, [ade], steleman, and trochej thanks a lot guys).

Friday, February 13. 2009

UPnP support in KDE and Amarok Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 15:12

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UPnP support in KDE and Amarok

During FOSDEM [ade] and I met with Frank Scholz, the lead developer of Coherence. We discussed DLNA/UPnP and how Coherence can be used in KDE and Amarok. The conclusion of this meeting was that we should use Coherence as our base for supporting UPnP services in KDE. The first implementation will be a KIO slave for browsing media stored on remote devices.

UPnP is a network technology using a combination of SSDP, XML and SOAP, with some GENA thrown in for eventing. A group of UPnP services called the UPnP A/V Architecture has been picked up by an industry organization called the Digital Living Network Alliance. DLNA specifies device classes which have to implement specific services and support a minimal set of filetypes and codecs.

Coherence is a framework, written in Python but it exposes a DBUS API, that allows an application to participate in the "Digital Home Network". For the moment this means mainly UPnP, but support for Ampache is available and Apple's DAAP is also considered. It's published under the MIT license and is multiplatform.

In Amarok we have been planning to integrate UPnP for a long while. But except for a failed Google Summer of Code project last year not a lot of effort has been spend. Thanks to Coherence this will quickly change: in relative short term (read 2.2) we will introduce a UPnP Collection that will list and enable playback of music stored on a DLNA Digital Media Server.

We could even consider publishing the content in the local Collection, basically making Amarok a DMS. Amarok can then track plays on remote devices and use it in the scoring algorithm.
Even more advanced functionality would be to control one or more Digital Media Renderes, such as
the Philips Streamium, from Amarok.

A few mails have been going back and forth between interested developers about discovery of network services in general. In order to simplify using technologies as UPnP, zeroconf, Samba, etc I'm wondering if we can integrate this in Solid. Only the discovery part obviously, using the services would be the task of separate frameworks, such as Coherence. With this functionality in Solid it should be trivial to show a kind of "Network Map" to the user with all the services per device.

As you can tell, plenty of cool things to keep a few people busy for a year or 3.

Bart

Friday, February 13. 2009

Qt 4.5 RC1 packages for Intrepid, ... Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 07:32

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Qt 4.5 RC1 packages for Intrepid, built with -graphicssystem raster

Update: These packages are for testing only! Things that rely on the default native backend WILL break. If you want a build of Qt 4.5 RC1 for Intrepid without -graphicssystem raster, try pollycoke's PPA.

The title says it all. They're available from my PPA. Enjoy!
Continue reading "Qt 4.5 RC1 packages for Intrepid, built with -graphicssystem raster"

Wednesday, February 11. 2009

Get your GSoC ideas in! Posted by Lydia Pintscher in Nightrose at 18:16

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Get your GSoC ideas in!

Google Summer of Code 2009 is a go and it is time to start thinking about project ideas for KDE. Do you have a nice project for a student to work on this summer? Let us know on this wiki page.

Wednesday, February 11. 2009

Karaoke with Windows (via VirtualBox) Posted by Alejandro Wainzinger in xevix at 02:02

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Karaoke with Windows (via VirtualBox)

Some time ago, a friend gave me this Chinese karaoke program called HomeKara2, which puts out a song-selection screen to one monitor, and the actual video with lyrics to another. I thought this was nifty, and tried to virtualize it with wine. First, to get Chinese working, I tried this "wineloc" project I used for my Japanese programs. No go. Also, the dual monitor output thing wasn't working. Bummer.

Recently I got hooked up with VirtualBox, a handy replacement for vmware for me, which I've been using for an OpenSolaris machine for developing a Qt game (that's a blog post to come). Somewhere along the line, I set up a Windows XP VM, just to test, and was surprised that it ran quite well, so I decided to put it to the test with HomeKara2.

I ran into some obstacles again, starting with that HomeKara2 has not a UTF-8 codepage, but some Chinese one. I decided to try the good 'ol Microsoft applocale program that changes codepages. This worked amazingly! Until the program crashed randomly and inexplicably at different times. Another problem was that the program uses an external MDB (Microsoft Access Database) file to keep track of the tables of artists, songs, etc, which is not readily editable or even viewable on Linux without extra tools. Last but not least, I had to figure out how to get multiple monitors set up within the virtual machine.

My solutions are out of order of how they happened, but in the order as previously mentioned

The applocale program is apparently quite unstable, and all I had to do to get HomeKara2 to run correctly without it, was to set the default codepage for non-utf8 codepage applications in Control Panel's regional language settings somewhere. This required a quick vm reboot, which was fine.

For the MDB issue, I sought out some freeware editors, which are in general wonderful, but realized that the Windows version of OpenOffice can connect to an MDB file and modify existing tables. A bit fat of a solution to install OpenOffice, but I can't doubt the ease of it.

The multiple monitors issue was a bit tough, but some googling around eventually brought up the right combination of answers. First, shut down the VM if it's running, and start up a terminal.

Note: replace VMNAME with the name for your VM

1. Use the VirtualBox GUI to enable VRDP (remote desktop) and change the port, in case Windows doesn't like you using its default RDP port, and take note of the port.

2. `VBoxManage modifyvm VMNAME -monitorcount 2` will set the number of monitors on the machine to 2.

3. `VBoxManage modifyvm VMNAME -vrdpmulticon on` will allow for multiple connections to the same RDP port. This allows you to connect twice, once for each monitor.

4. Start up your VM as normal, right-click the background wallpaper, click properties, goto settings tab, and select decent sizes for each of your monitors, checking the box for "extend my Windows desktop into this monitor" and apply.

5. Shut down your VM.

6. `VBoxHeadless -s VMNAME` will start your VM in a headless mode (like a daemon) which will listen on the port you specified for RDP connections.

7. Use an RDP program (I use KRDC on KDE), and set up an RDP connection to 'localhost' at your port, i.e. 'localhost:port'. When KRDC asks for extra options, put in '-d @1' and this will connect you to monitor 1 of the VM. Adjust resolution as necessary.

8. Repeat step 7, but change '-d @1' to '-d @2' to connect to the second monitor.

9. KRDC allows you to full-screen each desktop. In my setup, I use nvidia-settings to set up twinview, then put a KRDC instance on each desktop, and fullscreen.

10. Run HomeKara2, and behold the beauty of success.

Notes: be careful with sound forwarding on KRDC, as it might cause an echo. You can just choose to keep sound on "remote only" to fix this.

-- Interesting little other hack --

My friend gave me his music videos by putting them on my iPod, along with the program. I don't have much room left on my laptop's hard drive, so I did something somewhat hackish which actually worked.

1. I mounted the iPod with this long command:

`mount -t vfat -o rw,nosuid,nodev,uhelper=hal,shortname=mixed,uid=1000,utf8 /dev/sdb1 /media/ALEX_IPOD`

The real trick here was the shortname=mixed, which makes sure capitalization is done correctly, and the long vfat names are used. Weird stuff can happen with the default mode on Kubuntu's mounter.

Beforehand, I had set /media/ALEX_IPOD as a shared folder for VirtualBox, so to keep consistency I mounted there again. I then changed the cdrom's drive letter to not D: and assigned D: to a particular folder on the iPod, so that the path lined up perfectly with the path listed in the MDB file for the videos. This worked quite well, so I was able to get away with not modifying the MDB file's path for videos, and with reading all videos directly off the iPod.

-- end hack --

So what did this all look like in the end?

Well OK, later on I fixed the resolutions so that each Windows "monitor" would take up my entire monitor, for both monitors, but this is my setup with my laptop screen and a classic CRT. Not bad for a day's work I'd say, and now I can set up haphazard karaoke when hanging out with friends and there's no place nearby. Nice!

Friday, February 6. 2009

I am disappearing Posted by Harald Sitter in apachelogger at 18:41

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I am disappearing

Due to new employment (Zivildienst) I'll be unable to continue my work on the various projects I am a proud contributor of. Well, until mid-October at least.

I'll most likely not be able to follow mailing lists, nor will I be online on IRC when I am not really available. If you want to reach me, you better drop me a mail personally... the inbox is pretty much everything I kind of read. Should you be lucky enough to actually get a hold of me: don't expect me to do or say anything useful

By 2010 I should be able to attend conventions and fairs again, so you can worship me live and in action

So long...

Thursday, February 5. 2009

Where *are* those Camp KDE videos ... Posted by Jeff Mitchell in jefferai at 13:15

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Where are those Camp KDE videos anyways?

Hello there. I have good news and bad news regarding the Camp KDE videos.

The Bad News

I've run into a series of setbacks regarding getting them prepared for posting. The first was that the Monday I got back from Jamaica, I had the following schedule at work:

9:15 AM: Check email
9:16 AM: "My details have been confirmed for my upcoming trip? What trip?"
2:00 PM: At the airport awaiting departure, thinking that I knew I should have checked work email sometime over the weekend...

Regardless, I did manage to have some of the files with me, and did actually get a few of the videos done during that week that I was away. I then got held back a bit waiting for the videos on Wade's camera to arrive -- they were 16GB or so in total, and so he had to fetch them off the tapes, encode them, and get them uploaded to me. After that, I started to put Wade's videos together with slides, only to find out that the videos would not properly work inside kdenlive. Or so I thought. After a period of long transcodings that I performed during my free time over the last few days, I find out this morning that the issue with the videos was a massive dose of PEBKAC.

There's only one other piece of bad news, which is that due to a bug in (ffmpeg? libmlt?) kdenlive's Ogg/Theora export is borked. So, I've ended up coding in XviD, which while using a patented algorithm is at least otherwise free software. I've thought about transcoding everything to Ogg/Theora afterwards, and I may end up doing so before posting them up, if the quality is okay. And before you ask -- it didn't seem right to post them up without having Wade's keynote up there to kick things off, which is why I've not posted some of the ones that are already done up before now.

The Good News

The good news is that 11/13 of the videos are done, and I forsee no obstacles in getting the rest of them to behave. So I am hopeful that I can start getting them up to Blip.tv within a couple days. Thanks for bearing with me.

Continue reading "Where *are* those Camp KDE videos anyways?"

Wednesday, February 4. 2009

Free alternatives to proprietary PDF ... Posted by Myriam Schweingruber in mamarok at 04:12

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Free alternatives to proprietary PDF readers now easy to find

I suppose we all have come across that "red button" on websites asking you to download Acrobat Reader to read a PDF document. Even free for download, it still is a proprietary solution and in no way a Free Software tool.

Now, my friends at the Free Software Foundation Europe have been busy working on a website to propose alternative readers for all OS platforms: pdfreaders.org. And it seems that there is only one alternative package running on all operating systems: Okular

Another proof that KDE is "The Universal Desktop".

Don't forget to use the buttons provided for your websites:

There are other models in the "Graphics" part of the website.

Update: if you want to get in touch with the authors of pdfreaders.org, you can drop them a mail with this link.

Monday, February 2. 2009

Amarok Junior Job: Auto-download new ... Posted by Bart Cerneels in shanachie at 14:12

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Amarok Junior Job: Auto-download new podcasts

A recent comment by progmanos on the post of the 2.0.1.1 release reminded that I still have to implement Podcast episode auto-downloading. In the hurry to get 2.0 released I did add the config option, but forgot to add the actual code to make it work.

In Amarok 2 Podcasts are implemented in classes derived from PodcastProvider. There can be mutliple providers, which allows for instance podcast syncing between Amarok and an iPod.
The default provider is SqlPodcastProvider. This is where the auto-download function should get implemented.

This is a nicelly contained and not to steep introduction to Amarok development. So it's an excelent Junior Job.
If progmanos or anyone else would like to have a go at it, contact me on #amarok on irc.freenode.net. My nickname is Stecchino.

Monday, February 2. 2009

Playlist Layout Editor Posted by Nikolaj Hald Nielsen in freespirit at 05:56

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Playlist Layout Editor

Woho! I finally have a new toy in Amarok worth blogging about!

Today I want to introduce the first draft of the Playlist Layout Editor for Amarok 2.1. In an earlier post, I discussed the new customizable playlist rendering engine and the underlying configuration system. I also hinted that there would be a simple and easy way of customizing your playlist layout. This is exactly what I have been working on for a little while now. And while the results are still mainly at the prototype stage, I think it is far enough along that it is worth giving a sneak peak at.

So lets get some screenshots on the table!

Building on the "Token Dragging" code crated by our GSoC student Teo Mrnjavac we now have an easy to use editor where the layout of a playlist item can be created and modified using drag and drop and a simple config menu. Currently saving these layouts back to xml (loading from xml into the editor works fine ) is not implemented yet, but it is possible to apply a modified layout to the playlist by pressing the "preview" button.

As can be seen, a playlist layout basically consists of 3 configs, one for each major element in the playlist. Album Heads, Album Body, and Single Tracks. The editor has a tab for each of these, but the way they are edited and created are exactly the same. In the last screenshot can be seen how an illusion of ungrouped tracks can be obtained by making the Album Head item have 0 rows and making the Album Body and Single Track items have the same layout.

Enough for now, I had better get back to playing with... uhm... working on this thing!

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