This blog is now at a new location.
Hey, you are still here ... well, I am about to close ship here.
Okay now stop crying, I have blogged the past 5 years using vi but now I have finally installed wordpress and am now a full fledged blogger with all the bells and whistles.
I am still trying to figure out how to split my different personalities topics into different pages under the header but I am sure with time I will figure this one out as well.
So what are you waiting for ? Head on over to the new blog
I spent a few hours straighten out the functionality of the loop settings for the MovieObjects in the MovieDialog.
I also fixed a crash bug in DialogFiles and fixed the scanning of Images through libjhead.
Finally I straightened out the generation of multiple concurrent slidehows which will now run in parallel if you choose to. The default is to have 2 concurrent background threads running.
| So I can now get back in trying to get slideshows with background audio support before I can ready for the next release |
Just a note that I have enjoyed the past two weeks doing little work on QDVDAuthor other then trying to get ffmpeg to utilized audio together with the slideshow.
I added a new button in the MovieDialog for MovieObjects to allow to loop the movie or to stretch to become the same length as the Menu. I still need to fine tune this feature and fix a crash bug but once done you'll have another thingy to play with :)
And finally I also worked a bit on improving the compilation on different Linux distributions. thanks to Scott B. who is currently trying to generate the propper rpms.
Also there is a .deb package available on http://www.getdeb.net which works perfectly fine for Debian AND for Ubuntu. The Support page has a bit more info on this for the curious ones.
The main new feature is the improvements to the FewClickWizard and the cache to handle images and slideshows. Also a new application to handle the generation of slideshows was added.
Here is the ( very limited ) list with the most important changes.
During the past week I tested the new version on SuSE 10.3, Kubuntu, and Fedora 9 and made sure it compiles and works under each of those distributions.
To get it working under Kubuntu I installed :
> apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-dev libavutil-dev libbz2-dev qt3-dev-tools libqt4-dev qt3-apps-dev libqt3-headers qt3-designer mplayer libbz2 g++ cvs bzipOn Fedora 9 I added atrpms.net and used :
> yum install dvdauthor qt.i386 qt-devel.i386 qt3-designer.i386 qt3.i386 qt3-devel.i386 mplayer xine-lib* mjpegtools.i386 mjpegtoos-devel.i386Needless to say that I compiled qdvdauthor from source :)
Update: I had to re-release 1.5.0 due to some issues with configure. The latest file is now qdvdauthor-1.5.0-2.tar.gz
| I just added a new template called Horizon to the mix. This one I like for it beauty and simplicity. I think it'll make a nice DVDMenu for a vacation DVD. |
Besides the template I have been busy readying for the next release, this included a couple of bug fixes and polishing of some features.
I will do some more testing and then get the release out as soon as possible.
So first I realize that QDVDAuthor crashes a lot because QProcess is not thread safe at all ( and I am using QProcess quite a lot especially with MPlayer ). Next thing I find is that creating a QPixmap in a background thread can lock up your display and basically freeze QDVDAuthor.
I guess there is nothing I can do for now but to check that all QPixmap operations are done in the main GUI thread. Now that is going to suck big times since I am forced to push some of the heavy workload onto the main thread which will decrease the GUI responsiveness.
I hope it is getting better from here on forward ...
I just uploaded a new screencast for the FewClickWizard which you can watch here.
I was busy working off my todo list to get to the next release. I am getting really close and hope to be able to release some time next week.
I have added a new feature to ButtonObjects to allow you to change the underlying object. This way you can E.g. change a button from a FrameButton to a ImageButton without a need to go through unbutton/define as button.
I also fixed the color scheme of the plugins SimpleDVD, and ComplexDVD. You will now be treated to semi transparent bunttons out of the box.
I donated a new Context menu item to Slideshow based SourceFileEntries. This way you'll be able to change the slideshow parameters and have it being re-created in the background.
Update: I finished this weekend with the addition of QMatrix manipulation to the slideshow. You can now finally rotate the images in DialogImages and actually see results in the generated slideshow. Also the auto-rotation of the EXIF information is now passed through to QRender.
First I want to thank Michael M. for his donation. I will use every penny of it appropriately.
Whow, my first vacation in a year. It came and went and now I am back to reality. Oh well.
The bad ( or good ) thing was that I had only very limited internet access and did not spend a whole lot of time in front of the computer. However I could fix a few outstanding issues and bring us closer to the next release.
If you get the latest source code you should now be able to mix and match slideshows and videos using either the FewClickWizard or the [Add / Organize] buttons.
A small step for man, one giant leap for mankind ... well sorta ... okay, maybe not :)
I fixed the MusicDVD template and will add it tonight on SourceForge so that you too can enjoy this great template.
Next on my list is to fix the crash recovery for the QRender server and add some missing error handling in both server and client. Then polish the micro button handling and do some general cleaning up before releasing the next version of QDVDAuthor.
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I want to thank Luis Garcia R. for the MusicDVD template. I tried it and found there to be some issues with it due to the CreateTemplate dialog not working correctly. I will add this template right after I fixed it. The CreateTemplate dialog will have to wait a bit until I have wrapped up the Slideshow creation process which is top priority for me right now. I found a few communications issues between QDVDAuthor and QRender and have to implement a lot of the still pending error handling. I.e. if the Client disconnects, or the server crashes or the Surce is being deleted or the connection drops dead or the coffee pot boils over. I have to also polish the general integration of the DialogImages into the overall framework ( I.e. Slideshow manipulation vs video grouping etc. ) Well all said, the bottom line is that I have a lot of trial and error left before I can consider the next release. Stay tuned ... |
Phew already July. Time flies as the saying goes ...
I have been a bit busy, a bit sick and a bit tired. So all in one, I had a wonderfull time the past week.
Besides this I have been working on the Client/Server interaction and am diligently working off the points on my TODO list.
I was mainly working on adding a logging class and handling the case where the server and client reside on the same machine as is most likely the case all around.
Next on my list is the implementation of the state-log. This file will store the stages of the slideshow generation. This will help us prevent re-rendering the same slideshow over and over again.
Just to let every one know that I have added a Wiki to the QDVDAuthor project.
I hope I will get some support through the wiki in form of tips, tricks, and user guides.
What else has happened the past three days is that I progressed on the qrender.pro project file, added a script to pull and compile ffmpeg locally to be able to statically link qrender against it instead of relying on the system installed version.
I did also improve on the overall process integration and am now sending the resulting video from the server back to the client. Once I get some more quality time I will of course add some logic to have this only happen if server/client are on different computer.
Still a lot of open points and issues to be tackled before I can call on the next release. So please hang in there :)
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Heureka, it rocks. I spent the past few days integrating ffmpeg in QRender. It took so long as it was hard to find examples on how to convert a QImage to a suitable AVFrame. Thanks to anca I finaly found a way to convert RGBtoYUV420P. Of course I should mention that the cmment in the code pointed out that this function originated in gnommeeting
So the result of my very first ( short ) test can be viewed here
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Now that I have the socket communication, XML parsing, and mpeg2 encoding in place it is a matter of implementing the missing functions to account for a full loop slideshow generation.
With time I envision QRender to become a powerfull command line tool to easily generate dvd compliant slideshows on top of the X-platform render farm capabilities inherent by the built in socket communication.
Once the slideshow part is in I would like to add a command line interface which would allow to render moving menus such as to possess the capablity to create again all pieces of the DVD through a script.
I am getting closer to the point of actually implementing some 'business' logic into the server/client architecture.
It took quite some time to get the QSocket implementation just about right on both sides. The file transport is now working satisfactionally and I wrapped up converting the xml parsing class to Qt 4.x.
The next step includes some porting of support functionality from Global, and Utils to Qt 4.x.
#ifndef RENDER_SHARED_H
#define RENDER_SHARED_H
namespace Render
{
// All Message IDs are 16 bit
// KeepAlive messages sent every 20 seconds from server to QDVDAuthor
// when no rendering is done. Simply to know if server is still there.
#define SERVER_I_AM_ALIVE 0x5555
#define CLIENT_I_KNOW_THAT 0xAAAA
// Progress message
#define SERVER_YOUR_PROGRESS_SIR 0x1234
// Client message to server thread to pause execution
// Note: at this point we should probably write status
// info into a cfg file to recover, just in case.
#define CLIENT_TAKE_A_BREAK 0x1001
// Server exited
#define SERVER_TO_BE_OR_NOT_TO_BE 0xFF00
// 0xSHIT << 16, Server exception
#define SERVER_SHIT_HAPPENED 0xB01C
// Lastly ( for now anyways )
// Client telling Server to shut down
#define CLIENT_KILL_YOURSELF 0xB00B
}; // end of namespace Render
#endif // RENDER_SHARED_H
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It is alive ! I am kind of feeling like Frankenstein, The QRender server is talking to the client ( QDVDAuthor ). These are the proposed messages between Client and Server. So there is quite some work to be done. Lets just hope it does not turn out to become a monster. |
| Just a short note to thank Thorsten G. for this real nice looking template. We need more artists like him who are donating their artwork to the community ( and this project ). |
Another day and another dialog had to bite the dustbin.
I removed the qslideshow dependencies from QDVDAuthor, just as I said I would. Though it is sad to see some work of mine being less relevant, I am glad the new DialogImages is doing a fine job replacing the old qslideshow dialog.
Along the same lines I'll still have to implement the qrender part and the handling of slideshow's in general, now that the old way is gone for good.
Interestingly the compilation time of the complete project went down by about 20 seconds, to just under 6 minutes total ( on my laptop ).
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I just wrapped up the new Previewer class. This class is integral part of the DialogImages dialog and shows a Image including Exif info if present inside the QIconView. You can see it in action by choosing [View ...] from the context menu or by simply double clicking onto the image. The whole dialog looks much like digiKam, only ... well ... better |
I am progressing overall and am getting closer to the point where I pass the selected data back to QDVDAuthor itself.
The new slideshow feature of the FewClickWizard requires that I convert the image sequence into a VOB compliant mpeg2 stream ( favourably with audio ). I have a couple of options at this point.
Number two has the drawback that I would need to link against ffmpeg or similar to create the mpeg stream. It would also further break the philosophie of being able to create the whole DVD through the command line.
So let's talk about scenario # 3 :
If I create a new executable which communicates through sockets with the main application I
So I guess the choice is pretty easy ... now the implementation is something different though ...
I wrapped up the integration of the new plugin into the caching system and also the handling of images ( as opposed to videos ) in the cache.
I can now get to basics and plug in all the bells and whistles to make the new DialogImages purr like a little kitten.
Usually I have about 5-10 points on my todo list for a particular dialog. this time it's a whole sheet of paper, which boils down to about 46 points I'll have to consider.
Once this dialog is done we will have to say good bye to the old slideshow dialog. But not to worry, I won't remove the qslideshow sub-project. Thus you can still run the interface as the stand alone application qslideshow.
I have done quite some progress the past two days. I created a library out of the jhead executable ( and submitted the patch to Matthias W. ).
You can check out the sstp ( Stupid Simple Test Program ) for pulling the data out of the EXIF information, using the shared library. You can use it to build the next great image application if you so like.
As a note to the test program, I created it with Qt 4.x, so you'll have to have this version of Qt in your path.
So now I have to put this into QDVDAuthor, re-design the thumbnail generation and start implementing all the other missing features for this dialog. I then have to handle the slideshow generation in background threads, add another dialog to modify slideshow parameters, create another plugin to take advantage of the slideshow aspect and modify the CreateDVD process such to become aware of what's going on in the backround.
Simple ...
Time is racing by and I am a busy bee working on the new ImageDialog, to finalize the FewClickWizard.
I spent the past three days testing and tweaking the thumbnail generation for the dialog. Unfortunately there seems to be an issue in current X11. This is crashing QDVDAuthor when I allocate pixmaps in a background thread.
I was also playing with the number of background threads and found that on my single core machines a value of 2 seems to outpace 4 concurrent thumbnail threads.
At first I did not want to store the image thumbs in the cache but after running some tests with images of greater then 1600x1200 I found the generation too slow and decided to keep the thumbs in the cache. So I also had to spend time for the implementation of the cache logic.
So to sum it up, I spent a lot of time fighting with system specific issues rather then feature implementation and while I could reduce the number of crashes I am still experiencing some with large amounts of images :(
May 20'st 2008
May 12'th 2008
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So here you go ... and oh you are welcome !
As usually, following is the list of the major changes in this release.
While getting ready for the next release I was doing some thinking about a new Template to use when I got sucked into the wonderfull world of HDR ( High Dynamic Range )
So I was trying to get some more information and found that my Cannon SD630 is not supporting AEB ( Automatic Exposure Bracketing )
BUT ... digging a bit deeper I found CHDK ( Cannon Hack Developer Kit ) which will install some additional tools on Cannon cameras.
Sure enough, after putting the tool on the SD-card, I could take pictures in RAW format and I could install bracketing.bas to get AEB installed on my SD630.
Now I am in the process of installing hugin and qtpfsgui to get HDR working n my computer.
If I made you curious, check out :there tutorials and These results as a starting point.
As you can see from all the links, there is a lot to be learnt but done right, the results are well worth it.
I had a lot on my plate this weekend, not the least to celebrate the 3'rd birthday of my son.
I finally found some time for a walk and realized that I have been stuck in a state of featuritis with the new OneClickDVD.
Apropos OneClickDVD : I decided to rename it FewClickDVD for obvious reasons. After all you will have to specify the videos and images you want to use for the DVD and unless QDVDAuthor gets direct access to you brain there are a few clicks involved into this selection alone.
So wrap your heads around it, FewClickDVD.
That's my story and I'm stickinng to it.
I have been working on all aspects of the new dialog but there still remains quite some work to do before completion.
The selection, grouping and generation of a DVD based only on video material is almost in place. I am planing in releasing this is an initial step so that I can focus on the Slideshow part.
I did also adjust the default plugin location to the system directory and started on the tedious work of cleaning the interface and implementing some of the new Context menu items in the new dialog.
I finally checked in all changes from the past two weeks. I have been working on a new plugin based system to integrate the -OneClickDVD- functionality.
The plugin system is now in place and needs to be connected to QDVDAuthor (I.e. I need to implement the loading of the plug ins ).
Once this is done I can focus on the main reason to implement the whole 'Clumbatsch', namely the Wizard to create a DVD through a few mouse clicks.
I also noted ( and fixed ) that the MenuSlide function was broken. This feature should now work again.
And finally I replaced silence.mp2 with silence.ac3 as the main audio file to use for dvdmenus.
It is amazing how much time you can/have to waste on the net to learn something new and how fast you work with 'stuff' you already know.
I spent most of my time, the past week or so, trying to get the hang of Joomla and also played around at Zazzle
On the QDVDAuthor front I spent two hours to add support for transparent images, which is a nice feature to have.
On the bigger Picture-note I am trying to come up with an easy way to get my vision of One Click DVD implemented in QDVDAuthor. One of the most frequent complaints of QDVDAuthor is that it is to complex and is missing the "hold my hand" dialog.
I also started to look into SMPlayer as the base for a possible Qt 4.4 port. And of course I can also use Phonon in Qt.
The discovery of ECC, or where the F... is the documentation ...
I heard about DVDs capability to include Error Correction Codes and was browsing for a good amount of time and read through stuff like General DVD+-RW docs.
I have to admit that google let me down this time as a simple hint fnally pointed me towards DVDisaster
I added this fine tool to the DVD burn part of the CommandQueueDialog so that you too will be able to put some reduanency into your hard earned family DVDs.
The nice part about dvdisaster is that you can either run it as a command line tool or as a GUI if you do not specify any parameters.
I can not believe I forgot to mention the release of 1.1.0. as of April 1'st.
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Ahhhh, a month worth relaxing and sun bathing. Taking long walks at the bech and doing lots of sports. Only not for me :(
So anyhow I admit I have fallen a bit behind the curve with updates lately as I was busy with one of my other pet projects. But I finally broke down and exterminated some nasty bugs.
At this point I would like to thank all the busy bug reporting folks. It helps a lot having multiple pairs of eyes looking at my application.
I fixed quite a few bugs, two of them appeared to be major.
The Play Multiple functionality was broken and rendered this option useless in some/most instances.
The second major issue was causing some memory corruption and llllooooooonnnnggggg start up times on my system.
So try using the latest nightly and see if this is solving some of your issues with QDVDAuthor.
And lastly I want to thank for the latest donation I received.
... let the upgrade continue ...
So after I got tired of KDE 4.0 I switched back to KDE 3.5. At this point I noticed that my wireless caused about 50% dropped packages.
"Lovely" I thought to myself. There has to be a better way and so off I went to find my way in driver land.
Here is what I brought with me on my journey :
Unfortunately I had to deviate from the straight course as ndiswrapper from SuSE 10.2 no longer compiled with the newer kernel.
While continuing down the ndiswrapper-path, I took a wrong turn by asuming that ndiswrapper in its current incarnation ( 1.52 ) must work ... well, it did not and it took me about a day to figure that out.
So I had to return to square one and I foolishly thought I might be able to cure the bcm43xx kernel driver. Let's just say it was a rocky road that required me to do two full days of forced research-reading ( where can I get my Dr. certificate ? ).
While this was quite enjoyfull ( NOT ! ) I was nearly starved to death by the constant loss of dropped packages. I tell ya, it's sucking your life right out ...
And back to the start ... I went on to try some of the newer wonders in BCM-driver land. The still under construction b43 ( the new kernel driver ) did cause some confusion and head scratching and did not work at all for me. Well at least this was looking like a promising new path to get my BCM chipset working ... in the future.
So the last path I could possibly take was that of the b43legacy ( the new kernel drivers legacy support driver ). Okay I admit I ony tried it once before I asumed my fetal position and cried for about ten minutes.
So let me get this straight, previously working ndiswrapper is now broken plus we have a grand total of 4 non working drivers for the bcm chipset. That must be some kind of world/linux record as I see it.
Then the next day, being a wiser man, I ignord all the thousands of wrong prophet-web pages which got their BCM chipset working on older kernels and drivers. I found myself without wifi support and waited for my intuition to hit me.
The bang that the intuition hit me with caused some lights to go on ( in my head and on my Laptop ). I found that offering the lord of boot some gentle "noapic nolapic" and throwing the bcm43xx driver in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist jail, I finally gotten to a place where colorfull light persisted in a microwave heaven-like environment.
Wifi working, WPA/PSK working, dropped pakages=0. I made it.
Oh all the fun you can have ith Linux :)
First and foremost I would like to thank for the generous donation I received.
So now you probably ask yourself what I have been up to in the past two weeks ( or not ). Well, here you go ...
Upgrade story ...
Okay I had the itch for a long time to get upgrade from my 10.2 install of SuSE to a more recent OS.
On my amd64 Compaq Laptop ( ATI Radeon XPress 200M ) I had everything working from wifi to sound to accel radeon driver and BERYL.
I tried 10.3 first and had the system up in no time. But then the horror started whilst trying to get compiz-fusion to work on it. I also noticed that ndiswrapper was sometimes causing lock-ups.
I know I had fglrx working as I saw the framerate of glxgears jump from ~600 to ~1200. Xgl was also working without compiz-fusion.
After two days unsuccessful trial-and-error (somehow compiz-fusion does not like to play with Xgl on my laptop ) I gave in and tried Kubuntu.
I played with Kubuntu for about 4 hours and gave up on it. I am sure that given more time I would have gotten the system to the point where SuSE 10.3 left off but why I asked myself, why should I continue down this painfull path ...
So off I went to pull SuSE 11Alpha2 off the web ( oh yeah I am sure my ISP enjoyed all the extra traffic of the past few days ). The installation went smooth and to my surprise it kept my home directory around ( my root dir is on a separate partition ).
Booting up I found myself presented with KDE4.0. KDE4.0 looks nice and it might help me get over my still missing compiz-fusion. At some point I might get adventurous again and try to set it up.
Has any one here compiz-fusion working on a Radeon Xpress ? If so, let me know what / how you did it.
BTW, the driver that used to work in 10.2 does not compile with newer SuSE versions.
That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
I finaly came around to implement the functionality of the micro buttons in the SourceToolBar ( next to the videos ).
I did also remove the outdated SourceEntryDialog. This dialog was one of the more sophisticated dialogs but in the current version all of its functionality has been shifted to the MovieDialog and the DialoFiles.
The final improvement was made to the Preview feature for xine based backends ( KXineWidget, and QXineWidget ). The first frame was no longer generated which should now be back in working order.
On a final note: It is nice to finally be able to use the program more then program on it. I am in the midst of converting all my dv videos to DVD.
I made few changes here and there based on user feedback and myself by using QDVDAuthor to create all those family DVDs.
One change I made was in the CommandExecuteDialog. When I created my last DVD which had about 70 input videos. All of which would get subtitles based on their meta information ( I.e. timestamps ).
I wanted to make some minor changes to the menu I created which was not a problem. I then pressed [CreateDVD] and since the videos had been transcoded before I disabled the transcoding block in the CommandQueueDialog ( one click ).
Next came all the Subtitles which wanted to get put into the video streams. Since this has been done before as well I had to either endure the process again or I had to disable these steps manually ( 70 clicks ).
The first time I though "Now this is really annoying", the second time I had to re-do this I though "What a piece of crap, some one should group it the same way as the Transcoding Block". Turns out that some one was me and so I did.
So instead of 72 clicks in the CommandQueueDialog for a re-create I now have to only click thrice.
Another thing I fixed was the selecting and addition of source files which was sometimes done in the reverse order. Of course I also discovered some crash bugs in QDVDAuthor that I fixed ;(.
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I finished the last dialog, used it to create a family DVD and found it to be usable.
Following is the list of all major changes within the past 6 weeks.
Next on my list is now to continue convering my home videos to DVD. Thankfully I have all I need now to get the job done :)
The article on LWN.net is finally available to the public.
Enjoy :)
Happy Birthday to me ...
Oh well, who'd thunk ... big 40.
'Q' DVD-Author in the news :
Before I start here, a big thank you to Paolo Rampino for his improvements of the Italian translation.
 | LWN.net has a writeup on DVDStyler vs QDVDAuthor ( subscription required or wait till Jan 10'th ). And nope I will not tell you which app came out on top, that would spoil the whole fune :) |
Also noteworthy is that I will be back on http://tllts.org again on January 9'th. So stay tuned and tune in next week.
Besides the podcast you can also participate in the IRC chat during the show, which can be fun.
As I wrote last year this time :
2006 has been a productive year and I accomplished at least some of my goals for the year. I have yet to get the undo/redo functionality working 100%.
Well, there you have it. Nothing has changed ... Or has it ? Let's recap the changes made last year :
We added 6 new templates, which is not a lot for a full year but bringing the total up to 30 templates. I wish for 100 and more templates though ...
Early on I added the ThumbnailDialog to help create chapter menus. The LibraryDialog was also added together with some 208 buttons included in the library. The ButtonDialog was revised and a new SelectionDialog was added to play multiple files with the push of a button.
The last dialog to have been added last year was the DialogFiles dialog, which will allow you to add, rate and group video source files. This dialog goes hand in hand with a newly added thumbnail cache.
Of course improvements were made throughout the whole app and the following is only capturing the most important changes.
The dvdauthor.xml file creation was revamped which allows you to manually assign videos and menus to a titleset/title. The evil, evil jumppad attribibute is no longer required. You can now add multiple audio channels to a DVDMenu and import chapter markers for you video.
QPlayer and QDVDAuthor itself have received a facelift.
Playing with different platforms turned out that you can cross compile QDVDAuthor to OpenSolaris ( BeleniX ), windows, MacOSX, and of course all sorts of Linux and BSD versions.
We had four releases in 2007 of which the last three were actually release candidates.
Varol ;)
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