 |
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 chenges 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.
|
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 ;(.
 |
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 ;)
Hosted by :
