Smart Home Blog

Last weekend was rich on releases of open source products. After new versions of Boxee and LinuxMCE 0810 Klaus Schmidinger announced VDR developer version 1.7.6. The changes since 1.7.5 are following:

* cDevice::PlayTs() now syncs on the TS packet sync bytes.
* Made MAXFRAMESIZE a multiple of TS_SIZE to avoid breaking up TS packets.
* No longer resetting the patPmtParser in cDevice::PlayTs(), because this caused the selected audio and subtitle tracks to fall back to the default.
* The SVDRP command PUTE now supports reading the EPG data from a given file (thanks to Helmut Auer).
* Added cThread::SetIOPriority() and using it in cRemoveDeletedRecordingsThread (thanks to Rolf Ahrenberg).
* Fixed the MEGABYTE() macro to make it correctly handle parameters resulting in values larger than 2GB.
* Added cDevice::NumProvidedSystems() to PLUGINS.html (was missing since it had been implemented).
* Fixed distortions when switching to the next file during replay.
* Fixed detecting the frame rate for streams with PTS distances of 1800, which apparently split one frame over two payload units.
* Added missing ‘const’ to cRecording::FramesPerSecond() (thanks to Joachim Wilke).
* Any TS packets in the first “frame” after a cut in an edited recording that don’t belong to a payload unit that started in that frame now get their TEI flag set, so that a decoder will ignore them together with any PES data collected for that PID so far (thanks to Oliver Endriss for reporting chirping sound disturbances at editing points in TS recordings).
* cDvbPlayer::Empty() subtracts 1 from readIndex, because Action() will first increment it.
* Only storing non-zero Pts values in ptsIndex.
* Added a note to the INSTALL file about using subdirectories to split a large disk into separate areas for VDR’s video data and other stuff (suggested by Udo Richter).

I’d like remind you that the main target of VDR 1.7.X is support of HDTV.

Boxee development team announced yesterday a new alpha version. It’s gonna be public since now for Mac, Ubuntu and Apple users. Windows folks should stay on private version.

There is a few new features in the new alpha such support of BBC iPlayer (UK users only), Joost and MTV Music as well as several bug fixes.

For developers who want to develop their applications for Boxee the developer guide was created. The real example of using Boxee API is a support of photo sharing service Pikeo implemented by Orange Labs (from the France Telecom group).

All folks who built Boxee for other Linux distributions such as SlackeWare or Fedora may be interested to know that Boxee source was also updated. Now it’s 0.9.7.4826.

The stable version 180.22 of nVidia video drivers was released yesterday. Following main changes were done since last release:

• Support of CPU 9XXX and some 8XXX and 7XXX.
• Added initial support for PureVideo-like features via the new VDPAU API (see the vdpau.h header file installed with the driver). The VDPAU API is already implemented in the mplayer, libxine, ffmpeg, vlc and MythTV.
• Added support for CUDA 2.1.
• Added preliminary support for OpenGL 3.0.
• Added new OpenGL workstation performance optimizations.
• Enabled the glyph cache by default and extended its support to all supported GPUs.

A bunch of bugs found in the previous version of the drives was fixed.
The nVidia 180.22 video drivers are available for Linux (IA32, AMD64/EM64T), Solaris and FreeBSD.

Yesterday the final version of LinuxMCE 0710 was released. Basically, it’s exactly the same as RC1 except just two thing. The first one is adding a few packages into debian cach to speedup installation. And the second one is updated version of ZWave interface. So, if you have installed RC1 there is no reason to upgrade it.

I have to find time to upgrade my 0710 Beta 4 and play with VDR 1.6. And waiting for the first version of 0804.

Yesterday I released an updates for the LinuxMCE 0704 and Plutohome 2.0.0.44 Orbiters. Following changes were done:

• fixed a bug with running Orbiter from the application menu;
• fixed a bug with incorrect destroying of the Orbiter;
• modified a bit layout to fit captions for LinuxMCE version;
• added appropriate description for LinuxMCE version;
• fixed a few spelling mistakes in the ‘About’ section

Also, I’m planning perform following tasks next step: add all Orbiter’s dependencies to the Maemo extra repository and build a package for MS TrueType Fonts. The package for MS TrueType Fonts is needed because people usually forget to copy those fonts from the core to their Nokia. As result all dynamic captions are not visible.

The latest versions of the Orbiter for LinuxMCE and Plutohome can be downloaded as usual from the Maemo garage.