Sebastian Pölsterl's blog

After I released version 0.1.13 earlier this week and the Debian package got updated accordingly, I took the time to port the package to Ubuntu Karmic. I created a PPA containing the packages for Karmic. Add the PPA to your system and install gnome-dvb-client, gnome-dvb-daemon and totem-plugins-dvb-daemon.

One month after the last release, I released version 0.1.13 of GNOME DVB Daemon today. It's mainly a bug fix release which fixes a couple of problems with recordings, especially if watching and recording took place at the same time. There are only two new features: You can now sort channels either by name or by group in Totem. Channels can be grouped in gnome-control-center under Edit -> Channel lists.

I'm currently in release mode and just released GNOME DVB Daemon 0.1.12, the third release in three weeks. Those three releases include an improved DBus API, a way to assign channels to any number of groups and a lot of bug fixes. You can configure the channel groups in gnome-dvb-control from the "Edit -> Channel Lists" menu. Unfortunately, the groups are not yet displayed in Totem (coming in the next release). Currently, only the DVB Daemon plugin in Coherence makes use of it.

Nelson Creek grave by Canterbury Heritage. License:

I spent last weekend hacking on Coherence, a DLNA/UPnP MediaServer, in the beautiful city of Barcelona. KDE sponsored a couple of hackers to get together at the second Coherence sprint.

Today I moved all the stuff (bzr branch, bugs and downloads) of DVB Daemon over to Launchpad. Therefore, please make sure you pull changes from the new Launchpad repository. Although, the repository at bzr-playground.gnome.org still exists I won't push there anymore. Development takes place at https://launchpad.net/gnome-dvb-daemon now.

It hasn't been that long since the last release and I try to continue releasing more often in the future. Version 0.1.9 is mainly bug fix release. It fixes are critical bug that caused the channel list file to be corrupted (especially with DVB-S). In addition, the EPG scanner and channel scanner use their own main loop now. That should make the daemon more responsive and fixes a couple of crashes.

Beside the bug fixes there's only one new feature. The title of the show a scheduled recording belongs to is retrieved. Therefore, you don't just see the channel, start time and duration of each timer, but the title of the show, if available, too. This required changing the database scheme, make sure to delete ~/.config/gnome-dvb-daemon/ before starting the new version. (I just realized I mentioned the wrong directory in the release notes. Sorry.)

The new version is available at http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-dvb-daemon/0.1/

After almost three months a new release of GNOME DVB Daemon is available today and a lot has changed.

Recordings and live TV are finally treated the same way. Thus conflicts between live TV and recordings can finally be resolved. In addition, all features from gnome-dvb-control are now available in the Totem plugin, too. Therefore, you can schedule recordings, delete recordings and browse EPG directly within Totem. The setup assistant got re-designed and does most of the work automatically now. You can get more information, including screen casts, in my recent post. Another new feature that's worth mentioning is support for Rygel's Media Server Spec so you can watch TV using the Rygel UPnP/DLNA MediaServer.

You can download the latest version at http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-dvb-daemon/0.1/

So far I neglected writing about this year's Google Summer of Code. This ends with this post. As last year, I'm working on GNOME DVB Daemon.

In the last couple of weeks I concentrated on the user experience, thus making setting up devices as easy as possible. I made a short screencast that shows the new assistant started by the Totem plugin.

Update: Apparently, I used a too recent version of libgee when generating the release tarball. Therefore, gnome-dvb-daemon 0.1.6 doesn't compile with libgee 0.1.5. I just released version 0.1.7 which fixes this problem.

After two months since the last release I'm proud to announce GNOME DVB Daemon 0.1.6.

If you don't know what it is:
GNOME DVB Daemon is a daemon written in Vala based on GStreamer to setup your DVB devices, record and watch TV shows and browse EPG. It can be controlled by any application via its D-Bus interface.

I'm particularly happy about this release, because it fixes two of the most annoying bugs. First of all, the channel scanner now produces the same results on each scan. Secondly, it's now possible to record multiple shows on the same transport stream at the same time. In order for the latter to work properly you currently need gst-plugins-bad from git (a tarball is supposed to be released soon). Both bugs would still be present if the awesome Zaheer had not fixed fixed a couple of bugs in GStreamer and helped me getting the recording done correctly. Thanks a lot man!