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As you might have guessed from the GNOME 2.26 release notes there where no big improvements for Deskbar-Applet during the last release cycle. In addition, most items on the roadmap for 2.26 remained unresolved. I’ve been nearly the only active developer for the last two release cycles and the time I spend working on Deskbar-Applet is decreasing steadily. Therefore, I’m searching for someone who is willing to take over maintainership and who brings new energy to the project.

A little bit more than a month after the last release I bring you GNOME DVB Daemon 0.1.2. You can download it at http://download.gnome.org/sources/gnome-dvb-daemon/0.1/

It mainly fixes numerous bugs and memory leaks. Therefore, scanning for channels works much better now. However, I didn’t manage to reproduce exactly the same results as dvb-apps’ scan does, yet. For some still unknown reason some SI tables get lost on the way from the hardware device to the scanner.

All information is now stored in Sqlite databases. Therefore, dvb-daemon doesn’t depend on gconf anymore. Unfortunately, you have to setup your cards and schedule your timers again.

In addition, I reworked the program guide. It looks much nicer now.

GSoC is over for a long time, but that was only the start for dvb-daemon.

Today I released version 0.1.1. The biggest feature is that you can now watch live TV. Channels are streamed over RTSP using the excellent gst-rtsp-server. This made it possible to provide live TV streaming in short time.

Together with the new Totem plugin you easily watch your recordings or live TV.

Now, go download it, test it, and report bugs you came across.

Today I made two releases. The first one was Deskbar-Applet 2.25.1 and the second GNOME DVB Daemon 0.1.0.

Deskbar-Applet

2.25.1 is the first version of the unstable series that will lead to 2.26. I got rid of all gnomevfs calls and replaced them with gio. Furthermore, glade files have been replaced by GTK builder’s UI files. Please download it, test it, and most importantly report bugs you came across.

Download link and more information is available at the Deskbar-Applet site.

GNOME DVB Daemon

Some of you might already now that I worked on this project during this year’s Google Summer of Code. However, I never got round to make a proper tarball release. So here it is.

For those who haven’t heard of this project before, let me give you some short introduction: DVB Daemon is a daemon written in Vala to setup your DVB devices, record TV shows and browse EPG. It can be controlled directly via its D-Bus interface or with UI applications that come with it.

I was attending the Desktop search hackfest in Berlin last week. It was sponsored by Nokia which did a very good job in choosing the location and organizing everything. Big thanks to Nokia for all the work and money they put in. Unfortunately, it was more of a discuss-fest instead of a hackfest. Originally, my plan was to write Python and C# bindings for xesam-glib and plugins for Deskbar and Gnome-Do. It become clear quickly that this ambitious plan doesn’t work out. The schedule was packed with discussion about Xesam Ontology, Search API and Query language. Basically, the discussions about this three topics protracted over the whole hackfest. Mikkel already summed up the conclusions nicely on a wiki page.

We are in UI freeze already and string freeze starts today. It’s time to show the world what’s new in Deskbar-Applet in 2.24.

There’s only one major UI change in the new version. History is not in the main search window anymore but in a separate window as it was in 2.18 and earlier. New is that you can delete the selected item from history if you press the delete key.

(I wasn’t able to take a screenshot when history was displayed. I can’t even take a screenshot if I open any right-click menu.)

Another Summer of Code for GNOME will end soon. As you probably know my task was to write a DVB Manager. Last week I was able to add an option to do a brute force scan for DVB-T (shamelessly stolen from Zaheer’s code). In addition, I was finally able to work on the EPG part. When you record a show the name and description of the currently running show at the beginning of the recording is associated with the recording. Each channel has a Schedule associated with it that contains a sorted list of events (shows) from EPG. Although, it basically works and is accessible through D-Bus I’m not happy how EPG data is currently collected. Currently, I’m iterating over all channels, tune to each of them and store the EPG data I receive. Especially, for satellite this takes a lot of time. Furthermore, during the scan the DVB card can’t be used to watch TV or record shows. E.g. when you watch TV with Totem for some time, dvb-daemon won’t be able to collect EPG data. I honestly have no idea how one can avoid this problem. On the UI part I improved the UI to manage timers. It will now show a red dot when an recording is currently active and the UI will update when timers are added or removed.