Re: fresh Gnash rpms for OLPC XO 1.75
On 01/23/12 15:17, Martin Langhoff wrote: Without ffmpeg, what is a good test of current gnash? What is a reasonable expectation of what it can deliver? I start with testing from source, ala make check. The Gnash testsuite requires many dependences, many of which are not available in Fedora or rpmfusion. A short list is haxe, mtasc, swfmill, and swftools. Then I test with a few SWF files, followed by going to YouTube to make sure it works acceptably. Gnash has decent support for up to swf v9 with AVM1, your mileage may vary... what's the right way of doing things? and what's a reasonable expectation of what a lightspark+gnash install can / cannot do? I didn't find a how-to nor a summary of the state of play... If Lightspark sees an AVM1 (swf versions 5-9), it hands those off to Gnash. That's about all it does. I've looked into Gnash handing off AVM2 (swf v9+) content to Lightspark, but after conversation with the Lightspark developers, that was abandoned as unworkable. We had another ide for integration, but that would be alot of work, and nobody has volunteered to do it. Lightspark uses LLVM and a pile of other stuff, it's got a pretty big footprint. I haven't tried it on the ARM. It does work with YouTube, but I believe support for generic SWF files is a work in progress still. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
fresh Gnash rpms for OLPC XO 1.75
On 10/20/11 03:59, Martin Langhoff wrote: That's really good news! Rob, we can ship you a few more B1 units, if that helps make bricking less of an issue :-) I just put new rpms for the XO 1.75 in the Gnash repository at getgnash.org, for anyone that wants to play with a pre-release snapshot. I assume these will also work on the XO 3.0, although I'd need to do some work for Gnash to run on the newer version of Android. We are looking into a (partial?) rebuild of the rpmfusion repo to see how it works with ffmpeg in. Might take some time... I've found the performance better with ffmpeg than gstreamer on the XO 1.75. I understand the redistribution issues... Any progress on the rpmfusion repo ? - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Gnash-dev] rpms for OLPC XO 1.75
On 10/20/11 03:59, Martin Langhoff wrote: That's really good news! Rob, we can ship you a few more B1 units, if that helps make bricking less of an issue :-) It was mostly a matter of finding the right combination of firmware, OS, etc... I think some of the web pages are out of date... but now I've got it working with the latest and greatest, other than the browser doesn't seem to work at all. We are looking into a (partial?) rebuild of the rpmfusion repo to see how it works with ffmpeg in. Might take some time... I don't get working sound with gstreamer, as flash uses MP3 unfortunately. If I build ffmpeg manually from source, it works fine. A partial rpmfusion for ARM would be great for those that don't want to build the plugin by hand. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
XO 1.5 died
I fired up my B2 XO 1.5 unit yesterday, the power light came on, then went off, and now it won't power up at all. The same power supply works fine with a G1G1 unit. I was planning on using it for demos at SCALE 8x next month, any ideas ? I've tried using other power supplies, even a charged battery from an older XO doesn't do anything. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Gnash loves the Via C7
Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: The XO-1 has hardware-accelerated XVideo, including YUV-RGB and scaling. Are you talking about hardware acceleration for the internal stages of video decoding, a la XvMC? Tests on a 1.0 GHz C7-M (the processor in XO-1.5) indicate that software-only rendering should be fast enough to play DVD-resolution video and audio. Sorry, I wasn't quite clear, it's the existing XO hardware that has problems with streaming video when done entirely via software. A 1.0Ghz C7 is fast enough for software rendering of streaming video, but 400Mhz seems to be a threshold for software rendering of networked video. Both the C7 settop/NetBook I have here have Unichrome support (OpenGL), which helps for YouTube. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Gnash loves the Via C7
Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: OK... but entirely via software is Doing It Wrong. With XVideo accel, the XO-1 is perfectly capable of playing back YouTube videos at full speed. Observed performance is only awful because Gnash isn't using XVideo, so YUV-RGB and scaling are being done in software. If we built a As of the 0.8.5 release, Gnash supports both XVideo an the MIT-SHM extension for better performance. It's just that these newer builds never seem to get built for the XO, although I drop binary snapshots as rpms on our http://www.getgnash.org site occasionally. To enable XVideo support of newer Gnash builds, just add set XVideo true in your $HOME/.gnashrc file. We added both of these over the winter because of the benefit to XO class hardware. It's not enabled by default as it's a new feature. The other problem with Gnash builds on the XO is the non-standard Gstreamer builds, so I dynamically link mine with ffmpeg, which also give better performance than using Gstreamer anyway. I assume when you switch to Fedora 11, this problem will go away. Anyway, I like to switch to the C7 from the Geode LX. :-) - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Gnash loves the Via C7
Samuel Klein wrote: Rob - Gnash tweaks would be welcome. Could you use an A-board when they're ready? They're expected out around the end of May: http://wiki.laptop.org/go/Hardware_specification_1.5 It depends on how hot you are to see how Gnash performs on the newer hardware. :-) I shouldn't have to do more than reconfigure Gnash properly more than do many changes. I've worked on several Via boards over the years, in the past their open sourced drivers sucked, and the free software versions were better. Then they finally got the religion, and have been much better the last year. What would be truly awesome would be OpenGLES support on the XO 1.5. :-) Software rendering kills streaming video performance... - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Gnash snapshots for XO
For the brave at heart, I beat Gnash's internal rpm packaging into shape, and managed to produce working rpms from Gnash trunk. These are a bit bleeding edge, with both jemalloc and mit-shm enabled, so your mileage may vary... Rather than fighting with the version skew of Gstreamer, these instead depend on ffmpeg directly, but ffmpeg isn't included in the build, you have to install it separately. With the latest build-767, this is pretty easy now, as the livna packages for fedora 9 work just fine. This worked ok, but the youtube performance isn't great, due to the network overhead. So it skips alot due to buffering issues, it'll have to be looked into it. But many other things work just great now with this build, so while it's a work in progress, I thought some people might want to play with it as it's better than the current version of 0.8.3 in build-767. #!/bin/sh # install livna sudo yum http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-9.rpm # install ffmpeg from livna sudo yum install -y ffmpeg # get rid of the old build of 0.8.3 sudo rpm -ev gnash gnash-plugin # install gnash sudo rpm -iv \ http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-20081025-1.i386.rpm # install the plugin sudo rpm -iv \ http://www.getgnash.org/packages/snapshots/fedora/gnash-plugin-20081025-1.i386.rpm - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: ship Gnash 0.8.4 RC1 in OLPC 8.2.0?
For the record, I consider Dan to have spoken authoritatively on this matter. As he says, the best things that you can do now are to demonstrate that the newer gnash can safely be deployed either via 'yum update', via 'olpc-update', or by providing a custom installation script Our release of 0.8.4 just went out. I'm running it on a G1G1, and it works fine, when compared to any other machine I've tested on. You can grab the source tarball from http://www.getgnash.org. Good luck... :-) - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: getting mp3 sound working w/ Gnash easily
On Sat, Oct 11, 2008 at 04:13:22PM +0800, Carlos Nazareno wrote: We were having a discussion at the Gnash developer mailing list about the absurdity of the situation where it was so difficult to get sound working with Gnash on build 767 that the easy workaround to get sound I have Gnash with working sound and full YouTube video support on 767, and it wasn't even hard. What I mean is that if it's going to take so much difficult jumping through hoops to get sound working with Gnash on the OLPC, why not just recommend that users install the Adobe Flash player which can be done with a single wget-rpm combo and cause less of a support nightmare? Persovnally, the only way to fix this problem is to get political, and start lobbying for the end of software patents. It's the *legal* issues here around codecs and software patents that is the problem, not any technical issue. btw, this attitude is why I've personally given up on the OLPC project. It's been very upsetting to me to see such a great project slowly slide into the proprietary software world. Oh that's right, Nicholas says I'm a free software fundamentalist, holding back the OLPC project... Ship whatever you want... I give up again. And if we ship with 0.8.3, once Gnash 0.8.4 comes out (pretty close enough from what I read from Gnash dev), G1G1 users are going to be stuck with an older outdated version of Gnash for a long time. Which won't work, then everyone will say Linux/Gnash sucks, and give me XP and Adobe. Sigh... - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Video from last week's country meetings.
C. Scott Ananian wrote: Talking with Rob Savoy at FISL, he mentioned that recently some speedups for Ogg encoding has been found that offered over an order of magnitude improvement. I can't tell if that's what's being discussed in the email above, or if these improvements are still in the pipe. But Rob promised that we'd have a full end-to-end Ogg solution by the end of the year. For Theora, as opposed to Ogg Vorbis, but mostly on the encoding side of things. It used to take over 60 passes to encode, now it's down to 1 pass. There appear to be many other places the encoding/decoding process for Ogg Theora can be optimized, it's surprising nobody tried before. btw, I didn't do this optimization, it was done by a developer at Redhat. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: flash specs
Andres Salomon wrote: Adobe was clearly responding to Nicholas's cry for flash on the XO. ;) I doubt that... although they are also dropping all licensing fees. As far as the Gnash team can tell, while this does remove some of the legal issues around flash, we're far past the point the released specs will do us any good. Also although FLV is documented, it uses Sorenson, so it's still a patent violation for us to make YouTube work out of the box on the XO. A nice move on Adobe's part, more openness is always good, but basically useless for developers. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Flash Gnash
Edward Cherlin wrote: The video in XO Speak: Speech Synthesis for One Laptop Per Child, http://www.olpcnews.com/software/applications/xo_speak_speech_synthesis.html http://flash.revver.com/player/1.0/player.js?mediaId:761721;affiliateId:137131;backColor:#00;frontColor:#ff;gradColor:#00;width:480;height:392; showing a child using Speak, doesn't play in Gnash. How can we get that fixed? YouTube videos mostly play fine, so we know that there is no sound technical reason for the problem. For example, the Theora encoding is supported in Free/Open Source software. The video player is written using the very latest swf v9, which Gnash is still working on. We do support many of the swf v8 players, like YouTube's, but this one we never get to the video at all. If somebody could recompile that swf file that's the actual media player, it should work, or at least be close to working. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theora Theora is an open and royalty-free lossy video compression technology being developed by the Xiph.Org Foundation as part of their Ogg project. Based upon On2 Technologies' VP3 codec, Theora is targeted at competing with MPEG-4, WMV, and similar low-bitrate video compression schemes. Gnash already has Ogg Vorbis and Theora support. I'm also working on my own media server, that speaks flash, but also support Theora instead of FLV. We're big fans of using patent free codecs as much as possible. The real reason for this problem is Adobe, which refuses to either create a Free Flash player, or to provide information to allow the community to build one. I invite you to complain to them, also. You We don't need Adobe's help, we're far past the point in our reverse engineering for Gnash where it would help anymore. What we do need is community support to solve this problem by increasing the pace of development of Gnash. There is only a small handful of us working on Gnash. There's alot of sharp engineers on this list. If we all got motivated, we could push Gnash to the point we don't care about Adobe at all. Seriously... - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin wrote: * Gnash needs funding and developers. Let's do it. Rob Savoye says, as I understand it, that more codecs have been cracked but not coded for. Rob, can we get the list? Is there a roadmap for implementation? I didn't see it in any of the obvious places. Gnash supports all the proprietary codecs, the issue is that the OLPC can't ship Gnash enable for these codecs due to US patent law. Can these modules be recoded for Gnash? I don't see this as an either/or. Usually this is the fastest way to get something working with Gnash. If the developer test with Gnash, it's often a tiny bit of additional work. The problem is nobody tests with Gnash but a few free software developers... I am willing to discuss bundling Flash on the XO if Adobe will give us a license. I am willing to work out an easy download process if not. Regardless of that we need to finish Gnash, and get as many Flash videos as possible recoded for Gnash. Different people can choose which of those paths to work on, if they like. The OLPC already bundles Gnash with the XO. The issues are often one of missing codecs for multimedia support, and completeness. While Gnash handle SWF v7 reasonably well, much newer content is coming out in SWF v8 and v9, which we're still working on. As Gnash uses ffmpeg and gstreamer, it can actually handle any supported video format, including the new high quality YouTube one (H.264), as well as Ogg Vorbis, Theora, and Dirac. For the XO, I'd think one would want to be using Theora or Vorbis instead of something proprietary. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Edward Cherlin wrote: So where is Gnash? What can we look forward to in the next release? The latest release was about 2 weeks ago. :-) We put snapshot builds up on http://www.getgnash.org and we recently got buildbot up and running, those builds currently go in http://www.gnashdev.org/buildbot. What help do you need? Seriously ? :-) We need more resources for the Gnash project. We are a tiny handful of people working hard on doing a clean room SWF player. The few of us work all day, every day on Gnash More people volunteering to work on Gnash, funding help, test cases would all help us achieve compatibility with SWF v9 in a reasonable amount of time. Most people, and this includes the majority of OLPC users, just go Gnash doesn't work or Gnash will never be complete, and just install the Adobe player as the easy path to what they're used to. If people were willing to work with us on actually tracking down what the bugs are so we can fix them, or working on producing SWF content that has been tested with Gnash, we'd get more accomplished. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Charbax wrote: filmed myself, I can encode a version in Ogg Theora I think, though is there a way to automatically stream Ogg Theora in full screen on the olpc laptop? The simplest way I know is to write a 5 line Flash program to load the file from disk and play it. If you use Gnash, it'll just work. I hope gnash will work sometime soon, with some ways to playback Youtube and all other flash video sites in full screen and smoothly. There is no other Gnash has supported YouTube, and other video sites (not all) for over a year, and we also support a -fullscreen option. My own builds of Gnash for the XO work reasonably well, but due to patent laws, I can't redistribute those builds. The other problem becomes the libraries we depend on, like Gstreamer, change frequently, so Gnash breaks often after upgrades. So most people just assume Gnash is incredibly far from even working at all, which is far from reality. theora encoded videos and all that. I just think that perhaps OLPC would be a good way to put pressure on the established software patent holders, so that they stop blocking Linux from having good, smooth, legal access to what have become web standards for video codecs such as flash video and Mpeg4, VOIP such as Skype, audio codecs such as Mp3, website design such as flash animations. Proprietary formats that have become so popular on the web need to be opened up by new laws and regulation or by popular pressure on those companies that purposefully block interoperability on those certain features. I've recently formed a new 501c6 non-profit to do exactly this. While continuing to work on Gnash, and emphasize patent free codecs, we also plan to pursue other means of legally decoding proprietary formats. We already can support the proprietary codecs using ffmpeg, but would like to deal with the patent issue in a legal way. Fluendo has done this, Redhat is trying to negotiate a way to do this now, so maybe we can too... Our hope is that we can raise sufficient funding through our new organization to not only accelerate the progress of Gnash, but to work on the legal and political aspects as well. Those of us that develop free software have special concerns, and as far as I can tell, there is nobody else trying to improve the situation for us all. So we're going to try... So if people want to see this situation improve, please support us in this task. (insert generic fund raising plea here) - rob - http://www.openmedianow.org ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Carol Lerche wrote: Once again I get depressed about everyone's dependence on proprietary formats, even for worthy causes. :-( specific case of Adobe flash, it would be excellent if someone friendly to the project could approach Adobe and ask that they allow the plugin to be packaged for distribution during school deployments. Adobe has been approached many times by various OLPC people in the past about this... which is why the XO ships Gnash instead. Rather than continuing to have a nasty dependency on a large company with proprietary formats that prefers to make money from software licensing, we'd do better to support Gnash getting more compatible faster. Most of the bugs we find and aren't that time consuming to fix. We're just a tiny team of people. With some support we could hit that magical spot were we play enough of the existing SWF content that nobody cares about the few things that don't work. Our SWF v8 and v9 support is already starting to work, along with initial support for ActionScript 3, making many new sites work. With some support (test cases, working with us, funding, engineering) we could push Gnash ahead much sooner than most people realize is possible. While this doesn't solve the problem *now*, it does let us work towards eliminating this as a problem in the future. I'm also a homeschooling parent, so thinking about leaving a better future behind for my children is more important to me than short term goals. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [Olpc-open] Nortel LearniT animations (Seth Woodworth)
Steve Holton wrote: Gnash will *never* be fully compatible with Flash because the closer Gnash gets to being a viable free Flash replacement, the more incentive there is for Adobe to change the Flash specification in a way to break compatibility. They've already changed the format in a big, hence all our hard work to reverse engineer SWF v9. ActionScript 3 is finally ECMAScript compatible, same as JavaScript, so I doubt that'll change much in the future. Also all the changes in SWF v9 were performance oriented, and that required a new VM. Gnash now does support the SWF v9 format changes, that was easy. It's implementing the ActionScript class libraries that's much of the work left. SWF has evolved very slowly, so I don't feel we'll be chasing Adobe for long. Two decades in the Microsoft format wars should have taught that lesson to everyone by now. Look how long (and how much) it's taken ODF to get where it's at. Yes, but as far as I can tell, OpenOffice works well enough with M$ Office, compatibility wise, that I haven't had to use M$ Office for many years. Not everything converts in OO 100% all the time, but what doesn't work I can easily live with. OTOH, the XO offers us an opportunity to create a new standard among an audience which has no investment in the old. But this is a limited opportunity. New standards still don't solve the problem of playing existing content (often proprietary), which is what I though we were discussing. Also playing SWF files in the future is not something we worry about, since that will only effect new content, which doesn't exist yet. :-) My point is that we want people to work with us. Most of the time all I hear is Gnash sucks, it's not 100% compatible yet. We know that already... What we want to do is identify what sucks, produce test cases, and then fix the problems. Bitching about the problem and dumping Gnash does not solve the problem, it merely ignores it. It's the easy way out. Yes, it can take some time for an end user with a problem to work with us till we identify what is wrong. As none of us can use the Adobe player due to clean room problems, it's our end users that help us work on testing compatibility. Many people have helped contribute to the development of Gnash merely by helping answer questions about what's wrong, and trying patches, and most of them were not professional engineers. All we are asking for is help beyond just griping, and patience as our small team pushes forward. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: No sound when playback flash file on XO
Yibo Lin wrote: The sound is perfect when I playing the flash file using Gnash (0.8.1) in the emulator on my laptop (Ubuntu with sugar-jhbuild). Just when using the Gnash (0.8.1) to playback the same flash file on the actual XO, the sound won't come up. Any suggestions? Thanks! Flash files use MP3 as the audio codec, which can't be shipped with the XO. You'd need to install the Gstreamer plugin for MP3 support to have this work. If you install the gst-ffmpeg plugin, then you can also get FLV (ie, YouTube) to work also. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: compiler / glibc optimization
Vasilis Liaskovitis wrote: 1) I haven't found a default gcc in my xo system - if there is one, where is it installed ? yum install gcc works. You quickly run out of room for the development packages you need, so it's easier to build on another Fedora 7 machine. You can also stick the dependent headers and libraries on a USB drive or SD card, but it's slow and much more efficient to just use your desktop machine. You can also compile on Ubuntu Gutsy much of the time, if your libraries are roughly the same version. Or statically link. (http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Building_OLPC_Tools) Is the geode-patched gcc4.2.1 preferrable for integration with the XO? I think Bernie added this to the gcc builds for the XO. I think he also added the patched glibc as well. As I use my own toolchains, I hadn't checked... :-( 2) My XO uses glibc2.6-4. I have reproduced the performance improvement from John Zulauf's optimizations (memcpy, memcmp, memset, strcmp, strcpy, strlen) against the local 2.6-4 implementation. The 2.6.5 glibc built on the gnashdev project includes these optimizations except from strcpy. Does anyone know why that is? Is the gnashdev build pushed for inclusion in upcoming stable systems? strcpy() had a problem that was causing a core dump, that I didn't have the time to track down. I thought I had a link to the working copy of strcpy() in assembler to anyone that wishes to improve the current optimization patch. There may be other routines worth optimizing. I limited my patch to what AMD had provided in their performance tests, as it was very convenient to start with known testing results. Most of what I did was just make the best perf-test code build as part of glibc. 3) Are there any important libraries or tools that still need to be analyzed/profiled or optimized for geode? FFTW, BLAS are mentioned on the optimization effort wiki/thread - are they being benchmarked by someone? Similarly, any important XO applications/system components that need to be benchmarked/ profiled with the default toolchains or with a newer toolchain? Any wiki links are appreciated. On my system I build most everything with the optimized toolchain. For a system like the XO, every cycle helps. I'd love to see more performance testing and improvement through the use of this geode-optimized toolchain, plus see the patches get migrated upstream. I can continue to keep the gnashdev wiki page updated with this info, or maybe it should live on the laptop.org wiki. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: compiler / glibc optimization
Wade Brainerd wrote: Anyway, I would love to see someone publish a secondary compiler package that was XO optimized to the repository, e.g. yum install gcc-xo. At http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Building_OLPC_Tools, you can get a binary tarball of gcc 4.3, plus rpms for the XO of glibc. Sorry it's not packaged as easily as being able to use yum, but at least this is an fully geode optimized toolchain. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: no, it does not need to be thrashed out either in the press or in court. The aim is to avoid both. What you need to do is produce detailed claim charts, along with a set of non-infringement arguments. Once you have those then you can work out how to write your code so as to avoid the patent. This isn't always possible, but it often is. I'm actually considering an approach like this, because the Gnash project is in the same basic boat as Samba when it comes to protocols and other things. Unless we research this, we'll never know... Not true at all. I have handled the patent avoidance for Samba for a long time now, and it has generally taken me a few weeks per patent with a good patent attorney to come up with a solid non-infringement argument. Those are intensive weeks, but it is certainly not years. I think it is work the effort, and would like to figure out how we on the Gnash team can do this. Whether the effort involved is worth it depends how much of an impediement these codec patents are to the success of the OLPC This issue is much more important to the Gnash project I think than the OLPC. While we do prefer emphasizing using free codecs, the simple fact is most of the content on the net is in a proprietary format, so we don't have much choice but to find ways to support them. Since often these web sites use flash to stream the video, it seems the problems lands on us Gnash developers to work out a solution... - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Jake Beard wrote: Hopefully, later this year we'll see a completely open Java, and then see Java on the XO. Flash is terrible. If it were possible, I'd prefer to see an all-Java solution. Sorry, but java sucks rocks, and although I dislike flash, I think it's a better solution for just streaming video. The several years I worked with Java was a nightmare of bloated code and poor performance. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: We really need a open project to do patent analysis of this kind and determine which of these key patents (not just codecs, but also other important blocking patents) can be avoided, and which ones are too tied to the format to avoid. Perhaps the OLPC project would provide a good bit of motivation for people to do this type of work? As of last week, I've incorporated the Open Media Now! foundation to work on issues like this. Our current projects are Gnash and Cygnal (Cygnal being our media server). We hope to expand this as I raise funding to work on the political and legal aspects. Yes, good lawyers are expensive... I do believe that figuring out a clean and legal path through this minefield is very important for free software. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Sebastien Adgnot wrote: However it seems quite difficult for us to encode our videos in Theora+Vorbis right now. I'm gonna talk to different people in the company to get their opinion and see what we can do. Ffm peg does a fair job at codec conversion. We use our friends at Lulu.tv to convert videos to free formats. In the meantime, I've heard of the Helix Media Player http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helix_(project) for the OLPC project? It won't be of any help? No. It's not really useful, and the streaming codecs are not included, you still have to license the codecs anyway. The free version of helix is one of those brain damaged things that's purposely limited. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Benjamin M. Schwartz wrote: There might be some way to embed Theora in Flash in a way that Gnash can play, but this will never work in Adobe Flash. I strongly advise that, for OLPC, you avoid Flash altogether. Gnash can already handle both Ogg and Theora as external files just fine. We're also modifying Ming to be able to generate swf files with Ogg and Theora as embedded data. This requires extending the swf spec in a way that still says compatible for FLV, ON2, and MP3. To go along with this, I've been working on a clone of the Adobe Media Server, so we can steam free codecs. Right now you can only do this with icecast, but it doesn't speak the flash protocols, which Gnash now supports. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Fwd: Dailymotion for XO laptop
Walter Bender wrote: Unfortunately, when I tried to see Dailymotion's website http://www.dailymotion.com, the videos didn't work. Sigh, I am getting so tired of this issue with codecs... Gnash for the XO is built without support for any proprietary audio or video codecs. Because of the patent laws, the OLPC project (which is based in the US) cannot redistribute these codecs. So, although Gnash supports dailymotion just fine, it'll never work on the XO unless it's built with support for these codecs, namely FLV, ON2, and MP3. I'm on vacation this week, but I'm very strongly considering finding a safe host far away where I can stick a Gnash build for the XO that fully works, as that's probably the easiest fix. I sure wish Gnash could be distributed to support these codecs, but changing US patent laws seems a huge project. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: GLX available?
Bert Freudenberg wrote: As a data point, Doom runs quite fast even at full resolution on a B4. Have not heard reports on getting Quake running. But I suspect that a software renderer hand-optimized towards the XO could be made Doom and Quake use character graphics, and not GL, which is how they get adequate performance. For Gnash, which also supports OpenGL on platforms with a GPU, we used AGG instead for the XO, as the performance was much better than trying to run Mesa. For Gnash this works fine, but it does effect the video performance. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Give One Get One laptop for software development
M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote: 1. Cross-develop on a more powerful platform, download the software to the XO, and test it. Which is the easiest way. You can also develop natively on Fedora 7, and just copy the executables over, as the XO is basically running Fedora 7 anyway. 2. Native develop and test on the XO itself. Barely... There is barely enough room for all the development packages, and gcc does not perform real well. At one time I had a USB drive with everything on it, but it's just easier to use a Fedora machine. I usually only use my own cross compilers for the XO when I'm on my Ubuntu laptop. and there is not GCC or any of the conventional Linux development tool set. GCC and G++ are both used with the XO. Yes ... once you set the root and olpc passwords on the unit itself, you can ssh in over either the wireless network or via a USB standard I usually ssh into my XO, and do most everything that way except for testing. Well ... I guess that depends on how good your emulator is. But the Geode is more like an Athlon than anything else -- I think it has MMX and 3DNOW! but not SSE or 3DNOWEXT or any later SSE instruction sets. I believe the geode optimized GCC and Glibc are included now. If not, here's instructions on building your own: http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Building_OLPC_Tools - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: wow, wireless go BOOM!
Ricardo Carrano wrote: Up to the present moment, there is no other known scenario where a group of XOs could disturb a network. So, if you update the firmware and still get general problems in the network, we are really interested in repeating this. Actually this sounds similar to the problems we had a few weeks ago a a conference in CA. There is a bug report open on it already. As the conference was a temporary thing, we can't reproduce the exact situation. Some of the symptoms you posted look different, but the 3 X0s at the conference were all running build 406 still. One of the ideas at the conference was the density of other APs was part of the problem. This is the part that sounds real similar... - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: [PyCON-Organizers] OLPCs not considerate wireless users
Noah Kantrowitz wrote: We can always lock the mesh interface to a single channel, and keep the normal APs on the two others. Also turning down the Tx power will reduce interference with normal 802.11b/g. As an absolute fall-back, there is a snippet of commands on the wiki to disable the wireless interface (Airplane mode or similar IIRC). I think banning them from PyCON is over reacting. I've been at multiple conferences with multiple OLPCs turned on for days. This includes conferences like Chaos Camp, with 100 times the wireless traffic of Hackers. At the Camp, they even had several other mesh networks running with zero problems. But yes, at Hacker's it was a serious pain in the neck. There were two main problems. People kept rebooting the OLPCs, which re-enabled the network after I had disabled it. I finally had to make sure it stayed off after a reboot of any of the 3 units. The other problem was originally thought to be the high density of APs, about 9 within a few hundred feet, and several within 25 feet. (down the length of the hallway) At other conferences (like the Camp) the APs were mostly dozens, if not many hundreds of feet away. After brainstorming with some other folks at Hacker's, our feeling is the problem was caused by having multiple APs with the same identical SSID, but multiple MACs. This should be easy to reproduce if you can reconfigure several APs without causing other problems. :-) Sorry this response took a few days after the problem was reported, I was offline on a rare few days of vacation. Yosemite was beautiful! - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
Re: Compiler optimization for Geode/Floating Point pipeline
On Mon, Oct 29, 2007 at 03:33:22PM -0700, Brian Carnes wrote: What aspects of this issue/request for help are still open? I'll go take a look at the OLPC build system tonight to see what is being used (late versions of GCC do have some Geode -mtune/-march modes), but would love to be hooked into whatever project is addressing this There is more info on geode optimizations for GCC and glibc at: http://wiki.gnashdev.org/wiki/index.php/Building_OLPC_Tools. There is some minor tweaking of the optimizer for the geode, it's mostly treated as a pentium class processor. While it could be better, with these patches it's still better than the default of pentium. Anyway, I'd love to work with folks that are also into shaving cycles whereever possible. - rob - ___ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
