Its pretty simple, maybe im wrong but as far as im aware, the bbc’s iplayer (designed and built by microsoft) is based on microsoft drm technologies and it will be a cold day in hell before microsoft licence their drm systems for use on a linux platform. you’d basically have to have a complete re-licencing of the drm system the iplayer uses (or god forbid, a non drm system). people can keep on beliving in the bbc porting the iplayer to linux but personally, im directing all my efforts regarding this to convincing the bbc trust that the whole idea is flawed relative to the bbc’s own guidelines.
Goom is a crap visualiser (the one that ships with with totem when you play music via totem, its also in rhythmbox iirc).. it just is. and the other day i wanted to just listen to some music and have something nice to look at while I did. unfortunatly i couldn’t find any such thing so this weekend i got off my arse and started coding. heres a sneak peak:
I think it looks kind of neat :) its hardware accelerated unlike the rubbish goom which is done in software and re-sized via the xv extension. i really hope i can stay focused on this, we free software people really need better multimedia support and id love to finally get contributing to free software projects instead of having 20 odd folders in my ‘projects’ directory that are full of half finished stuff.
just in the process of converting it to C instead of C++ (only used C++ to prototype it really, saves me having to think about system design) and then hopefully integrating it with gstreamer. also if anyone happens to know anyone who knows a thing or two about spectrograms point them in my direction ;).
lately I have had problems with giving support for people who want to watch dvd’s on their computer. traditionally i have recommended people install the required libdecss packages and voila things work, but suddenly its not in the repos. apparently and suddenly for some reason that i can not fathom the makers that be have decided that they can not even give us the chance to choose weather to ignore a stupid law or not. so anyway here is the offending code in all its related :o ness: decss.c
i hope that in the next version at least there is some sort of message detailing why there is no dvd support instead of just ignoring the issue all together, if only to make the people and community that gives support to the masses job a little easier.
