A multimedia life

Bossa Conference - Linux Multimedia Highlights

2007-03-20T08:18:00.000-03:00

Edgard and Wim Taymans talking about Gstreamer in the INdT Office

Helix

In the 1st day, Milko Boic, principal software engineer for Real on the Helix DNA Client project, talked about "Building Digital Media Solutions with Helix DNA Client".

DaVinci

In the 2nd day, Rishi Bhattacharya, Systems and Software Architect (DSP Systems) from Texas Instruments, talked about DaVinci technology and OMAP.

Gstreamer

In the 3nd day, Wim Taymans, core developer and project co-founder, talked about the Gstreamer framework (overview) and what is coming in the next releases.

Brisa 0.3 is out!

2007-03-05T08:36:00.000-03:00

Brisa is a UPnP A/V framework written in Python, it enables to create MediaServer/MediaRenderer devices allowing users to share and search content from UPnP A/V devices. It has a plugin architecture enabling new services such as Flickr to be added as UPnP services.

Skype - Voice Mail to Text

2007-02-28T08:44:00.000-03:00

Now, Skype users can have their voice mail messages delivered to their e-mail and SMS, the service is based on voice recognition software created by SimulScribe. It uses proprietary voice recognition algorithms to transcribe voicemail to text. The transcribed voice message is held in the e-mail body, while the original audio is contained in an attached .wav file.

Sony - Stereo Bluetooth Accessories

2007-02-27T09:08:00.000-03:00

Sony unleashed a suite of Bluetooth 2.0 accessories all supporting the A2DP profile for stereo audio, thus if you have a mobile device with support for A2DP, it will be able to send music directly to their stereo, controlling playback using the phone's playback controls. One day I will have a N800 and a Stereo Bluetooth Headset.

Microsoft must pay $1.5B in patent suit

2007-02-23T08:44:00.000-03:00

A U.S. federal jury found that Microsoft MP3 technology has violated patents held by Alcatel-Lucent and should pay $1.52 billion in damages. If you don't know which patents Alcatel-Lucent used to get a $1.52 billion from Microsoft, they are:

Definitively to use OGG Vorbis is the best way to avoid lawsuits.

Carman - OBD-II analyzer for Maemo platform

2007-02-14T15:20:00.000-03:00

"Carman is the first OBD-II analyzer for Maemo platform. You are wondering why your car's Check Engine Light is on. Carman will help you answer that."

Steve Jobs and DRM

2007-02-07T08:47:00.000-03:00

Thoughts on Music

Steve Jobs talked about DRM and why the labels insisted on it. It is a import post, and I recommend you read. After pros and cons, Steve Jobs concludes that the best course of action is to abandon DRM completely. He said: "Perhaps those unhappy with the current situation should redirect their energies towards persuading the music companies to sell their music DRM-free."

Photo sharing application

Picme provides an interesting 3-D interface that offers a “perspective view” to allow users to sift through large collections of photos. It isn't a product yet but at least it seems promising at the beginning.

Singing a song

2007-01-31T09:23:00.000-03:00

Midomi

I discovered a new music service, it is funny! With Midomi you can use your voice to search music, basically you sing into your microphone and then it guesses what song it is.

The Police

The Police originally came together in London in 1977, they are certainly one of the greatest bands of the 80s and had a great influence on the 90s. It was my favorite band for a long time. They will reunite at the 2007 Grammy Awards on February 11, that's a great new for me, at least! :)

Turning Vinyl into MP3

2007-01-29T08:38:00.000-03:00

I already was a great fan of vinyl, but I have a huge Vinyl collection still, and I would like to get it digitalized some day. Few days ago Soul-Sides.com posted a Guide to Turning Vinyl into MP3 , and I discovered that the process is not quite as simple as just ripping CDs and it is quite expensive, anyway one day it will be cheaper and I will have my Vinyl collection digitalized .

More about books

2007-01-22T08:41:00.000-03:00

"Working together, Google and the University of Texas will digitize over a million books from the university's collection. Anyone will be able to freely view, browse, and read the university's public domain documents."

University of Texas Libraries are the fifth largest academic library in the United States. This initiative will be available on Google Books Library Project.

Shelfari - Social Network For Book

2007-01-19T08:40:00.000-03:00

Yesterday, Osvaldo told me about Shelfari , it is a social network for books, it has all the familiar trappings of social networks such as profiles, tagging, friends and recommendations. It lets you create book list for books you’ve read, books you own and books you plan to read. It seems an interesting social network, I am enjoying it.

Python 2.5 for Maemo released

2007-01-16T15:10:00.000-03:00

Python 2.5 is the latest major release of Python, the highlights of this version are:

* Support for N800 device/software (SDK 3.0)
* Language updated to Python 2.5
* Updated bindings
* Added bindings to new Hildon widgets
* Improved OSSO bindings
* Project home has moved to Garage.maemo.org.
* The new project page is http://pymaemo.garage.maemo.org.

Bossa Conference

2007-01-15T08:46:00.000-03:00

Bossa Conference - Who's coming

INdT is promoting an International Conference in Recife, Brazil, from March 12th to 14th. You can check some confirmed names and lectures in the Conference website!

Brisa

"Brisa is written in Python and enables to create MediaServer/MediaRenderer devices allowing users to share and search content from UPnP A/V devices. It will offer a plugin architecture enabling new services such as Flickr to be added as UPnP services"

I tried Brisa Media Server in my Nokia 770, and it is working quite nicely with Canola and MediaStreamer! I am waiting for Flickr and Playlist support!

iPhone

2007-01-10T08:49:00.000-03:00

About Cingular, actually Apple chose GSM, it was an excellent marketing decision, i suspect that Cingular will have the exclusive for a short period of time. About iPod's future, I think in the future the Apple could easily decouple the "phone" part from the rest of the iPhone, and iPods will have a multi-touch interface with cheaper price.

Nokia N800

2007-01-08T09:23:00.000-03:00

"Nokia is launching a Developer Device Program to provide open source developers with Nokia N800 Internet Tablets at a discount. Maemo.org will be providing 500 devices at a price of 99 Euros per device to selected open source developers. Eligible developers will be provided a discount code to be used at the Nokia N800 online shop."

Gnome Love - Tell your adventure!

2007-01-04T16:30:00.000-03:00

Context

My wife loves to talk about adventures with her best friends. She has a lot of Photos, but many times is so hard to find and to share the right moments with the friends. If you imagine that every picture may represent a place, a person and a special context, we could link them to each other based on place, person and context.

Proposal

Gnome Desktop Application and tools to create connections among the people, places, and contexts in your photos, and share! The concept could be extented to video, i.e, if I have a video where my brother appears three times, he would be just interested in that specific moments.

Features

To set relationship between me and others.
To represente a person at different stages of life by photo’s date and the birthday.
To create filters by Life Periods.
Who’s in the photo and where it was in that moment.
To plot the location that person on a world map (web services).
To see a specific month based in a context, i.e, Christmas photos in December!
To connect pictures with other medias.
To create audio/visual presentations and tell your adventures.

Technologies

Annodex
Gstreamer
Flash (?)

Gabriel 0.1, "Fly Gabriel Fly" released

2007-01-04T09:07:00.000-03:00

"Gabriel is a client-server application that allows you to create D-Bus connections on a remote machine over a secure (SSH) channel. The project is the first step towards the GOD (Gstreamer On-Demand) project, which would allow applications to create multimedia pipelines (or parts of the pipeline) on a remote machine. Nonetheless, Gabriel can be used by other projects as well."

Good Job Zeenix! Gstreamer on Demand is coming soon ...

Listening and Reading

2007-01-03T06:24:00.000-03:00

Most Listened To 2006

These were the artists that I have maintained their spots in my car in 2006:

1. The Killers
2. John Mayer
3. Phoenix

Reading

I want to start reading more this year. My first choice will be Long Tail by Chris Anderson. A colleague recommended this one to me. It seems an interesting book in terms of its approach. It promises to be a good source of information by someone who wants to understand how the Internet impacts marketing and distribution.

Picture Frame and Vaporware!

2006-12-29T14:37:00.000-03:00

It is a picture frame with built-in WiFi. The device operates independently of a PC, it can be configured to check RSS feeds from Flickr, Webshots and other photo-sharing sites, automatically adding new images to the rotation as they become available. Sounds great!

Just for fun:

* Vaporware Awards
* 100 things we didn't know last year

Happy New Year!

Multipoint technology

2006-12-27T11:11:00.000-03:00

Unfortunately, when there is only one mouse pointer on the screen, so you have to fight for it! Multipoint sounds like a great idea!

Don't touch my screen, please! Could you use the second mouse to point something on the screen? :)

Microsoft and RSS

2006-12-26T10:02:00.000-03:00

Microsoft isn't attempting to patent RSS itself, they are trying to patent two applications of RSS:

Technology patents should be actually innovative, but they are trying to patent obvious inventions, sounds like the entire process of reading, parsing, and storing RSS for multiple applications to utilize. Funny!

Pandora - New Social Feature

2006-12-22T14:53:00.000-03:00

Pandora was created by Music Genome Project, it's an useful service, especially as they added social features. It has a different approach from listening to a tag station on last.fm. Musicians analyze the musical qualities of songs and build a database based on this analysis, but I think Last.fm has a better approach than Pandora. Anyway, similar artist radio is awesome.

Amazon selling DRM-free mp3s

2006-12-20T08:52:00.000-03:00

They will only sell DRM free mp3's and will offer variable pricing. You would download the music, no more restrictions to burn and to share in your computers. Is DRM-free the best approach?

Google Maps Mars

2006-12-19T08:36:00.000-03:00

Yes, it is true! Google and NASA have partnered for a “Space Act Agreement". The press release says:

"As the first in a series of joint collaborations, Google and Ames will focus on making the most useful of NASA’s information available on the Internet. Real-time weather visualization and forecasting, high-resolution 3-D maps of the moon and Mars, real-time tracking of the International Space Station and the space shuttle will be explored in the future."

Location-based application

2006-12-18T15:01:00.000-03:00

I did some research in Location-based applications few time ago, mainly privacy and data storage issues. Today, I read about iFind, it is a new social networking application. The approach was:

There is no centralized storage of data, and everything happens on encrypted peer-to-peer transmissions among users.

It is a good idea, in my opinion, because all the intelligence is inside the client application instead of on a central server, so nobody can track your position unless you want.

Google Patent Search

2006-12-15T09:28:00.000-03:00

Google Patent Search uses the same technology as Book Search. Google says there are currently 7 million patents in the database.

Flickr - Camera Finder

2006-12-14T08:52:00.000-03:00

What’s The Most Popular Camera or CameraPhone? Flickr can help you discover!

Flickr is now offering a Camera Finder that lets you see which cameras are most popular on Flickr. Lists and Graphs are generated automatically by periodically sampling the EXIF data from the stream of recent upload. The information is ranked by the number of photos uploaded to Flickr by each camera model.

Right Now, I can see the quality of the Cameras for myself before I buy one. Current, I have a Nikon Coolpix L3.

Platform for Wi-Fi Radio

2006-12-13T11:25:00.000-03:00

"At CES 2007, Cambridge Consultants will launch a platform design which rewrites the economics of the emerging internet radio market. Based on just two ICs, the Iona Wi-Fi portable radio can be built with an electronic bill-of-materials (eBOM) costing less than $15."

It supports RTP, HTTP, RDT and MMS, and audio streams such as MP3, WMA, AAC, AIFF.

Music Search Engine

2006-12-12T15:33:00.000-03:00

Owl Multimedia developed a new music search engine, it enables to discover tracks released under Creative Commons licenses by comparing the sounds of songs they own with the sounds of thousands of new songs. You use sound similarity instead of text-based queries. That's a great initiative. I've already tried Acoustic Discovery Services like MusicIP.

Gstreamer - Distributed Multimedia

2006-12-11T16:38:00.000-03:00

Gstreamer provides a network clock, serialization of events and data buffers. Therefore, we need to control a pipeline remotely, to allow multiple devices inside the home to listen to the same stream while maintaining only a single connection to the server (Proxy), and to enable session sharing service. These are some of the challenges that I have discuss with Zeenix (Gstreamer On-Demand Project) and Marc-André (Gsmartmix).
I have some use cases in mind, and I am sure that we will reach the goals! We could concentrate effort to make the "remote system" work at all. Let's share ideas!

Joomla!

2006-12-09T08:37:00.000-03:00

I was looking for a content management system.
My wife needed to publish web content, to use Calendars, to enable Subscription services and to assign roles and responsibilities. After some research I choose Joomla. It is very simple, and flexible! Ok, I am losing the opportunity to learn Python! But, Joomla/PHP does the job!

Mugshot

2006-12-05T13:33:00.000-03:00

Recently, I discovered Mugshot, it allows to show off the music you listen to using services like Last.fm. Mugshot works with "social networking" sites, but it doesn't replace them. Some Features:

Create and customize your own Music Radar to display on MySpace, LiveJournal, or other blog site
Display your music playlists as you're listening

Don't speak!

2006-12-03T14:02:00.000-03:00

Imagine a device that translates what you are saying, but does not require the you speak the words out loud. Researchers of Carnegie Mellon University has developed a prototype! Currently, the prototype supports English to Spanish or German and Chinese to English. I would be able to talk effectively in multiple languages, quite nice!

Music in you!

2006-12-01T10:03:00.000-03:00

Typically Wireless Headphones use infrared or Bluetooth, but they would basically use your own body to carry the music up to the headphones. I am talking about a Human body communication system, Sony's research lab did the body-wired headphone patent application. The new system uses the listener's body as a capacitor that carries a tiny electrostatic charge. A music or video player sends a fluctuating signal to a conductive cloth pad.

Canola

2006-11-30T09:12:00.000-03:00

After Canola official release, I’m very impressed, lots of feedbacks. I would like to congrat the team for the great work. Marcelo posted some videos explaining Canola usage. It's fast and beautiful! We hope you all enjoy it!

Sunset on Jacare Beach

2005-10-20T22:53:00.000-03:00

Saturday I will be in Joao Pessoa, I hope to find some friends there! I was browsing in my favorite music store and I did some new discoveries. I bought the new Franz Ferdinand album. Great album! Better than the first I'd say. Added to my basket the new stereophonics album, okay, it isn't their best cd, it takes more than one listen to enjoy it, but I recommend!

Tapioca

2005-09-20T21:04:00.000-03:00

INdT team is working in a new framework for VoIP (http://tapioca-voip.sourceforge.net/), they are doing a great work. Renato filho is working on Rhythmbox port for Maemo, I hope to get a release in the next weeks.
Every tuesday we play football, It’s always fun, I don't undestand how Edgard runs so fast, really he is a surprise. Last sunday, we were running a cart race , I was much too slow, but it was my first time, who knows in the next I will have a better performance.

Porto de Galinhas

2005-09-08T22:14:00.000-03:00

I took this picture on january, I was with my fiance in Porto de Galinhas, at south coast of Pernambuco. Saturday, I am going to Joao Pessoa, and monday I will be back in Recife. I am preparing the Symbian Series 60 slides to present on wednesday, my todo-list for next week is already starting to grow. I should have started preparing the slides three days ago.