Gnome Multimedia

The latest GNOME Journal has hit the streets. Issue 18, published on February 5, is a special edition focusing on multimedia, and a wrap-up of the GNOME Boston Summit by Jason Clinton. Four articles are by first time GNOME Journal contributors!

• Pitivi by Jono Baco
• What's new in Banshee by Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier
• Boston Summit Recap by Jason Clinton
• An interview with Jonathan Thomas, creator of the OpenShot video editor by Paul Cutler
• Writing Multimedia Applications in Vala by Jim Nelson

The latest GNOME Journal was edited by Sumana Harihareswara, Jim Hodapp, and Stormy Peters.

Want to keep up to date on GNOME Journal? Follow @gnomejournal on Identi.ca and/or Twitter. The GNOME Journal team is always looking for contributions!

This is the fourth in a series of interviews about open source multimedia, the previous interviews were about Jokosher, Totem and
Empathy. For this interview we talk with Edward Hervey who is the maintainer of the PiTiVI video editor. Edward will talk to us about the current status of the PiTiVi video editor and their plans going forward.

This is the third in a series of interviews about open source multimedia, the previous interviews were about Jokosher and Totem. For this interview we check in with Sjoerd Simons who works on the Empathy client, an which combines instant messaging, video conferencing and voice over IP into one application. Sjoerd will talk to us about the current status of Empathy and where it is going.

This is the second in a series of of interviews about Linux Multimedia. The previous interview was with Laszlo Pandy about Jokosher. This time we check in with Bastien Nocera of the Totem media player. In addition to Totem Bastien has worked on range of multimedia related projects and is someone who knows the challenges of multimedia from a range of different angles. In this interview we talk about his work on Totem and the other major contributions he has done to free software multimedia and where he sees things heading from here.

In this first in what I hope will be a series of interviews about linux multimedia I talk with Laszlo Pandy, the leading force behind audio editing application Jokosher. In addition to talking about Jokosher itself and Laszlo's involvement we also will talk about the general state of Linux multimedia.

Linux.com features a review of the Exaile music player.
This new music player for GTK+ and GNOME aims at a featureset similar to the popular Amarok player, but tightly intergrated with the GNOME desktop. Its also another application showing the quickly growing popularity of using Python as an application development language. Be sure to check out the review for information about the status of Exaile and also take a look at the Exaile homepage at www.exaile.org.

On behalf of the Rhythmbox developers, I'm proud to announce the newest release of the Rhythmbox 0.9 series, which includes a large number of fixes, improvements and new features.

Notable new features include:

• Further improvements to plugin infrastructure and more plugins
• Tag writing and ipod-write support turned on by default. Note that gst-plugins-good 0.10.4 is recommended for ID3 tag editing, and Ogg Vorbis tag editing requires a plugin from the cvs version of gst-plugins-base
• Local file support for album art plugin
• Gnome-keyring support for storing DAAP password
• and many, many more improvements, bug fixes and new minor features. See
  below details.

Read the rest

BMPx is a GTK+ media player rewritten from the ground up on the foundation of BeepMediaPlayer. Originally started as a "behind doors" project, BMPx aims high and will get there very soon. Version 0.30.x was launched just days ago in a totally new form that drops the old Winamp-style look, bringing a more iTunes-like interface that will soon support SVG themes. Let's see what the lead developer of BMPx (Milosz Derezynski) has to say about his creation in this detailed question-and-answer session.

BEAST/BSE version 0.7.0 and BSE-ALSA version 0.7.0 are
available for download at:
http://beast.gtk.org/beast-ftp/v0.7/

This is a development version of BEAST/BSE, the BEdevilled Audio SysTem
and the Bedevilled Sound Engine. BEAST is a powerful music composition
and modular synthesis application released as free software under the
GNU GPL and GNU LGPL, that runs under unix. BSE-ALSA is an ALSA driver
for BSE.
The "Bedevilled" portion of the names has no religious background,
refer to the About page for more details:
http://beast.gtk.org/about

Last-Exit is a Gtk/C#/GStreamer based player for the LastFM radio station.

It has most of the useful features that the official player has including

• Stream support
• Station searching
• Tagging
• Journalling
• Access to subscriber features

It also has more powerful searches for stations including Neighbour's
personal stations, users stations and fan stations.

Further information and screenshots available at:
http://www.openedhand.com/~iain/last-exit

Serpentine 0.7 was just released!

Serpentine is a simple to use and very porwerful cd audio recording application.

Serpentine features a simple to use HIG compliant interface. It aims to do one thing and do it right: writing audio CDs. It accepts a big range of audio (and video) formats thanks to the excelent GStreamer framework. It also tries to integrate well with other application, accepting full Drag N Drop from applications like: Nautilus, Rhythmbox and even Firefox!

I want an audio player that will do everything that Apple's iTunes does..... including working with my iPod ..... and do it natively on Linux. That's a tall order. I've tried many fine Linux programs..... KDE's amaroK, RealPlayer 10 for Linux, Xine, etc. .... but none have scratched my itch.

Read the rest | Banshee Screenshots

Linux.com reviews Thoggen: Thoggen is a new DVD ripper/backup-tool for Linux that encodes video into the free Ogg Theora format. Unlike its rivals, Thoggen is easy to use, and its built-in support for the Theora codec instead of the patent-restricted MPEG-4 and derivatives makes it worth looking at.

Read the rest

James "Doc" Livingston wrote: Rhythmbox Breakdown is the weekly (ha! last posted four months ago)
summary of what's been happening in the world of Rhythmbox. For those
who use cvs and follow the rhythmbox-devel mailing list, it will provide
a summary of what's been happening and things that haven't been
discussed on the list. For those who don't, it will let you know all the
juicy new features (and crack) that we've been up to.

Rhythmbox 0.9.3 gained support for all mass-storage audio players (auto-detected if HAL knows about them, or via .is_audio_player). What it doesn't have is support for playlists on all those players. Last night we committed support for reading playlists from PSPs, and we want to add support for the rest.

If you have an audio player which uses playlists (and isn't an iPod or PSP), you need to run to bugzilla and tell us about it. If you do, we can the next version of RB support many more players.