Eat your heart out, Microsoft :)

Posted on April 20, 2006 by Trick

So on Monday, Marcus over in the gphoto2 development land committed a monster patch giving MTP Metadata support to libgphoto2.  I’ve been waiting for this patch to land so that I can pipe that information thru to Banshee MTP support, and I’ve got it :)

Screenshots will follow, but as of now, I can plug in my Zen, view a list of the tracks on it including many details (stuff like bitrate and format doesn’t work just yet), I can drag and drop any number of tracks in any format that Banshee’s transcoding engine works with, and synchronize at the push of a button, and the rest is taken care of.  The sync works like a charm!

Gphoto has proven to be a very reliable library, and I will continue to implement more extensions of it into Banshee.  Some of the finer points, such as disk space, battery level, and time sync have not been implemented because they aren’t exposed in the ptp camlib, but I’m sure that it will come soon :)  I also haven’t finished track deleting support as the C# bindings that I’ve been using from f-spot don’t contain a delete method.  This will get done :)

Many thanks to the folks over at gphoto for all their work!  If you have a MTP device and have been waiting for a nice GUI to take care of transferring tracks, wait just a little longer, as it’ll be in Banshee CVS soon :)

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Trip back to the old days…

Posted on April 4, 2006 by Trick

It’s been a fun trip over the last few days as I remember my XFCE days as I’ve been getting emails about the xfce-xmms-plugin that I started back in the day. That was TWO YEARS ago now that I wrote my first real open-source program, my first GTK+ program. It turns out that another guy has been working on it, and has vastly improved it…but it brings back some memories :)

 

xfce4-xmms-plugin screenshot
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FreeBusy parser

Posted on April 3, 2006 by Trick

I’ve always been wondering how I can make use of the FreeBusy export in Kronolith, and I’ve been looking for a php script to parse it into a simple calendar…so I’ve decided to write one for myself! It’s nowhere near complete and has been borked by this weekend’s time change, but it oughta be cool :) I’ll post a link to my FB calendar and the source for it as soon as I get it fixed with the time changes :)

Has anyone out there seen anything like this?

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Transfers in banshee with libgphoto2/MTP driver (ptp2)

Posted on April 3, 2006 by Trick

So, I finally got it working over the weekend :)

Marcus is a genius, and it turns out that libgphoto2 has mass-storage device detection support which just so happens to touch HAL in just the right way that it screws up banshee’s HAL device pointer. I haven’t taken the time to debug this, but it starts working when I remove the disk.so library from libgphoto2_port. SO…for the time being, it’s starting to work :)

Since we don’t have track metadata yet, everything is associated by Title=filename and Artist=foldername…but it is working :) Track write support works like a charm – and once libgphoto2 is ready to transfer metadata with it, I’ll make a release for folks to test things out with :)

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MTP Progress…

Posted on March 31, 2006 by Trick

…or lack thereof. I’ve hit a few walls with things, and been struggling to find the energy to debug them.

libgphoto2 has proven to probably be the best choice for interfacing with MTP devices, but it’s holding a few issues right now that have slowed me down immensely…

  1. Metadata. Marcus is working on this, but I don’t have the ability to read it yet, and write support is more just a figment of my imagination right now. Seeing that libgphoto2 is so advanced, the code for it is way over my head and I’ve been just kindly pestering Marcus as he works on things, and he actually went out and bought himself a Zen as well for debugging and testing. Marcus has been my hero lately and has made some great progress!
  2. HAL issues with banshee and libgphoto2. I’m having trouble even figuring out where to debug this one. It seems that when I call libgphoto2’s camera detection routine, HAL must go on the flip…because when I get to the device initialization, the HAL pointer is stale and returns -1 for everything. All my attempts to hack past this (running detect after HAL validation, not running the detection routine, etc) have failed…I think it’s time to figure out what’s happening. Maybe banshee just needs to refresh it’s HAL information between creating the device class and calling it’s initialize? I don’t know, and I’m not familiar with the code enough to really know what I’m talking about.

So…I guess it’s been just a bit of a bummer lately b/c I feel like I’m stuck. libmtp worked in it’s own special way, but has proven to be under heavy development and hasn’t reached any of the maturity that libgphoto2 has, but libmtp did work. Makes me wonder if I should give it another shot…but…the gphoto developers have been so helpful and I know they’ll get it all working in the end. Argh!

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