Archive for the 'Hacks' Category

forked-daapd: new features, Squeeze

Published on August 29, 2010 in Hacks. Closed

A number of things have happened in and around forked-daapd in the last month or so, so let’s review the new features and the plan for Squeeze.

On the features front, Kai Elwert has done a lot of work since July to implement missing features at the DAAP and DACP level to get better support for Remote:

  • playlists can now be played from Remote;
  • listings are sorted in a way that’s closer to what you get from iTunes;
  • sort headers are now generated when requested so Remote can display the A-Z quick access list.

Also, forked-daapd can now remember which speakers were selected before shutdown and attempts to automatically reselect these speakers the next time around. Speakers that were selected will be reselected if they appear at most 5 minutes after startup and the player isn’t running at that time.

On the Squeeze front, a viable snapshot of forked-daapd will release with Squeeze. This snapshot doesn’t have all the Remote improvements listed above, although it’s got the playlist support, can remember the speaker selection and includes bug fixes.

My plan is to provide backports through backports.org once Squeeze is released and for as long as possible after that.

There’s always more in the works, so stay tuned =)

Grand Central Dispatch available in Debian

Published on July 17, 2010 in Debian and Hacks. Closed

Thanks to the work of Mark Heily, both upstream and in Debian, this week saw the arrival of libdispatch in Debian.

libdispatch is the userspace component of Apple’s Grand Central Dispatch technology, designed to help write applications that really take advantage of multicore processors without having to fiddle directly with threads and locking (and getting it terribly wrong).

To get that working on Linux, Mark wrote a userspace implementation of the pthread workqueues and a kqueue compatibility library (libkqueue). He also packaged the Blocks runtime (libblocksruntime) for Debian so as to build libdispatch with Blocks support. That means code using libdispatch must be built with CLang (or llvm-gcc-4.2) rather than gcc, as getting Blocks support in gcc in the near future looks highly improbable.

On Mac OS X and FreeBSD, a kernel-based implementation of the pthread workqueues is used; we don’t have that for Linux yet. The all-userspace implementation we have at the moment works really well; there are some caveats, though, but that’s no reason for not starting to play with libdispatch right now!

Try it out, it’s great. Thanks again, Mark!

forked-daapd: available in experimental

Published on July 7, 2010 in Hacks. Closed

Following the update of antlr3 in unstable, I have now uploaded forked-daapd to Debian. For now, and until the new version of antlr3 is ready to migrate to testing, forked-daapd will only be available in experimental.

I have also uploaded the ANTLR v3 C runtime (aka libantlr3c) to unstable. It’s currently blocked from migrating to testing, until antlr3 is ready to migrate.

Hopefully, the issues affecting antlr3 3.2 in unstable will be resolved soonish and all of this will migrate to testing and be part of Squeeze.

forked-daapd: now with AirTunes v2 streaming

Published on May 2, 2010 in Hacks. Closed

I’ve been working on this for a few months now; it’s taken quite some time because I wanted to do it right and deliver something better than what already existed in the OpenSource world as far as that particular technology was (not) concerned. So here it is:

AirTunes v2 UDP streaming

forked-daapd can now do streaming to multiple AirTunes devices (as well as the local soundcard) and can be controlled from Remote (and, ideally, from anything that speaks DACP).

I’m releasing this early while the paint is still wet and not everything works on the DACP-side of things. Case in point, while playing a song or an album is supported, playing a playlist isn’t. There’s some work needed on this particular feature, and it’ll get there eventually.

There have been a couple of other changes in the codebase in recent weeks too; details after the jump.

Implementing AirTunes v2 has been quite fun and, in addition to releasing the forked-daapd code today, I’ve also taken the time to write down my findings about the protocol so others can experiment with it. This documentation is by no means exhaustive nor complete as far as the protocol goes; if you find out anything I haven’t, let me know so I can update this document.

Continue reading ‘forked-daapd: now with AirTunes v2 streaming’

pommed v1.32: maintenance release

Published on March 19, 2010 in Hacks. Closed

I’ve just released pommed v1.32, a minor maintenance release for the 12″ PowerBook G4.

I’ve just realized that I did not post an announce for pommed v1.31 a while back, which was also a maintenance release, adding support for the MacBookPro5,4 (15″ June 2009) and the latest wireless keyboard.

forked-daapd: Remote support, more to come

Published on February 14, 2010 in Hacks. Closed

A few weeks ago, I’ve added support for Remote, Apple’s iPhone application for controlling iTunes remotely. Here, “support” means Remote can be paired with forked-daapd and can be used to browse the library. And that’s it, for now.

At this point, there won’t be much visible activity on forked-daapd for some time. I’m working on a couple of things, but they take time and they require a lot of new code.

So, for a couple weeks now, I’ve been working on that. I have some code outside forked-daapd that is starting to work well, but it’s not there yet, far from it. Then it’ll have to be integrated into forked-daapd, which means a lot of new code there too.

Bug fixes will still happen in the meantime, and some smaller new features may also appear before the Big Thing™. So if you find or encounter bugs, feel free to report them still. If you have patches or ideas you want to discuss, feel free too.

As I wrote to a couple people by mail already, good things come to those who wait or contribute.

With all that, I’ve updated the Debian packages, given that there won’t be important changes for a while; I hope they’re useful to some of you out there. Note that I’m making an amd64 binary package available alongside the source package; it’s built on a current Debian unstable system, but if that’s not suitable for you, in terms of dependencies or architecture, you can trivially build a suitable binary package from the source package. As a reminder, I have packages of the ANTLRv3 C runtime too. I’ve also added antlr-3.1.3.jar there, in case you need it and can’t find it at the upstream download site.

forked-daapd: FreeBSD & kFreeBSD port completed

Published on January 12, 2010 in Hacks. Closed

Mostly an update to my previous post on the subject, I’ve just completed the FreeBSD port. It also builds and runs on GNU/kFreeBSD, by the way.

The filescanner for forked-daapd on FreeBSD is now up to par with its Linux counterpart, as much as possible. Contrary to the latter, it will lose some metadata (play count, for instance) when files get moved around, because it’s not possible to track moves and renames accurately. It also performs more rescans than the Linux/inotify implementation. Still, it works just as good.

On a related note, the machine I tried to install FreeBSD 8.0 on and finally ended up installing GNU/kFreeBSD on just seemingly committed suicide. I’m not sure what message it’s trying to send me. It’s previously been my main workstation for the best part of 10 years, so this is a bit sad.

At least I found some bugs in the process and fixed some too:

  • 2 bugs in forked-daapd, one of them a crasher,
  • a bug in Avahi on kFreeBSD,
  • a bug in GRUB2 as used on the kFreeBSD daily d-i images.

Not bad, is it?

forked-daapd: porting to FreeBSD

Published on January 9, 2010 in Hacks. Closed

Since I released forked-daapd, I’ve got a couple of emails about porting it to FreeBSD. Apart from isolating and reimplementing the parts of the code using signalfd and inotify, there isn’t much work to do beside taking care of the usual libc/platform issues. However, when you don’t know the codebase and don’t know the APIs you’re replacing, it makes it a bigger job.

So, I’ve just spent a day going through FreeBSD documentation, installing FreeBSD 8.0 in qemu (because it wouldn’t install on my spare machine due to a bootloader issue that’s at least 5 years old…), and started porting the codebase.

A dozen or so commits later, forked-daapd builds and runs on FreeBSD.

With one caveat: the filescanner doesn’t update the database on the fly when the library directory is modified. While I’ve put in support for kqueue/kevent to replace inotify, it’s only a stub for now. Someone will have to write the code to actually act on the events and trigger the rescans/database updates.

kqueue/kevent delivers a lot less information compared to inotify, which means there’s a lot of work needed to track renames and moves. And I didn’t feel like doing it.

So, FreeBSD users: send patches! :)

VMware Workstation 7.0.0 packaging

Published on December 31, 2009 in Debian and Hacks. Closed

I’ve spent the last week packaging VMware Workstation 7.0.0 at work. Looking around on the net, I’ve been unable to find anything helpful about packaging this new version, so it seems nobody’s got around to packaging it yet.

I’ve asked our customer for its approval for releasing our packaging scripts to the community and got it, so here are our packaging scripts for this version, courtesy of EDF. See the instructions in debian/README.source for what has to be done to turn it into a full source package.

The packaging is based on our previous 6.5.2 packaging, which was itself based (partially, at least) upon the Gento 6.5.2 ebuild. It uses a tweaked vmware-installer to install the products to debian/tmp, then makes use of the vmware-installer database to populate the packages.

I think this method should work with any VMware product using vmware-installer 1.1.

Packages have been built and tested on Etch and Lenny.

Hope it helps! Bugs, comments, questions to the email address listed as Maintainer in debian/control, please :-)

forked-daapd news: FrontRow support, TV shows

Published on December 26, 2009 in Hacks. Closed

Over the past weeks, a couple of contributors sent me fixes and new features for forked-daapd. Thanks to you all!

The biggest change is the addition of TV shows metadata as found, for instance, in TV shows bought on the iTunes store. Together with the added support for FrontRow and QuickTime clients, this means forked-daapd is a lot more able at streaming video files than it ever was. Kudos to Ace Jones for his work!

Note, however, that you’ll need a patched version of ffmpeg to pick up the TV shows metadata from your MP4 files. At the time of writing, the patches have not landed into ffmpeg upstream yet, and it’s a bit unclear when this will happen. Contact Ace for the patch and instructions, see the commits in the git tree for his email address.

Git tree on Alioth: http://git.debian.org/?p=users/jblache/forked-daapd.git (git URIs on the page)