aLANtejo 07 · 14 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
aLANtejo is a yearly free software related event in Évora, Portugal. In 2005 I held a presentation about MPlayer.
Now the Portuguese Zend Free Software Contest is held as a part of the event and I have been awarded to be a part of the Jury. I have been lucky this year :)
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Opensource MPL · 14 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
MPL aka Meridian Lossless Packing is an audio compression technique mostly used on DVD-Audio discs. For a long time only proprietary decoders existed until finally Ian Caulfield succeeded in understanding the format and submitted an initial implementation to FFmpeg.
Nellymoser Asao · 2 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
The Nellymoser Asao codec is a proprietary single-channel (mono) format optimized for low-bitrate transmission of audio. – according to the Multimedia Wiki
This format was once widely used in Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash files and currently is the only sane codec for encoding from microphone at the user.
For a long time there has been no support for this outside the Flash Player, thus people went as far as offering bounty for writing a decoder.
Now a few weeks ago someone took the nelly2pcm code and ported it into FFmpeg. Still not committed in its current state as Benjamin Larsson discovered it can be implemented with reusing much more code from the framework.
Also the codec is used with some changes under different names (information based on an old email), we have to get a view of those samples.
It will be available once the required changes are done. We can thank already the maintainers for their picky attitude about quality.
Les Trophées du Libre · 2 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Is an international free software contest held in France.
I had been offered a place in the multimedia category of the Jury. The nomination phase is now over, over 25 projects have been submitted to my category.
The multimedia jury includes Sam Hocevar of VideoLAN (and now Debian) fame, also he created the WTFPL license ; Damien Sandras, author of GnomeMeeting/Ekiga; Øyvind Kolås from GIMP; Louis Desjardins contributed to Scribus, and Olivier Saraja to Blender.
Thanks to this page, I am aware that there is a Libre Graphics Meeting, last year organized by Louis.
Parallels update · 19 September 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Finally my Parallels block device patch has been merged into QEmu.
It has been merged since a month now, just Savannah forgot to send out a cvslog message for some unknown reason,
Parallels · 27 July 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Parallels is a great para-virtualization tool for MacOSX. Pufi, a friend used this a lot, but once decided to try some alternatives. Now VMware is out with Fusion, doing the same job on the platform.
However, everyone faces the problem of reinstalling; it takes enormous time. Qemu has the tool qemu-img to convert between formats, it even knows how to write VMware images. Would be a great opportunity if it supported Parallels. Now it does.
Pufi gave me a bunch of disk images to work on. Sparse image formats used by commercial and open source tools are not really different, no breakthrough ideas, no real extras, just the same algorithms.
Watch out Qemu, hopefully this patch will be integrated.
Update: patch available here
Ideology fanatics · 29 July 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
I am subscribed to pretty much mailing lists, like I wanted to send in a patch for something and the list was members only, thus I subscribed and forgot to unsubscribe.
The same is the case for QEMU for which I have sent in some patches (VPC and Bochs image support) some two years ago. Since that I was not able to follow it strictly, but every now and then I read the interestingly looking mails.
First, as an introduction, you need to know, that QEMU is a multiple machine emulator (the best freely available now?) with optional support for virtualization (like VMware). In that case, when running the emulator on an Intel host for the purpose of running for example Windows on it, the instructions wont be emulated, but executed by the CPU. This is much faster of course than emulaton.
So. Originally, Fabrice Bellard (who is the primary author of QEMU) wrote the QEMU Accelerator (also called kqemu)- the virtualization helper kernel module – as an addition and made it available as binary only, with a proprietary license, while Qemu itself is GPL/LGPL. This is legal of course.
And now comes the misery. Every now and then, people get to the list, and without doing anything in favor of the project and people, just write some ranting words like: Yo, this is not ethical, make it open.
These people just don’t catch it. They get it for free, damn.
You need to know that there is also a free (as in freedom) virtualization module for QEMU called qvm86. Use it if you dont like the binary blob.
As an interesting addition, on the QEMU Accelerator some years ago there was a note, that if someone pays enough money, he will make it open. But that paragraph is gone now.
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Copyright absurdum · 12 June 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
In the past you could go to a library and read, borrow or copy any book. Today you’d get arrested for mere telling someone where the library is.
– Michael Niedermayer
Michael is/was an MPlayer developer, but does FFmpeg maintenance nowadays. He is a codec guru and explains things in his blog.
Really open AVS · 8 June 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
Remember the chinese doing their own multimedia standard? And it’s name AVS (Advanced Video coding Standard, how much creative)?
It aims to compete with H.264 and MPEG4. Wondering how they can do it without harming tons of useless patents?
Now they started writing an implementation under a free software license. It’s called OpenAVS. Good.
Brave license compliancy · 27 May 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
A siker egyik eleme [...], másik pedig a Linksys merészsége, amely ahhoz kellett, hogy szabaddá tegye a Linuxot futtató router programjának, azaz firmware-ének a forráskódját. (Linksys, Linux, advocacy by Zsolt Köhler, CHIP, 2006 June)
One key figure in the success of the Linksys WRT54G had been Linksys’ being brave enough to release the firmware of its Linux based router.
What is brave there? It is just about complying to licenses – to the GPL. It is really good that people familiar with open source are reporting about open source in the mass media. Really.
Motorola goes opensource · 17 May 2006 by Alex Beregszaszi
Motorola’s opensource portal went live! It is like a mini Sourceforge, even projects can have wiki pages.
As a first try, I downloaded the kernel for the A1200: it’s a zip package, which contains a tar.gzipped (another compression) Linux kernel version 2.4.17. Nice. Hopefully they wil even open source own written code..
Interesting is the arch/arm/mach-ezx/ directory, which contains machine specific code for the EZX platform. Motorola calls its Linux based phone platform EZX. Maybe the OpenEZX has to do something with the release of these sources?
Added this to my ever growing coporate open source portal list.
Update: Harald Welte, the guy behind OpenEZX already analyzed released sources.
Corporate open source portals · 2 November 2005 by
I am really interested in the possibilities of cooperation and coexistence between free software, open source, corporations and proprietary software. This page is devoted for links on these topics, it will grow with time. Feel free to add your links in comments.
Corporate open source portals (in ABC order):
Linux portals:
Related:
Not strictly related: