In the land of media files

One year and a half ago I knew relatively little about media formats, media libraries and so on. Then luckyduck convinced me to join Gentoo.. I approached a few libraries just to fix the build systems (like xine), and now I’m here trying to find the cause of a FLAC file not being loaded by xine. Things change easily.

But I really want to thanks Darren Salt of xine project for taking care of applying almost all my patches on xine-lib’s CVS 🙂 Now I can actually think of refreshing the CVS snapshot, this also because there’s a company working on a xine-based set top box whose patches I’m interested in that is going to merge them into CVS.

From one point of view, I’m a bit displeased to see the mostly broken support to FLAC files out there, xine is not the only software that handles them not that good, also TagLib, as I already blogged before, is not exactly the best FLAC-supporting library.. I hope this can improve, because I really like using FLAC to have my CDs available on HDD. This would be also the reason why, if I’m ever going to buy a portable media player, I would buy one with FLAC support 🙂

Anyway, I’m finally happy not to see “B” anymore as title for some tracks on Japan-a-radio when the artist is instead B’z 🙂 Darren merged also this patch, and so did Xtophe for the analogue patch in VLC (both in Gentoo ~arch are fixed). I know it’s just a minimal thing, but I like fixing these things 😉

I’ve also had a response by Pascal Blaser for SUSE’s Helix packages, seems like neither them are able to build Helix Player as 64-bit, and this is bad :/ They have some ABI black magic between 64-bit amaroK and 32-bit Helix, I’ll try to get a look, but I won’t be spending much time on it for now. I’d like to help with Helix porting but as I said the Helix Community project does not seem that friendly for external contributors.
If anybody from Real or Helix Community is reading this, feel free to contact me, I’m more interested in a native port rather than using this wrapper, but I can’t really think of doing it with external patches as it is.

Speaking of VLC, I’ve seen quite a bit of activity on their SVN about a Qt4 frontend, I really hope it can be available for 0.8.6, as it would finally make me able to ditch wxGTK…