Okay so… now?

I already blogged about being able to make xine play MP3 files without libmad and using ffmpeg plugin. While this works perfectly for most cases, I’ve found that my work isn’t done yet, to have MP3 support really working well.

Amarok is playing both stream and file mp3s just fine, and seems to me even with a lower overhead than libmad had, which is just fine. I can also reproduce most of my video files, but I unfortunately encountered the same problem I had before. Dattebayo’s fansubs don’t play correctly, audio skips and has pauses in it. After looking around, I found the problem in the AVI file itself, as it doesn’t seem to include the proper tagging of PTS data. For some reason, mad was still able to play the audio fine, maybe because it simply ignored the feedback from the metronome support. The incriminated AVI files were generated with Windows Movie Maker, that would suggest a reason for the file to be broken, it wouldn’t be surprising to me if Windows Movie Maker created invalid AVI files.

Anyway, I’ll still try to fix this so that users can still play those files, somehow. For now, you can either still use the MAD plugin, or you won’t play those files decently. Myself, I think I’ll simply skip those files.

For a Gentoo update of the day, I’ve updated ALSA packages to 1.0.13_rc1 (for the ones released of course), and I’ve added today a new package: BOUML (as dev-util/bouml), an interesting Qt3 UML designer for UML 2. Different interface than Umbrello, but it’s not bad. I still have to decide if I prefer it to Umbrello or not, but it’s worth a look at.

Seems like lately I’ve been adding more ebuilds than i did up to last year, partly because I want to try new stuff and I usually take care of it in a pretty complete way, partly because I try to facilitate my users. I have other things I’d like to take care of, like for instance ProjectM that is submitted by postmoderm and pointed to me by eean from Amarok project, but I’m not sure when I’ll be able to move my priority to that. Tuesday I have to take my last cheque and then I’m entirely unemployed, which is bad enough on its own, plus I have to start the complain with my telco to get some money out of it at least (maximum €100, which I think is a bit too low considering they made me loose a whole month of connection), so I’m not sure how much time I can invest in Gentoo for next week, too.

Anyway, I’ll try to be as user friendly as I can be with dciding the priority I give to Gentoo work, so that the little time I have will be the most useful as I can…