Free Idea: Free Software stack for audiobooks

This post is part of a series of free ideas that I’m posting on my blog in the hope that someone with more time can implement. It’s effectively a very sketched proposal that comes with no design attached, but if you have time you would like to spend learning something new, but no idea what to do, it may be a good fit for you.

This is clearly not a new idea, as I posted about something very similar over eight years ago. At the time I was looking for a way of encoding audibooks coming from audio CD in a format that was compatible with the iPod Classic. Since then, Apple appears to have done their best to make the audiobooks experience on iOS the worst possible, to the point that I don’t really use my iPod Touch as my primary audiobook player any more.

As an aside to the free idea, which can probably give a bit more context for you all, let me describe the problems I have with the current approach to audiobooks by Apple. A few iOS major versions ago, they decided to move the audiobooks handling from the Music app to the iBooks app; this would be reasonable, given that they are books, and it was always a bit strange to have them in a separate application, but it also meant you lost the ability to build playlists with them.

Playlists with audiobooks are great, because they allow you to “stitch” multiple books of the same series, so that you can play them for hours on end, for instance if you need them to sleep. I used to have a playlist for the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy radio series and one for the books, one for Dresden Files, and one for the News Quiz, including both the collected editions in CD by BBC, my own “audiobooks” built out of the podcasts, and the more recent podcast episodes that I have not collected into audiobook files yet.

So what is the idea? There are two components that, as far as I can see, are currently heavily lacking in the FLOSS world. The first is a way to generate audiobook files, which is what I complained eight years ago. Indeed, if you look even at a random sample on Project Gutenberg, the audiobook is actually a ton of files (47!) each with a chapter in them. A proper audiobook file would be a single file, with chapter markers, and per-chapter metadata (chapter title, and in that case, the performer).

It’s more than just a matter of having a single file to move around. While of course the hardware improvements made a number of these points moot, the original reason to have a single big file over multiple small files was to avoid having to seek to a different point in the disk in-between chapters. It also allows the decoder to keep going, between chapters, as there is no “end of stream” but rather just a marker that at a given point in time some different metadata applies. Again, as I said this is no longer as relevant as it used to be, but it’s also not entirely gone.

The other component that is currently lacking, is a good playback solution. While VLC can obviously play those files right now, and if I’m not mistaken it also extracts the per-chapter metadata correctly, it lacks two features that make enjoying audiobooks possible. The first is possibly complicated, and relates to the ability to store bookmarks and current-playing time. While supposedly VLC supports the feature for resuming from last playback, I have heard it’s still sometimes unreliable (I have no idea how it’s implemented), plus it does not support just bookmarking a given time in a file/book. Bookmarking is particularly important when listening to non-novel audiobooks, as you may want to go back to it afterwards, to re-listen to advice or take a reference to further details.

The other feature is basically UI heavy, and it involves mostly the mobile UI (at least the Android one) and is the ability to scan backward and forward in the file. You have probably seen this in other players including Netflix’s own app, that allow you to scan back 30 seconds — in audiobooks it’s also useful to scan forward 30 seconds, particularly when considering the bookmarks above.

As usual for Free Ideas I have no time to work on this myself. I can give the idea details out, and depending on things I may be able to contribute to a bounty on it, but otherwise, no code I can share about this yet.

Ramblings on audiobooks

In one of my previous posts I have noted I’m an avid audiobook consumer. I started when I was at the hospital, because I didn’t have the energy to read — and most likely, because of the blood sugar being out of control after coming back from the ICU: it turns out that blood sugar changes can make your eyesight go crazy; at some point I had to buy a pair of €20 glasses simply because my doctor prescribed me a new treatment and my eyesight ricocheted out of control for a week or so.

Nowadays, I have trouble sleeping if I’m not listening to something, and I end up with the Audible app installed in all my phones and tablets, with at least a few books preloaded whenever I travel. Of course as I said, I keep the majority of my audiobooks in the iPod, and the reason is that while most of my library is on Audible, not all of it is. There are a few books that I have bought on iTunes before finding out about Audible, and then there are a few I received in CD form, including The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy Complete Radio Series which is my among my favourite playlists.

Unfortunately, to be able to convert these from CD to a format that the iPod could digest, I ended up having to buy a software called Audiobook Builder for Mac, which allows you to rip CDs and build M4B files out of them. What’s M4B? It’s the usual mp4 format container, just with an extension that makes iTunes consider it an audiobook, and with chapter markings in the stream. At the time I first ripped my audiobooks, ffmpeg/libav had no support for chapter markings, so that was not an option. I’ve been told that said support is there now, but I have not tried getting it to work.

Indeed, what I need to find out is how to build an audiobook file out of a string of mp3 files, and I have no idea how to fix that now that I no longer have access to my personal iTunes account on a mac to re-download the Audiobook Builder and process them. In particular, the list of mp3s that I’m looking forward to merge together are the years 2013 and 2014 of BBC’s The News Quiz, to which I’m addicted and listen continuously. Being able to join them all together so I can listen to them with a multi-day-running playlist is one of the very few things that still let me sleep relatively calmly — I say relatively because I really don’t remember when was the last time I have slept soundly in about an year by now.

Essentially, what I’d like is for Audible to let me sideload some content (the few books I did not buy from them, and the News Quiz series that I stitch together from the podcast), and create a playlist — then for what I’m concerned I don’t have to use an iPod at all. Well, beside the fact that I’d have to find a way to shut up notifications while playing audiobooks. Having Dragons of Autumn Twilight interrupted by the Facebook pop notification is not something that I’m looking forward for most of the time. And in some cases I even have had some background update disrupting my playback so there is definitely space for improvement.

Did Apple lose its advantage?

Readers of my blog for a while probably know already that I’ve been an Apple user over time. What is not obvious is that I have scaled down my (personal) Apple usage over the past two years, mostly because my habits, and partly because of Android and Linux getting better and better. One component is, though, that some of the advantages to be found when using Apple started to disappear for me.

I think that for me the start of the problems is to be found in the release of iOS 7. Beside the taste of not liking the new flashy UI, what I found is that it did not perform as well as previous releases. I think this is the same effect others have had. In particular the biggest problem with it for me had to do with the way I started using my iPad while in Ireland. Since I now have access to a high-speed connection, I started watching more content in streaming. In particular, thanks to my multiple trips to the USA over the past year, I got access to more video content on the iTunes store, so I wanted to watch some of the new TV series through it.

Turned out that for a few versions, and I mean a few months, iOS was keeping the streamed content in the cache, not accounting for it anywhere, and never cleaning it up. The result was that after streaming half a series, I would get errors telling me the iPad storage was full, but there was no way from the device itself to clear the cache. EIther you had to do a factory reset to drop off all the content of the device, or you had to use a Windows application to remove the cache files manually. Not very nice.

Another very interesting problem with the streaming the content: it can be slow. Not always but it can. One night I wanted to watch The LEGO Movie since I did not see it at the cinema. It’s not available on the Irish Netflix so I decided to rent it off iTunes. It took the iPad four hours to download it. It made no sense. And no, the connection was not hogged by something else, and running a SpeedTest from the tablet itself showed it had all the network capacity it needed.

The iPad is not, though, the only Apple device I own; I also bought an iPod Touch back in LA when my Classic died. even though I was not really happy with downgrading from 80G down to 64G. But it’s mostly okay, as my main use for the iPod is to listen to audiobooks and podcasts when I sleep — which recently I have been doing through Creative D80 Bluetooth speakers, which are honestly not great but at least don’t force me to wear earphones all night long.

I had no problem before switching the iPod from one computer to the next, as I moved from iMac to a Windows disk for my laptop. When I decided to just use iTunes on the one Windows desktop I keep around (mostly to play games), then a few things stopped working as intended. It might have been related to me dropping the iTunes Match subscription, but I’m not sure about that. But what happens is that only a single track for each of the albums was being copied on the iPod and nothing else.

I tried factory reset, cable and wireless sync, I tried deleting the iTunes data on my computer to force it to figure out the iPod is new, and the current situation I’m in is only partially working: the audiobooks have been synced, but without cover art and without the playlists — some of the audiobooks I have are part of a series, or are split in multiple files if I bought them before Audible started providing single-file downloads. This is of course not very good when the audio only lasts three hours, and then I start having nightmares.

It does not help that I can’t listen to my audiobooks with VLC for Android because it thinks that the chapter art is a video stream, and thus puts the stream to pause as soon as I turn off the screen. I should probably write a separate rant about the lack of proper audiobooks tools for Android. Audible has an app, but it does not allow you to sideload audiobooks (i.e. stuff I ripped from my original CDs, or that I bought on iTunes), nor it allows you to build a playlist of books, say for all the books in a series.

As I write this, I asked iTunes again to sync all the music to my iPod Touch as 128kbps AAC files (as otherwise it does not fit into the device); iTunes is now copying 624 files; I’m sure my collection contains more than 600 albums — and I would venture to say more than half I have in physical media. Mostly because no store allows me to buy metal in FLAC or ALAC. And before somebody suggests Jamendo or other similar services: yes, great, I actually bought lots of Jazz on Magnatune before it became a subscription service and I loved it, but that is not a replacement for mainstream content. Also, Magnatune has terrible security practices, don’t use it.

Sorry Apple, but given these small-but-not-so-small issues with your software recently, I’m not going to buy any more devices from you. If any of the two devices I have fails, I’ll just get someone to build a decent audiobook software for me one way or the other…

More USB chargers doubts

It was slightly less than an year ago that I have vented some doubts about USB chargers and a few more I have now. As I said last week, I changed the ROM on my Milestone and thanks to Robert I have also re-calibrated the battery, with the phone now lasting over a day with a single charge (terrific!).

When doing the calibration, it was suggested to use Battery Monitor to check the status of the battery during the process. The widget itself is quite nice, actually, and has one nice feature that estimates current flow in the device: negative while discharging, positive while charging. This feature is what made me even more doubtful about general usefulness of USB chargers.

I mostly use two USB chargers for my phone: the original one from Motorola, rated at 800mA, and the one I got for my iPod when I bought it a few years back, rated at 1000mA (1A). When I use the Motorola one, the widget shows just shy of 500mA of positive flow… when I do the same on the iPod charger, it shows around ²⁰⁰⁄₃₀₀. Given the iPod one should have more power than the Motorola one, it shows that something’s wrong.

I remember reading a technical article a few months ago about how Apple enforces their “Made for iPhone” brands on chargers by limiting the amount of current it would require of a charger depending on specifics resistance value over the data lines of the USB port, so that a number of chargers don’t even reach the power of a standard USB port (500mA) when used with an iPhone. Now I’m wondering whether the problem here is that Motorola did the same or if it’s the iPod charger that also tries to “validate” the presence of an iPod on the USB connection. Either way, the option sucks.

It is funny to think that there are so many specifications nowadays that calls for an universal charging solution – just look at this Wikipedia article – and yet nothing seems to stop manufacturers from imposing artificial limitations for the only reason to sell you their own charger!

Of course, simply relying on two chargers, and even more importantly, on the reading of a software application estimates, is no way to draw proper conclusions. The proper course of action, which I wish I had the time to pursue already, would be to add an ammeter in the chain, discharge the phone, then look at what’s really going on in term of current flow during the charge process. My original intention was to add the ammeter after the charger and before the adapter, using male and female USB Type A ports, but nowadays I’m doubtful. Since the European cEPS requirements don’t include the use of a USB Type A charger, but simply of a microUSB connector, it seems like Samsung took the opportunity to provide its users with an old-fashioned charger, where the cable is captive and microUSB is only the connector option.

Given both Samsung and Motorola use Android these days, it wouldn’t be a fair comparison if the two chargers weren’t cross-tested with the other manufacturer’s phone, but that also requires that the ammeter is added in the microUSB chain… option that would disallow testing charging of iPhone and iPod devices since they use the dock connector, and not microUSB.

Any suggestion on how to realise the hardware needed is very welcome, as I’ve already demonstrated I’m not that good an electronics person.

Hardware doubts: USB-based chargers

It seems like a huge number of phones and general portable devices, nowadays, charge with the help of USB-based chargers; these usually consists of extremely compact devices with a power plug, and an USB socket (type A) and come with a standard USB cable (usable for data as well as pure power) using either type mini-B (for older models) or micro-B (for almost all modern models, as they seem to have standardised with the help of the Open Mobile Terminal Platform.

I have to note that sometimes, even if the charging happens over the USB port, the manufacturer provides you not with a generic USB charger, but rather with a (sometimes model-specific!) charger that have from the terminal side the proper mini- or micro-USB plug, but is hardwired into the adapter. Motorola used to do that at the time of the V3 models (and many others; including their bluetooth headsets; I got a very old, very cheap one yesterday for my Milestone), and Samsung seems to be doing that, at least with the Corby.

At any rate, this is actually handy: I can leave a single charger in my bedroom, and one ready in my bag; then have around just a few cables (one for the iPod, one for the Milestone, one for the BT headset). On my office, I use the USB ports on my computer to charge them; this wouldn’t work as well, if I didn’t have this nice Belkin HUB that provides even ports with half an Ampere per port (the maximum standardised by USB); without that it would split the 500mA between multiple ports, and then it would take æons to charge.

But while travelling the past weekend to be at a fair to help some friends out, I noticed that sometimes, I really need to charge both the iPod and the cellphone, and bringing around a single charger while handy stops me from doing that. Luckily I remembered that a friend of mine suggested that there are many dual-USB chargers out there. I found some by Belkin as well, in a Saturn store near here, but unfortunately they seem to have a different problem.

As I said the computer USB ports are rated at an output of 500mA; on the other hand, the charger that Motorola gave me with my Milestone is rated for 850mA, and the iPod charger is rated at 1A (1000mA). This is pretty useful, as the higher current should allow for faster charge… and still not burn anything out. So, looking at dual-USB wall chargers, you’d expect them being rated for total output of 1.7A-2A, so that each port can output the equivalent current to the single-output chargers. But browsing through the above-mentioned store, I noticed that about half of them are rated for total output 1A (0.5A per-port, like a computer) and half of them are not rated at all on the box, or not clearly. For instance, the Belkin ones say they have “two USB 1A ports”, can’t really tell whether the charger has two 1A-ports or two ports for a total of 1A.

I hate when the specifics on the boxes don’t really make it explicit what you’re going to buy. Does anybody know these products and can shed some light over the matter?

Fedora, good and bad

In the past few days, since I’ve been spending time at my sister’s house, I’ve used as single system the laptop I bought a few months ago, with runs Fedora 11. This has been my first time, since I started working in Gentoo, that I had to work with just a laptop (if you exclude the hospitalisations) and especially the first time since I started using Gentoo that I had to work with just another Linux distribution.

Indeed, with the already noted exceptions, the last time I had to work with just a laptop was when Defiant (the box I had before Enterprise) died and I had to replace it (with Enterprise); at the time I was limited at working with the iBook G4 and, I think, Tiger (or Panther, I don’t remember to be honest). Luckily the work that I had to do at the time (translating Ian Sommerville’s Software Engineering 7th Edition to Italian) didn’t require me much more and it worked out quite fine with just that laptop.

But still, up to a few months ago all my laptops has been Apple and mostly using Mac OS X (even though I had Gentoo installed in both for a time). Now instead I have a laptop running Fedora; I have also to say that since I started using Gentoo, any other distribution has just been something to try out but never something used on a daily basis, up to now at least.

Now I have to say, I’m not really feeling extremely out of place in Fedora either. The system works mostly well although there are a few things that, I think, Gentoo gets better. The most obvious one is the gstreamer plugins: they are not split at all, they are a single package for each source tarball; this means that if you need, for instance, the plugin to play aac files, you also have to get the one that plays sid files, and that in turn requires you to install the libsidplay library. I guess the USE flag concept here works much better.

Almost all software that I need is one of the repositories, either the official ones or RPM fusion with the exception of the libdvdcss library that has to be found on ATrpms. Even Emacs 23 is now available on the updates, and that makes it much much nicer to use Fedora as development box for me: I cannot stand the graphical interface in Emacs 22.

Interestingly enough, Random mode works here with Rhythmbox, I have to check whether it was fixed upstream and thus fixed in Gentoo as well. It still does not seem to check the “skip when playing random” flag that iTunes add to the files, but I guess either I or someone else can fix that up one day (so that I wouldn’t get BBC Radio shows to play when I’m expecting music!). I also had the pleasure to see that connecting my iPod to the laptop, Rhythmbox is able to play the music from it like it was an external hard drive (using the tags without having to copy and rename the files), which has come very useful to play my music without having to use the earphones.

Connectivity hasn’t been an enormous issue, although it wasn’t a cakewalk either: at least in Fedora 11, NetworkManager does not support Bluetooth DUN (Dial-Up Networking) which means that I cannot use my phone over bluetooth (which would have allowed to leave the phone upstairs, where H3G network is reachable, and move the laptop downstairs), but I have to use the provided cable. This was of course after I updated enough packages so that they didn’t segfault on me while trying to configure the connection. By the way, I have to find out who “owns” the list of providers’ data: the Italian H3G options are only valid for the consumer-side, not the business-side that I use.

The one thing that actually upset me quite a bit, though, was related to the Mono development tools handling in Fedora: while the mono package comes with the mcs compiler, it doesn’t bring in all the development tools. And, at the same time, MonoDevelop does not depend on the mono-devel package with the remaining tools. I installed most of that stuff before coming here (because I didn’t want to use too much traffic from my almost-flatrate), but when I imported an external project into my main one (the vCard library I might have to hack on) it failed to rebuild the project because it was lacking the resource compiler. This really sounds strange to me!

Also, Pidgin here seems to crash much more than on Gentoo (and there goes the theory that Gentoo’s CFLAGS handling makes software crash). And I’m not even using OTR! And the keypad toggle button didn’t work by default, I had to use xbindkeys and a custom script calling synclient (upon Eva’s suggestions) to make it work, and I needed it badly because writing a long text minding the touchpad is quite hard; if anybody wish to send me something useful, order for me an Apple bluetooth keyboard, with US layout, and you’ll make me quite happy, and more productive as well!

All in all, it doesn’t look too bad, although it could use some extra polishing I guess; I’ll see how it goes with Fedora 12, once it’s released (given it’s now in Alpha it shouldn’t be too long). Unfortunately, the one thing that I was hoping for in 11 (the nouveau driver for nVidia cards) didn’t really work here…

Encoding iPod-compatible audiobooks with Free Software

Since in the last few days I’ve been able to rest also thanks to the new earphones I’ve finally been able to think again of multimedia as well as Gentoo. But just to preserve my sanity, and to make sure I do something I can reuse to rest even better, I decided to look into something new, and something that I would like to solve if I could. Generating iPod-compatible audibook files from the BBC Radio CDs I got.

The audiobook that you buy from the iTunes Store are usually downloaded in multiple files, one per CD of the original CD release, sometimes with chapter markings to be able to skip around. Unfortunately they also are DRM’d so analysing them is quite a bit of a mess, and I didn’t go to much extent to identify how that is achieved. The reason why I’d like to find, or document, the audibook format is a two-fold interoperability idea. The first part is being able to play iPod-compatible audiobooks with Free Software with the same chapter marking system working, and the other is (to me more concerning to be honest) being able to rip a CD and create a file with chapter markings that would work on the iPod properly. As it is, my Audiobooks section on the iPod is messed up because, for instance, each piece of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, which is a different track on CD, gets a single file, which is thus a single entry in the Audiobooks series. To deal with that I had to create playlists for the various phases, and play them from there. Slightly suboptimal, although it works.

Now, the idea would be to be able to rip a CD (or part of a CD) in a single M4B file, audiobook-style, and add chapter markings with the tracks’ names to make the thing playable and browsable properly. Doing so with just Free Software would be the idea. Being able to have a single file for multiple CDs would also be of help. The reason why I’m willing to spend time on this rather than just using the playlists is that it seems to me like the battery of the iPod gets consumed much sooner when using multiple files, probably because it has to seek around to find them, while a single file would be loaded incrementally without spending too much time.

In this post I really don’t have much in term of ideas about implementation; I know the first thing I have to do is to find a EAC -style ripper for Linux, based on either standard cdparanoia or libcdio’s version. For those who didn’t understand my last sentence, if I recall correctly, EAC can also produce a single lossless audio file, and a CUE file where the track names are timecoded, instead of splitting the CD in multiple files per track. Starting from such a file would be optimal, since we’d just need to encode it in AAC to have the audio track of the audiobook file.

What I need to find is how the chapter information is encoded in the final file. This wouldn’t be too difficult, since the MP4 format has quite a few implementations and I already have worked on it before. The problem is that, being DRM’d, analysing the Audiobooks themselves is not the best idea. Luckily, I remembered that there is one BBC podcast that provides an MP4 file with chapter markings: Best of Chris Moyles Enhanced which most likely use the same feature. Unfortunately, the mp4dump utility provided by mpeg4ip fails to dump that file, which means that either the file is corrupt (and how does iTunes play that?) or the utility is not perfect (much more likely).

So this brings me back to something I was thinking about before, the fact that we have no GPL-compatible MP4-specific library to handle parsing and writing of MP4 files. The reason for this is most likely the fact that the standards don’t come cheap, and that most Free Software activists in the multimedia area tend to think that Xiph is always the answer (I disagree), while the pragmatic side of the multimedia area would just use Matroska (which I admit is probably my second best choice, if it was supported by actual devices). And again, please don’t tell me about Sandisk players and other flash-based stuff. I don’t want flash-based stuff! I have more than 50GB of stuff on my iPod!

Back to our discussion, I’m going to need to find or write some tool to inspect MP4 files, I don’t want to fix mpeg4ip because of MPL license it’s released under, and I also think the whole thing is quite overengineered. Unfortunately this does not really help me much since I don’t have the full specs of the format handy, and I’ll have to do a lot of guessing to get it to work. On the other hand, this should be quite an interesting project, for as soon as I have time. If you have pointers or are interested in this idea, feel free to chime in.

I bought a software license

I finally decided to convert my video library to Mpeg4 containers, H.264 video and AAC audio, rather than mixing and matching what I had before that. This is due to the fact that I hardly use Enterprise to watch video anymore. Not only because my office is tremendously hot during the summer, but more because I have a 32” TV set in my bedroom. Nicer to use.

Attached to that TV set there is an Apple TV (running unmodified software 2.0.2 at the moment) and a PS3. If you add to that all the other hardware that can play video I own, the only common denominator is H.264/AAC in MP4 container. (I also said before that I like the MP4 format more than AVI or Ogg). It might be because I do have a few Apple products (iPod and AppleTV), but also Linux handle this format pretty well, so I don’t feel bad about the choice. Beside, new content I get from youtube (like videos from Beppe Grillo’s blog) are also in this format — you can get them with youtube-dl -b.

Unfortunately, as I discussed before with Joshua, and as I tried last year before the hospital already, converting video to this format with Linux is a bit of a mess. While mencoder has very good results for the audio/video stream conversions, producing a good MP4 container is a big issue. I tried fixing a few corner cases in FFmpeg before, but it’s a real mess to produce a file that QuickTime (thus iTunes, and thus the Apple TV) can accept.

After spending a couple more days on the issue I decided my time is worth more than what I’ve been doing, and finally gave up to buy a tool that I have been told does the job, VisualHub for OSX. It was less than €20, and that is usually what I’m paid by the hour for my boring jobs.

I got the software, tried it out, the result was nice. Video and audio quality on par with mencoder’s but a properly working MP4 container that QuickTime, iTunes, AppleTV, iPod and even more importantly xine can play nicely. But the log showed a reference to “libavutil”, which is FFmpeg. Did I just pay for Free Software?

I looked at the Bundle, it includes a COPYING.txt file which is, as you might have already suspected, the text of GPL version 2. Okay, so there is free software in here indeed. And I can see a lot of well-known command line utilities: lsdvd, mkisofs, and so on. One nice thing to see is, though, an FFmpeg SVN diff. A little hidden, but it’s there. Good.

The doubt then was if they were hiding the stuff or if it was shown and I did just miss it. Plus it has to have the sources of everything, not just a diff of FFmpeg’s. And indeed in the last page of the documentation provided there is a link to this that contains all the sources of the Free software used. Which is actually quite a lot. They didn’t limit themselves to take the software as it is though, I see at least some patches to taglib that I’d very much like to take a look to later — I’m not sharing confidential registered-users-only information by the way, the documentation is present in the downloadable package that acts as a demo too.

I thought about this a bit. They took a lot of Free Software, adapted it, written a frontend and sold licenses for it. Do I have a problem with this? My conclusion is that I don’t. While I would have preferred is they made it more clear on the webpage that they are selling a Free Software-based package, and that they would have made the frontend Free Software too, I think they are not doing anything evil with this. They are playing well by the rules, and they are providing a working software.

They are not trying to exploit Free Software without giving anything back (the sources are there) and they did something more than just package Free Software together, they tested and prepared presets to use for encoding for various targets, included Apple TV which is my main target. They are, to an extent, selling a service (their testing and presets choices), and their license is also quite acceptable to me (it’s like a family license, usable on all the household’s computers as well as a work computer in an eventual office).

At the end of the day, I’m happy of spending this money as I suppose it’s also going to further develop the Free Software part of the software too, although I would have been happier to chip in a bit more if it was fully Free Software.

And most importantly, it worked out of the tarball solving me a problem I was having for more than an year now. Which means, for me, a lot less time spent trying to get the whole thing working. Of course if one day I could just do everything with simply FFmpeg I’ll be very happy, and I’ll dedicate myself a bit more on MP4 container support, both in writing and parsing, in the future, but at least now I can just feed it the stuff I need converted and dedicate my time and energy toward more useful goals (for me, as in paid jobs, and for the users with Gentoo).

Migrating from iPhoto to DigiKam

For my photos I’ve been using, up to now, iPhoto. The reason for this is that the big part of my photo collection is actually composed of my sister’s photos, which I downloaded directly with the MacBookPro when she asked me.

On the other hand, I use way more often my Linux box, and while iPhoto is a nice tool, DigiKam is not bad either, so I’d gladly move everything on Enterprise, as the mobility option for the photos is lost already once I moved everything on the external harddrive (as I now have more than 10GB of photos).

Unfortunately this migration is not going to be painless I’m afraid, especially because there are a few features I might be losing, unless I can spend some time writing stuff on my own.

The first problem would be having a way to save the photos from risks of losing data; the quick way would be to put them in raid. At the moment the photos are backed up by TimeMachine too, so I don’t risk losing them. I don’t think putting them in my /home directory will be a good idea: it’s just 14GB and the photos will soon be over that quota. I wonder if LVM can mirror partitions easily.

Then there’s the cleanness of storing the photos on the iPod, I don’t think Amarok can load them, can it? I have to check that out. And having them on the AppleTV too.

On the Wiki there are instructions on how to set up a DPAP (Digital Photo Access Protocol, I suppose it’s a relative of DAAP) server to share the photos with iPhoto, and AppleTV. I have to check that out, maybe writing an ebuild.

Of course the easiest way to handle this would be to have DigiKam actually providing DPAP support ;)

Another point I’d like to address is Flickr uploading. To upload to Flickr at the moment I’m using the FlickrUploadr, as the only plugin to allow that in iPhoto is proprietary commercial software. kFlickr is better than FlickrUploadr, but still isn’t well integrated (can’t just select an Album and say “upload to Flickr”).

Probably some of these concerns will be addressed with the KDE 4 version of DigiKam, I expect that to happen, but now I’m wondering if I should migrate already or wait for those to be done…

On the other hand, I wonder if there is anybody working on reverse engineering the protocol with which iTunes talks to AppleTV, it would be nice to be able to just command it through Amarok or DigiKam.

/me adds stuff to his TODO, which is probably way too big for this to ever happen.

But I certainly hope someone will write this stuff for me :) After all we all do our parts in the greater Free Software plan!