Notices

Quick question...
When will it be possible to have alpha version of Orecchiette for Nemo-N950-wayland? Sorry for bugging you, but there is some chamber music to be heard in ten days near my place, and I was hoping that N950's microphone is good enough to share it with those who couldn't attend the performance.
Thank you.
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Per aspera ad astra...

Ah, well, I've been kind of consumed working on porting Pierogi to Android for the last couple of weeks. At least that's gotten me some experience in porting issues. Let me take another look; there's precious little documentation available for Nemo app developers.

Also, I've just gotta say:

So, you want to use a piece of alpha-quality software on a developer-only phone running an experimental operating system to do serious work? You are a brave man.

In the near future be able to register the phone number or name?
Thanks for your great app that does the n900 still a powerful phone.

Ah, the real problem here is that we've only been using the filename of the audio file to record metadata. There's a limit to how much info you can store that way. I know there's a way to "tag" some audio files with a variety of data, but I'm not very experienced with that stuff... If nothing else, I could at least create a separate metadata file for each audio file, I suppose.

It is certainly possible to record at least the phone number in the file name. The infrastructure is there already. Copernicus kindly avoided the real problem which is that I volunteered to do it but then did not turn my words into action, being distracted by other things. Unfortunately I cannot give you a target date but it is on my list. See also post #139 for more details.

Well, open-source software gets done when it gets done. Real life will take precedence over little projects like this one.

Besides, I still haven't added the proper DBus calls to Orecchiette yet, so the infrastructure isn't really all there yet. I should at least try to do that...

just as it should!

Well, ask questions and look into the source code, the most reliable source of information on what happens with the software. I have got to say, there is gst-launch-0.10 pre-installed.
More like, a fearless one. I had a problem when N950 wouldn't just start up: yellow warning, green letters, and then black display switched on and no 'Nemo' background, no UI whatsoever. So, I flashed with the latest, 2014-02-... Nemo Mobile release, and then... Upgraded all packages! Rebooted twice, just to check that everything works after the upgrade. It does, but the UI (equivalent of hildon-desktop) relaunches itself on a whim, whenever it wishes. Closing all open apps each time it does so.

And no, it's not serious work. It distraction from serious work. And yes, the music performance happens tomorrow.
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Per aspera ad astra...

Hello! I'm once again trying to pull myself out of another coding dry spell, this time by adding a quick little feature to Orecchiette: screen recording. (Pichlo mentioned this feature just recently.) It's actually fairly easy to record the screen using GStreamer (and I really don't know why there aren't more apps out there doing it already), as there is an "ximagesrc" that is tailor-made for this task.

I've thrown together a little GStreamer pipeline for this and added it in to Orecchiette. The nice thing is that there are dsp-aware video encoders for GStreamer on the N900! So, I've got it recording video in Mpeg-4 format with very little CPU overhead.

Of course, since this is Orecchiette, you can also record audio at the same time to make voice annotations over the video. Unfortunately, I'm still struggling to find the right combination of AAC encoder parameters to make a stream that my Matroska container will accept, so I'm just going with Raw-format audio for now. (Sadly, this means that the audio data actually takes up more space than the video data does...)

I've made a little video showing this feature, and uploaded it to youtube:

http://youtu.be/SjS74PSbjvk

Orecchiette version 0.2.0 is now going up into Extras-Devel with this new feature. As always, please be cautious of new bugs! Thanks.

Thanks for the screen recording feature! I think it is a wonderful addition that fits this application nicely.

If I may, there is a minor improvement I would like to suggest. My intended use case did not include recording my voice over the video. So my suggestion is this: instead of 4 radio buttons, have just 3 checkboxes for mic, speakers and screen and let the user choose his own combination (6 permutations altogether).

Three more things. One, I tried the new feature by trying to record the video stream from the camera app. It recorded the screen decorations and my voice but the actual video was blank. As if the camera app did not export the video in a way Orecchiette could access it.

Two, I tried recording a video from cuteTube. That worked fine in a sense that it recorded everything, but the CPU usage went through the roof and the playback was terribly jerky with the audio out of sync. Both during the recording and in the recorded file.

Lastly, after the aforementioned experiment, I tried to make another recording and got a yellow banner saying "Error: Unable to link avContainer to outputFile". That was perfectly reproducible until I closed and reopened Orecchiette.

At one point I also got a much longer yellow error banner with 4 or 5 lines of text but I do not remember exactly how I managed to provoke it and it disappeared too quickly to take down what it said so I understand that the value of this observation is close to zero.