Grilo is getting really interesting and one of its newest nice things is the DBUS interface Juan has been working on lately.

This DBUS interface is currently known as Rygel-Grilo (it was originally intended to be a source for Rygel) and uses the MediaServerSpec to allow developers to retrieve the media objects Grilo provides.

Since there aren’t still Python bindings for Grilo, I decided to use the Rygel-Grilo to be able to use Grilo from Python.
So I developed a Rhythmbox plugin that shows every MediaServer1 object available and lets the use browse through the contents of these. Needless to say, although this plugin provides a very generic basic and usage, it’s easy to see how applications like Rhythmbox could be using Grilo to get their media.
The philosophy is: Grilo gives you content, GStreamer plays that content, and you’re free to focus in the rest of your app’s details.

Here’s a video of Rygel-Grilo and the Rhythmbox MediaServer1 plugin in action:

Grilo MediaServer1 Rhythmbox Plugin from Joaquim Rocha on Vimeo.

You can find this plugin under the MediaServer1 Plugins project on Gitorious.

Juan did also developed a cool plugin for Totem similar to this one. Take a look at this post to see the plugin working and a more detailed explanation of what Rygel-Grilo is.

Igalia, a Free Software Galician company, offers for the ninth consecutive year the possibility of undertaking internships for twelve to fourteen weeks from early June to early September, at its offices in A Coruña and Pontevedra (Spain).

This opportunity is offered to Computer Engineers or Computer Technical Engineers who have completed over 50% of their degrees.

Why do it?

* Most of us undertook internships when we were students.
* It is a good way to give back something to the university from which we come.
* It is also a good way to hire people. Almost 50% of the people who made undertook internships with us in the past are part of the company today.

How are the internships?

* 350 hours with flextime, with a minimum of 5 hours/day and a maximum of 8 hours/day during July, August and September.
* 325 hours working on a Free Software project and 25 hours to write the report.
* Help 1500 €.

If you are interested in applying for the internship, the period for receiving of applications starts from May 14th to May 28th.
Please, fill this form.

It’s been a while since last SeriesFinale’s version and I have been a bit busy meanwhile but still got time, together with Juan, to pull up some nice new features. In the end, we had so many changes and the app felt so smooth that we nicknamed it “Xmas Comes Earlier”!

So what can you find in this new version?

* The covers are now downloaded in the background which allows users to keep using the application and improves idle times when adding/updating shows.
* No more database deletions. Many people complained that sometimes it would suddenly delete all the database. We have now introduced a few verifications that make it harder for the database to be deleted unless you do it yourself.
* The format of the JSON of the database and the way the serialization is done is now faster which allows faster load and save times.
* The impossibility to delete shows is also fixed.
* No more problems with characters like & on the episodes and shows’ names.
* Already added shows are now marked with color when searching for shows.
* The highlight of episodes is now fixed, when marking them.
* A new logo that works in a black background has been added.
* Images are now downloaded to temporary files which allows a safer assignment to the shows/seasons.
* The images are now deleted if it’s not being used anymore (when shows are deleted), and are not downloaded more than once (when a show is added twice).
* The removal of the application now deletes the images folder.
* AUTHORS, README and THANKS files were added to the package.
* Translations were updated.
* The search dialog now allows you to search shows in a chosen language.
* The About dialog was added. Here are a few screenshots:

Shows when no cover has been added

Temporary image when downloading cover

Search dialog with Language choices

About dialog

Two other things that are new are the creation of two mailing lists for SeriesFinale:
seriesfinale-general for general discussion, help and feature requests
seriesfinale-development for discussions related to features development and bug tracking

You should be able to upgrade SeriesFinale from the extras-devel repository. I’ll promote it extras later.

Enjoy!

Vimeo is one of the main video sharing places in the web and I thought it would be useful to develop a Grilo plugin to search videos on it.

Yesterday Juan committed the code which means you should now be able to easily search videos from Vimeo and watch them in your desktop using Grilo’s test UI. Here are a couple of screenshots:

I really like the way Grilo is going. Together with GStreamer, the effort needed to create and media player with sources such as your hard drive, YoutTube, Vimeo, Flickr, etc. is just minimum.

Let’s hope more plugins will arrive at Grilo!

Last Friday I gave an introduction to Python as class in Master in Free Software.
In this session I tried to cover Python from the very basics to decorators, properties and PDB. All covered only as an overview, not in deep detail.

After the introduction we did a simple PyGTK application to list the files from a folder the user gives it; it will hopefully come in handy when they start to develop their project’s UI.

So I’m sharing here the presentation I created for it. If you’re thinking of learning Python or have started learning it recently it might be helpful for you.