View PSD (Photoshop) files on Linux Desktop with GNOME using gdk-pixbuf-psd

April 21, 2011 at 20:58 · Filed under Code, GNOME, Graphics, Linux, Media, openSUSE

If you are often handling PSD files on your system, you might have issues to preview those on your Linux Desktop system.

For the GNOME Desktop, the file-manager does not display thumbnails of the images nor do those preview with the eog image-viewer.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (1,587) | 784 views

Latest on GNOME, Totem AirPlay, libimobiledevice 1.2.0, iOS 4.3, gdk-pixbuf-psd, Cherokee on iOS and openSUSE repositories

April 7, 2011 at 17:54 · Filed under Apple, Code, GNOME, Life, Linux, Media, Open Source, openSUSE, Web

A typical plague of the internetz has hit this blog. It had no posts for a long time. -silence-

I am sorry for this, but even if it might surprise some people, sometimes there are more important things in life than keeping your blog updated.

Anyways here a quick overview of things that changed or matter before I get bugged at writing again:

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (2,044) | 1,185 views

Native iPhone/iPod Touch support arrives on the Linux Desktop

March 23, 2010 at 15:07 · Filed under Apple, Code, Fun, GNOME, Linux, Media, Open Source, openSUSE

Last Sunday, after being in development since August 2007, Matt Colyer released version 1.0.0 of the libimobiledevice library (formerly known as libiphone).

libimobiledevice is a free open source software library that talks the protocols to support iPhone ® and iPod Touch ® devices natively on Linux.

Unlike other projects, it does not depend on using any existing proprietary libraries and does not require jailbreaking.

It was successfully tested with the iPhone and iPod Touch 1G, 2G, 3G and 3GS models running up to firmware 3.1.3.

So what does it mean for me as a desktop user?

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (3,645) | 4,520 views

NVIDIA’s VDPAU doc hints at ATI and Intel

January 30, 2009 at 11:00 · Filed under Code, Linux, Media, Open Source

Ah, feels good to be back finally. Enjoyed being ripped off and scammed in NYC over NYE and work has caught me up again.

In other news, you might have heard about NVIDIA’s VDPAU (Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix) which literally offloads Video decoding and processing to the graphics processor on Unix systems. They introduced it with the 180.06 driver series which you can download at their official site.

Apparently frameworks like ffmpeg/xine and players like mplayer or vlc have or plan to pickup support for it despite it will take a few months to get there. Unfortunately, my framework of  choice which appears to suit best for it, GStreamer (congrats for recent move from cvs to git), has no such efforts yet (and can’t directly profit on an ffmpeg implementation).

The API is only available for NVIDIA graphic cards but quickly checking out the docs today I picked up a line which kind of shows that NVIDIA seems to expect others to pick up…

…

Back-end driver files. These files are located in the standard system (possibly X11-specific) library path.

• libvdpau_%s.so For example:
• libvdpau_nvidia.so
• libvdpau_intel.so
• libvdpau_ati.so

…

Interesting… Too bad ATI and Intel both plan to go with their own implementations of Video acceleration APIs.

Are we going to see a happy end for Video acceleration on Unix?

Comments (1,099) | 835 views

iTunes sync with Linux on unjailbroken 2.0+ iPhones/iPods?

October 2, 2008 at 11:45 · Filed under Apple, Code, Linux, Media, Music, Open Source, Research

Hey, it appears as those superbrain folks on the libiphone mailing list are onto something regarding the new hashing algorithm used in Apple’s 2.0+ firmware.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comments (1,785) | 390 views