Some new functionalities we are thinking for Moldeo 1.1

We will release a new version of Moldeo the coming week. It will be Moldeo 0.8 and will be released after the Speak 3.1 performance on August the 21st.

We are thinking of new features for the next release, finally the RC 1.0. Among them we have more documentation on how to develop plug-ins, auto-created effects such as the erase pre-effect. I will add more information on that after we merge the Moldeo roadmap with the MIL project

New release of Moldeo Director

Image by jeanbaptisteparis via Flickr

We finally updated the Moldeo Director application on Sourceforge. You can find download it from

http://sourceforge.net/projects/moldeo/

Some words on Moldeo Director. It is the user interface for the Moldeo Framework, and in a nutshell it lets us create interactive installations without programming (at least that’s the goal, we will be able to do so when we implement MIL).

I will not get into the details of Moldeo functionality, I will do that on a later post coming soon. If you need information on the project, feel free to contact me for further information or check the project page on SourceForge (http://sourceforge.net/projects/moldeo/)

We are creating tutorials for the application and you can find the videos here:

http://verdondelosdejajaviera.com

So far the tutorials happen to be in spanish but we are working on the translated documents (believe me when I tell you that our english accent can be greatly improved). I will post the english tutorials soon in this blog. Later they will be available at the documentation page of the Moldeo project.

In case you need to report any bug, please do so at:

http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=163932&atid=829696

Hope you enjoy the new release!

Gustavo

Testing the webcam with gstreamer

Image by markuz via Flickr

We need to get ready an interactive installation by Wednesday next week. The client wants us to use an spare server and he wants us to use Linux, Ubuntu 8.10 for this particular installation.

So no big deal, it was a good opportunity to test Moldeo in a production setting with Linux. It was the golden opportunity for testing it. So we installed the development libraries (more on that on a latter post) and the webcam.

Testing the camera looked to be troublesome. Camorama could not see the camera. Same with Skype. Until we tested it with GStreamer. Only one line in the terminal did the trick:

gst-launch v4l2src device=/dev/video0 ! decodebin ! ffmpegcolorspace ! autovideosink

And voila! The camera was shown in an small window. GStreamer saved me hours of testing and installing and unistalling drivers.

Hope this trick will help you in future endeavors with Linux

Related Articles

• OpenOffice.org to use GStreamer for Multimedia (linuxjournal.com)
• Video Editing in Linux (brighthub.com)

wxSmith

wxSmith is a CodeBlocks plug-in that lets you develop C++ applications as if they were Visual Basic applications. Learning to use the plug-in is quite easy, you just have to go through its tutorials. It already comes installed with Code::Blocks and it is configured when you create a wxWidgets project.

How does it work? In a nutshell wxSmith is a code-generation tool. It generates the wxWidgets code for the visualization and control layers of your application. The code is quite readable and easy to modify (I don’t suggest it though). I have not tried modifying an existing wxWidgets application with wxSmith. Might do so in the near future.

I highly recommend using the plug-in. wxWidgets programming has a lot to do with configuration and user interface customization. This tool automates the task and will save your time in the near future.

Hello world!

Well, this is the first post for this blog on the development of an open source tool. We will talk about our experiences with cross-platform development, GStreamer, wxWidgets, C++ and organizations such as Siggraph.