Adding XSUB support to GStreamer

So I have been working on adding XSUB support to GStreamer as a landing task at my new job. To be honest, I didn't expect it to go as easy. Don't get me wrong, I do know most subpicture encoding schemes are kind of trivial, what I expected to be hard was to work with the GStreamer's plugin API, which was a completely new monster for me. Long history short; with the help of several coworkers and some good documentation, I have patch ready to be tested. There are still a few things here and there that might benefit from some tweaking but overall the code does its job and its in dire need of some testing love :) Dunno how long it would take for it to land in -bad but for the time being you can follow current development here.

If you want to test the code you might consider using a pipeline along these lines:

gst-launch-0.10 -v --gst-debug=xsub:5 xsub name=overlay show-background=FALSE ! ffmpegcolorspace ! xvimagesink filesrc location=/somepath/small.divx ! avidemux name=d d.video_00 ! queue ! decodebin2 ! ffmpegcolorspace ! overlay.video_sink d.video_01 ! queue ! overlay.xsub_sink

I'd put some screenshots here but I have been unable to find samples I can share.

Farewell light

So, sad but true -- Keyboard LEDs were removed a while back and I still miss them. Not that I haven't mourn enough on this but still hurts. Why, you might wonder (if you care at all). Well, here is the story:

When approaching OLPC for the first time I quickly sought something to do to start bonding with the existing development team. It wasn't really that difficult, this was soon after A-Test prototypes became available so really, there was a massive amount of stuff for a newcomer to pick and do. I don't recall if writing the kernel driver for these LEDs was my first choice but I do recall Chris Ball helped me through it from the ground up, Andres Salomon was there too and at some point I got help from Marcelo Tosatti and Jonathan Corvet (Thanks All). The driver had two incarnations, It's latter one used the LED subsystem (which btw, I advice you to hack on if you're starting or thinking on doing some kernel work for the first time) and made its way into the shipped kernel. I'm not good with dates but I will go ahead and pretend the code made a few hundred keyboards shine for about two months, now its gone. It turned out the LEDs where not fulfilling their purpose not to mention they sucked too much power so they were banned.

These LEDs were for me like a badge for others; a way to open some doors. From there I have done a few things but sadly -- none of them 'shines' the way these folks did. I'm going to miss them, Can't help it.

Long live light!