Tagged as Windows

GStreamer for all

By Georges Auberger Georges Auberger Mar 3, 2009 8:10 pm
Filed under Development
Also tagged as , , , , ,

At the beginning of 2008, we announced our intention to use GStreamer as our main media core. This was no small feat but we were determined to provide Songbird users with a robust, extensible, open media pipeline.
Since GStreamer was mainly a Linux project it required us to port it to OS X and Windows, which we got working [...]

Comments (13)

Hitting a Sour Note

By ali ali Feb 28, 2009 2:00 am
Filed under Development
Also tagged as , , ,

Bird Beta superfans,
We’ve hit a snag in the Hendrix release — our 1.1b1 and 1.1b2 builds are causing crashes for some of you and we don’t know why.  We’re launching an all-talons-out bird assault on this thing to get it fixed before the final release.
Here’s how it’s going to go down and what we need [...]

Comments (36)

MTP Device Support for Windows

By Aus Aus Feb 29, 2008 4:56 pm
Filed under Development
Also tagged as ,


MTP Device Support for Windows Screenshot (2008-02-29)

One of the big features we’ll be releasing as part of Songbird 0.5 is MTP device support.

MTP, or Media Transfer Protocol, is used by many types of devices these days. It ends up being pretty awesome because it enables device manufacturers to create devices that can all have the same great user experience when interacting with the contents and managing it from Songbird! Sweet.

Initial support for MTP devices includes manually managing the contents of your device, managing playlists and transferring media files to/from your device.

So far we’ve gotten Sansa, Creative, Nokia and HTC devices to work within Songbird. Awesome.

I’d also like to mention the names of all of the engineers that worked on this feature, without their dedication, none of this would’ve been possible. So, without further adieu, here is your MTP device team: Aus, David, Erik, Keisuke, Mark and Steven!

Tell us what you think! :) You can try it out by getting the latest nightly and add-on here.

Aus

P.S. If you are a device manufacturer and you would like Songbird to support your MTP device, do get in touch with us.

Comments (37)

Running the DRM Gauntlet

By ben ben Feb 4, 2007 12:09 pm
Filed under Development
Also tagged as

The next version of Songbird (0.2.5) will support Apple FairPlay and Windows Media DRM audio playback. Those features are already enabled in the latest nightly build and everyone is encouraged to give those builds a spin. If you’re on Windows you’ll need to have a new-ish version of Windows Media Player (probably 9 or newer) for protected WMA playback and QuickTime for Windows (probably 7 or newer) for FairPlay to work. On OS X you’ll only get FairPlay playback, sorry.

How does this work? We don’t hack out the encryption keys or anything illegal. Songbird supports multiple playback cores so we simply use Apple’s and Microsoft’s own playback engines to do the decoding for us. We use VLC for playback of most file types, but now whenever you play a protected WMA or M4P file we swap in the Windows Media Player or QuickTime core. Sounds easy, right?

Well, no. Not really. The world of DRM is a little (cough) unfriendly, so I figured that I should share some of the war stories and a few tricks for anyone interested in making DRM playback work in their own apps.

It seems both Apple and Microsoft are a little paranoid when it comes to debuggers. I fault Apple a little more than Microsoft in this case for reasons I’ll hit in a second. But be forewarned: using DRM software under a debugger may not work correctly (or at all), and documentation may be totally misleading. What happens? Well…

Comments (12)

Feature Parody

By jkoshi jkoshi Dec 4, 2006 4:14 pm
Filed under Development
Also tagged as

Our bird blue prints are coming together quickly now. It’s been my job to make Songbird’s user experiences easy and integrated. Now that our proof-of-concept has gotten us this far, we are free to make a few necessary changes to our visual and behavioral user experiences.

We are also addressing a number of accesibility issues that our proof-of-concept elicited from our early “fans.” That said, I’ve been doing competitive-analysis and necessary research to determine how we should make Songbird design decisions.

Comments (7)