As you all should know by now, the PS3 GTK webkit port uses Gstreamer for the audio and video stream.
We were told over a year ago that we would eventually be able to view 3-D inside the browser for things like Youtube. Turns out Gstreamer does not support 3-D yet.
http://planet.collabora.com/
I am also happy to say that by the end of the year we should have GStreamer 1.0 out the door, Wim Taymans is putting the foundations together as we speak. It should provide a lot of great improvements to GStreamer, like good solutions for handling 3D video for instance, but also provide a lot of speed improvements which will be especially useful for embedded setups
What embedded setups are going to display 3-D; PS3?
From the font/language settings in the PS3 we can determine that the blu-ray, DVD and IPTV players are separate players, the former two probably not part of gstreamer. We can't confirm but I believe that DLNA was rewritten and is supported by gstreamer
(The PS3 having a Gstreamer based DLNA is the lowest probability as DLNA was implemented before the 2008 date indicated by Collabora blogs that work was being done for Sony on the PS3.) as well as IPTV in its various forms like "Home" iptv, Hulu or Mubi etc. The latter with a Marlin ultraviolet DRM adaptive streaming gstreamer player.
Also coming by the end of this year (speculation for the NGP and PS3) is a new DLNA server/player/standard with the gstreamer implementation called Rygel after the Farscape SF series character. Essentially, with for instance a handheld like the NGP, you can have control of the PS3 DLNA player and remotely play files from the NGP or any DLNA server on the network and if I understood correctly, shared files on the network too.
Sony had as a release date for the NGP October and coincidentally, Linux embedded projects usually complete
before October in time for the EU Linux conference Sept-Oct. Partners (clients who pay) in these projects get the code first and have help implementing new code. I assume Sony is in this category.
Firmware 3.70 outed by Sept for New Headphones And here
7.1 digital surround sound on the PS3 requires system software version 3.70 or later. Surround Sound does not work with Blu-ray Disc movies confirms a separate player for BLu-ray disks and a gstreamer/audio upgrade with 3.70.
Redirecting audio to the usb port for the announced for September new Sony headphones is possible now and mentioned in multiple gstreamer players and guessing from the release date for the headphones, a PS3 firmware update supporting some new feature(s) is scheduled for September like firmware 3.5 last year.
A possible is
Pulseaudio that has a design advantage for handhelds in that it saves a few tenths of a watt in audio processing by pulse decoding/creating an audio stream then turning off the audio processor for a few tenths of a second while playing the decoded stream then turns on the pulse audio again for a few tenths of a second in cycles. The savings comes in the sleep time where the processor is turned off. Pulse audio can be fed by a gstreamer core. I suspect the NGP will use Pulse audio.
The PS3 while not needing a power savings can benefit in packing more audio processing in a shorter time for audio with pulse audio and then having a SPU free for other tasks during the audio processing sleep time. (Bumping audio up from 5.1 to 7.1 as well as Cross game chat and music in the background enabled by pulse audio?)
http://arunraghavan.net/2011/05/more-pulseaudio-power-goodness/
Summarizing the basic idea, we want music players to decode a large chunk of data and give it to PA so that we can then fill up ALSAs hardware buffer, sleep till its almost completely consumed, fill it again, sleep, repeat. More details in this post from Lennart.
The native GNOME audio/video players dont talk to PulseAudio directly they use GStreamer, which has a pulsesink element that actually talks to PulseAudio. We could configure things so that we send a large amount (say 2 seconds worth) to PulseAudio, sleep, and then wake up periodically to push out more.
http://blogs.gnome.org/uraeus/2010/10/07/echo-cancellation-on-linux/
Echo cancellation on Linux
So as I blogged about before, Collabora Multimedia has been doing a project with NLnet to improve echo cancellation support under Linux and Pulse Audio. There were and still are a lot of challenges to get it right, but we wanted to try to lay the groundwork for a system wide solution, which is why we decided to try to implement it within Pulse Audio.For those wondering what echo cancellation actually means, it is a way to resolve the issue that if you record sound from your laptop microphone and at the same time output sound from your speakers, you easily end up with the sound looping, creating an irritating echo effect, which makes doing voice calls on a machine painful and sometimes impossible. Echo cancellation systems basically try to analyse the data coming out of the speakers so that it can filter it out and ignore it when it comes back through the microphone.
This is an issue the current PS3 chat has. Another issue is poor video due to connection speeds; this is also being addressed with adaptive bitrate in gstreamer.
The above Sony headphones release date of September and requiring 3.70 confirms what we should already surmise; there is a schedule of planned upgrades for the PS3. My opinion: From functionality and looking at Collabora blogs as well as the Linux Gnome desktop and the latest Fedora release we might determine from functionality what Sony is using (open Source Software) for these planned upgrades in the PS3 and NGP.
This is new to Fedora Linux and might be a possible for the PS3 kernel and would support a dynamic kernel and more. It's available with a variety of licences and for embedded systems.
systemd: "systemd is a system and session manager for Linux, compatible with SysV and LSB init scripts. systemd provides aggressive parallelization capabilities, uses socket and D-Bus activation for starting services, offers on-demand starting of daemons, keeps track of processes using Linux cgroups, supports snapshotting and restoring of the system state, maintains mount and automount points and implements an elaborate transactional dependency-based service control logic. It can work as a drop-in replacement for sysvinit."
What does this tell us about when? I think webkit is done and in the PS3 (frontend still being constructed/tested), systemd done and being used by the kernel but gstreamer 1.0 and pulseaudio are still to come (Sept). As always this is opinion and based on functionality.
Multiple upgrades planned with a target date before the October release of the NGP for ecosystem functionality.
IF pulseaudio and/or telepathy is necessary for cross game chat or other new features then we might only have an announcement of these new features at E3 (or Firmware 3.7 at E3 and several new features like Cross game chat).
There is much more than a new web browser coming! There are dependencies and Sony needs to follow a planned implementation.
PlayStation is bringing E3 to you like never before. You can view a live stream of the Press Conference on PlayStation blog. You will have a choice of 4 video feeds that you control with the ability to deep dive on information topics. In addition, be sure to stay connected with the latest PlayStation Blog Live Reports from the show floor on the hour every hour.
http://gamerant.com/sony-e3-2011-conference-preview-benk-87681/
were no doubt expecting to hear about a new PS3 firmware hopefully with some long-awaited additions, such as cross-game chat as well as other community improvements (least of which will be some form of interconnectivity with the NGPs LiveArea functionality).
NGP Live area =
Trophy(s)
Friends playing game
PSN Store access for DLC
Chat
Access to Game
Live area will probably be duplicated in the PS3.
Collabora Gnome collaborative desktop like OLPC Sugar talk
Libraries listed in PS3 disclosure
$(CAIRO_LIBS) \ Cairo SVG library
+ $(COVERAGE_LDFLAGS) \
+ $(ENCHANT_LIBS) \...............Front end API for a spell checker and more
+ $(FREETYPE_LIBS) \...............Default Font Library & Pango is supposed to be included in latest version
+ $(GAIL_LIBS) \......................
GNOME Accessibility Implementation Library
+ $(GEOCLUE_LIBS) \...............No need for this on the PS3, NGP will use!
+ $(GLIB_LIBS) \......................low level C cross platform lib (needed for just about everything webkit & cairo & Gstreamer)
+ $(GSTREAMER_LIBS) \...........Gstreamer AV library *
+ $(GTK_LIBS) \.......................GTK toolkit library Implements many of the Xwindows GDK wrapper functions without needing Xwindows or GDK
+ $(HILDON_LIBS) \..................Icons and control panels (touchscreen
+ $(JPEG_LIBS) \......................Jpeg compression picture library (Video too?)
+ $(LIBSOUP_LIBS) \................HTTP library
+ $(LIBXML_LIBS) \
+ $(LIBXSLT_LIBS) \
+ $(PANGO_LIBS) \...................International Fonts Cairo-pango = SVG international fonts eventually to be part of Freetype above.
+ $(PNG_LIBS) \.......................PNG picture library
+ $(SQLITE3_LIBS) \.................Data Base Library
+ $(UNICODE_LIBS) \
+ $(XT_LIBS) \.........................Xwindows libraries?
+ $(WINMM_LIBS) \..................Windows Multi-Media library ?
+ $(SHLWAPI_LIBS) \ wrapper functions convert the Unicode input string parameters to ANSI and call ANSI versions of functions
+ $(OLE32_LIBS).......................
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_..._and_Embedding
