News and announcements

Medibuntu releases uncrippled ffmpeg!

Written for Blacklight by ChrisLees on 2009-12-14

Karmic Users - you can remove your self-compiled ffmpeg now. The Medibuntu repository has pushed out an update today that re-enables AAC encoding support in FFMPEG, so update ASAP.

In other Blacklight news, the development version will put thumbnails of your videos onto your Walkman. There's currently one bug that I've noticed on the X-series involving WMV files, but as soon as this is resolved you can expect a new version of Blacklight3 CLI.

The development version also allows you to specify the ffmpeg location, for advanced users, in /etc/blacklight.ffmpeg. This feature was implemented to help get around Ubuntu 9.10's lack of AAC encoding, but now it's not necessary. Still, it will be in there.

The version after next should see some more love for the GUI package, and possibly packages for other distributions. If you'd like to volunteer to package Blacklight for any distributions other than Ubuntu, please contact me at christopher_NOSPAMlees@iprimus.com.au. To facilitate this I'm considering moving away from Launchpad as it is fairly attached to Ubuntu (how many Fedora users look on Launchpad for software?) and because Launchpad is massively overkill, even difficult, for the small scope of this project.

Blacklight and Karmic

Written for Blacklight by ChrisLees on 2009-10-10

Due to licensing issues, the "libfaac" AAC encoding support in FFMPEG has been dropped from Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic Koala". This also means that Blacklight can no longer encode your videos if you are using Karmic. It gets worse: The FFMPEG developers are talking about removing "libfaac" support from FFMPEG and not replacing it until their own AAC implementation is mature enough. They might have already done it, I need to investigate further.

This throws Blacklight's future up-in-the-air. The obvious way forward is to include a local copy of ffmpeg and the libav libraries from a time when these existed in FFMPEG, but until then you need to compile FFMPEG from source if you are using Ubuntu 9.10 or any recent big-name Linux distribution. Or virtualise an earlier version of your distribution and use it for Blacklight duties.

I will post more information here when I have it.

Walkman problems on Ubuntu Jaunty

Written for Blacklight by ChrisLees on 2009-05-10

There is a bug in Ubuntu 9.04 that attempts to mount the Walkman as an MTP device. This unfortunately only allows for music to be loaded, and prevents you from being able to load video or photos onto the device. This problem also affects some other MP3 players.

There are workarounds available apparently, but they have not worked for me. This also means that Blacklight is useless if you are a Gnome user; yes, that's right, KDE is not affected.

I'm also providing a bounty: If you can release a fix for the problem (not a workaround, remember other MP3 players are affected) and get it pushed to Ubuntu Jaunty users as an update, I'll pay $100 Australian dollars into your Paypal account. If you can maintain the fix, so that Walkmans (at least) work perfectly in Ubuntu 9.10 and Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, I'll pay another $100 AUD to you on verification that the Walkmans still work fine on the release version of 10.04 LTS.

At this stage, I don't anticipate a release of Blacklight that can solve the problem or implement a workaround.

Bugfix version 0.1.2 released

Written for Blacklight by ChrisLees on 2008-12-22

An issue was reported that can cause Blacklight3-gui not to start. The issue only occurs when WxPython 2.6.3.2 or a similar version is installed. This is the version that ships with Ubuntu 8.10.

If the GUI is working fine for you, there is no need to upgrade.

The command-line package is not affected.

Please upgrade by clicking on release 0.1.2 on the Blacklight page on Launchpad.