Release notes for Flumotion 0.6.0 "Can Punyetes"

The Flumotion team announces a new release of the stable 0.6 branch of the Flumotion Streaming Server.

Flumotion is a streaming media server created with the backing of Fluendo. It features intuitive graphical administration tools, making the task of setting up and manipulating audio and video streams easy for even novice system administrators. Flumotion is released under the GPL.

Release overview

After two and a half years from the start of the stable 0.4 branch and after more than two years from the latest stable release we are crazily proud to announce the start of a new stable series.

The differences from the last release in the 0.5 development branch are mostly bugfixes, last cleanups and tying up loose ends. The assistant got further polished, test coverage got increased and nasty bugs were squashed.

On the other hand you will find quite a few new features in this release, ranging from improvements in the user interface to new possibilities for the streaming server administrators and developers to completely new functionality that Flumotion can now provide.

Below is the summary of the user-visible changes from the last development release codenamed "EAT". From this point new features will only be added and released in the new 0.7 development series. The stable branch will get bugfixes however.

Features of this release

• Added Python 2.6 compatibility. Dropped Python 2.3 compatibility. You can see we are going in the right direction.
• The icecast producer component will now automatically retry connecting to the icecast server in case of connection loss.
• The playlist producer component got a shiny new user interface visible in the GTK administration tool.
• A new plug for the HTTP server component has been added that makes it possible to configure the bitrate control plug on a file by file basis. This can be used to implement per file bitrate control.
• The porter now injects a HTTP GET parameter named FLUREQUID for each connection it passes to the slaved component. The parameter is unique for each connection the porter handles, so you can use it to track the lifecycle of a request across various components.
• Flumotion jobs can now be automatically run under a profiler if the environment in which the worker is started includes a FLU_PROFILE or FLU_BUILTIN_PROFILE variable. The former uses a statistical profiler from http://wingolog.org/pub/statprof.py, the latter uses the builtin Python profiler.
• Flumotion HTTP server component can now perform remote seeking with MP4 files, similar to Apache with mod_h264_streaming. When handling requests for MP4 files that include a HTTP GET parameter named start it will serve the file from a time offset specified by that parameter. This protocol is supported by popular open-source Flash players. The feature requires a supporting Python library from http://github.com/arkadini/mp4seek
• The assistant now offers the possibility to choose static OGG files as video or audio sources and creates flows with the looper component if you choose it.

Known issues

• The Ogg muxer in GStreamer started misbehaving in version 0.10.24 of gst-plugins-base. This regression has been found and fixed and the fix will be included in version 0.10.25. Unfortunately if you are using gst-plugins-base 0.10.24, your Ogg flows will not work. We strongly urge users to use a previous release of gst-plugins-base and upgrade to 0.10.25 as soon as it is released. A warning message will be visible in the administration UI if Flumotion detects that you are using an affected version of gst-plugins-good.
• The Dirac encoder element in current GStreamer has some issues when combined with the Ogg muxer. Setting up a Dirac flow might result in the streamer component staying hungry regardless of the muxer going happy. We are working on the issue and hope to have it resolved in the upcoming GStreamer release.
• The multipart muxer element in GStreamer can sometimes produce unplayable output. Setting up a multipart encoded mulaw flow can result in unplayable output. We hope this will also be fixed in the next GStreamer release.

Bugs fixed in this release

• 114 : When unable to write/read from a device the GUI should tell you how to fix it
• 197 : Sound card wizard page does not query hardware for capabilities
• 245 : lacking documentation for distributed use
• 294 : overlay is sad when my /tmp is full, but somehow stuff still works. amazing.
• 564 : should not be possible to start a component from the admin until its worker is logged in
• 804 : wizard should allow user to choose from sound cards, not hw:N devices
• 879 : Hostname column in the recent connetions dialog is too wide
• 894 : tracebacks in the admin due to wizard step programmers mistakes don't show up as an error message in the wizard
• 937 : when dvb-producer starts but cannot lock to a signal, it times out, then goes sad reopening the device
• 951 : streamer shouldn't report an error twice if a port is already used
• 952 : Probe ALSA devices using hal
• 955 : NoProjectError should have more info about the failure to load a project
• 965 : first-run option should generate its own default.pem file and not use the installed one
• 1085 : no xsl to upgrade configs to 0.6
• 1141 : Multi-selection stop traceback
• 1159 : Component UI is deselected when a new component is loaded
• 1163 : connection errors should be shown in recoverable error dialogs, and not exit the admin client
• 1167 : porter doesn't handle runtimeexceptions when passing fd's
• 1175 : properties are not documented
• 1182 : eaters cannot be named other than default for some reason
• 1214 : flumotion-worker crashes when no port and transport are specified in the configuration file
• 1238 : Improve local cache provider plug
• 1243 : it's possible to request the UIState of a component that's being removed
• 1252 : The dialog that appears when the connection is lost behaves wrong
• 1263 : ihooks.py:44 ImportError: could not import gobject (error was: 'import_module() takes at most 5 arguments (6 given)')
• 1264 : file-server leaking keycards when client disconnects before keycard returned from the bouncer
• 1275 : overlay is broken in recent gst-plugins-good packages
• 1276 : flumotion-admin takes 100% of cpu and doesn't show the flow when it has a lot of components
• 1277 : components that are already eating one from another should ignore eatFrom calls if the feed specified is the same as the current one
• 1278 : flumotion should drop all newsegment events after the first one
• 1280 : http-server is not checking if a byte range request with end range is bigger than the filesize
• 1282 : flumotion 0.5.4 fails on ubuntu 9.04
• 1296 : HTTPAuthentication: log the code returned to the client
• 1302 : Add metadata plug interface to ondemand http-server component
• 1303 : include reference to flvlib in the ondemand docs
• 1306 : pep8.py broken due to tokenizer module changes in python2.6
• 1311 : memory leaking, still
• 1312 : feedersnode.py:238 TypeError: iter must be a GtkTreeIter
• 1313 : [playlist-producer] p-p fails messily when gnonlin and/or python-iCalendar are not installed
• 1315 : when flumotion-admin connects to a manager, and gets refused because of wrong user/pass, in the background it keeps trying to connect there
• 1339 : [disker] the disker opens the files in append mode, even if it looks like it should open then it write mode
• 1340 : [overlay] does not work with recent gstreamer
• 1344 : flumotion creates borked ogg files with git gst as of Aug 20 2009

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Support and Issues

Developers

Contributors to this release

• Alvin Delagon
• Arek Korbik
• Guillaume Quintard
• Jan Urbański
• Josep Joan "Pepe" Ribas
• Julien Le Goff
• Murray Cumming
• Pedro Gracia
• Sebastien Merle
• Thomas Vander Stichele
• Xavier Martinez
• Xavier Queralt Mateu
• Zaheer Abbas Merali