The World of a Penguin

I gave up on my problems with Hauppauge PVR 500MCE. I think the card is broken. Instead I saw a shop selling a KISS PVR 558 for about €200. So I bought one. The box runs Linux and the GPL-parts of the software can be downloaded as source. I can FTP to the box and read and write videos, pictures and audio files. The box support free format such as OGG as well as propitary formats. Through their web service can I program it to record a show where ever I am. I have now uploaded the go-open TV-shows and can finally look at them from my sofa, without having the laptop in my knee. The campaign and shows was sponsored by Canonical and HP among others.

Maybe my dream about ogg can be true, at least according to an analyst in Wired .

We all remember that Fraunhofer required license fees for MP3 a few years ago. Today it is reported in news that Microsoft has lost a law suite about MP3 licensing against Alcatel-Lucent. MS thought they already had paid to Fraunhofer, but the jury found that it is Alcatel-Lucent that owns the technology behind MP3. Microsoft has to pay $1.52billion to Alcatel-Lucent. Here is my advice to Microsoft; Do like Ubuntu does, skip MP3 and only provide the free Ogg/Vorbis-format. If I can dream a bit more I want them to skip WMV (not VMW) too in favor for ogg. All MP3-player manufacturers start to support ogg, and that iTunes converts to ogg.

During the X-mas, I took a closer look in meta data tagging in music files using Python. There are modules to tag mp3, flac and ogg vorbis file, but each file format has its own module and each module has its own API. That's bad! Then I found a Python module called mutagen . Mutagen handles tagging for all the file formats above and some other too. Thats nice! If you are happy to only use some of those tags that are possible in MP3 files, you will have the same API for the three files. If you want to use all the tags in MP3, we are at least down to two instead of three different API:s. Unfortunately I noticed that mutagen convert all tag names in ogg files to lower case. The recomendation from the xiph-people that had defined the ogg-vorbis standard is that tag names should be in upper case. I have mailed the mailing list for mutagen and hope that they will change the behavior according to the recommendations.