One of my contacts notified me that he has reverse engineered the Smacker multimedia system. Hopefully we will get a description published soon and put a fresh open source implementation out in the wild.
This is great. This is one of the oldest and most enduring multimedia systems in the field, and one of the most widespread– The official website boasts of its use in over 2,600 software titles.
xine colleague James Courtier-Dutton informs of a curious story via the xine-devel mailing list: Homeland Security helps secure open-source code. It seems that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wants to run code audits on a number of increasingly-used multimedia applications. On the TODO list are xine and MPlayer.
It’s weird to think the government is commissioning to improve code I helped write. But multimedia players are certainly not exempt from security bugs– one of my more humbling experiences was when a code audit made be students of D.J. Bernstein’s security class found a careless buffer overflow condition in one of xine demuxer modules.
I want to create a fusegraf program that combines the FUSE (Filesystem in USErspace) project with BMS GRAF scripts. I present herewith my plan to do so, for public comment so you can see if there is anything obviously wrong with the idea (I mean besides the fact that I am even wasting time on this idea in the first place).
Someone once asked on one of the xine mailing lists, “Is xine big endian or little endian?” Clearly, the person was confused but his heart was in the right place: He had heard about the endianness issue and that it affects machine portability somehow. Here is Multimedia Mike’s quick and easy guide to what you need to know about endianness and platform portability: