Category: FreeGuide

(Badly wrong) usage statistics for FreeGuide

A long time ago I added functionality to FreeGuide so people could opt to report their use of FreeGuide to under a username, or anonymously. This all happens as part of the latest version check, and you can turn it off, obviously.

Quite a long time ago, Alex broke this functionality, and I haven’t yet made a release that fixes it. Stupid, really, because the usage statistics we’ve got are all-but useless:

Unique FreeGuide users by month (wrong)

Anonymous FreeGuide users by month (wrong)

Raw number of FreeGuide startups by month (wrong)

Hopefully I’ll get a release out soon that fixes it, and these graphs will become more sensible.

GSSMP goes beta

I’ve just released version 0.9 of GSSMP, and since I’ve fixed all the bugs I know about (except working around a gstreamer bug, which I will try to do before 1.0), I’ve marked this release as beta.

This is the second project I’ve marked as beta, and I am determined I am going to get to 1.0 this time. That means no more features, just bug fixes, and hopefully a 1.0 release in a few weeks, when it’s had a bit of testing.

Really, I think FreeGuide should have had a 1.0 release a couple of years ago, but I’ve always had a lot of features in mind before I feel it is complete. I think this was a mistake: it was pretty stable at one point, and it might have been helpful to label it as such.

GSSMP is not going to fall into that trap! It’s supposed to be minimal, and that is what it is.

It’s surprising how many features would be nice to have in a minimal app, though, like being a drag and drop target and checking the MIME types of files before playing them, not to mention cool stuff like gapless playback and volumne balancing…

But no, these will have to come after 1.0. My focus needs to go back onto FreeGuide after GSSMP 1.0, as I’ve been neglecting it, and it needs some love if it’s ever going to get to 0.11 … and 0.12 … and so on for infinity … and then after that, 1.0.

Recording in FreeGuide

If you download the nightly builds of FreeGuide, you can try out the new recording functionality.

There is quite a bit to do before this is ready for release. There are several bugs in the TODO list and you have to create your own scripts at the moment to launch mplayer or whichever recording software you want to use.

When the release happens, we will incude scripts that are useful for common TV cards (actually, it’s beginning to look like mplayer will handle all this for us, so all we need is one script) and make it easy to set up, with a default setup that should work for most people out of the box. Or that’s the idea.

The good news is that Alex appears to be back and working on fixing the bugs, so the ever-receding horizon of the next release is somewhat less receding.

I’ve not quite managed to get it to actually record something yet, (mainly due to mplayer being extremely awkward) but it shoud work…

FreeGuide 0.10.4 release candidate

Lots and lots of bug fixes, and some cool features sneaked in by people who obviously didn’t read my TODO list ;) means that FreeGuide 0.10.4 is nearly ready.

You can test it by downloading the relevant installer from freeguide-tv.sf.net/rc. I’ve put up a Linux RPM and tarball, and hopefully a Windows installer and other OS/distro packages will be up soon.

Reasons to try it:

  • There are loads of bug fixes in it.
  • You can now search for programmes!
  • You can try the new vertical list view.
  • It will help us if we find bugs before the release, and that will make you feel good.