That said, my personal contributions to the latest release are mainly related to the basecurves… The basecurves allow us to have decent default output of camera RAW files. With proper basecurves Darktable’s output is roughly similar to the camera JPEG output. We now have basecurves for Canon, Nikon, Sony, Pentax, Olympus, Panasonic and Leica. We have a basecurve for Kodak as well, though that didn’t make it into the 0.6 release.

With the new 0.6 release I also took the oppertunity to cleanup my PPAs. I now have two seperate PPAs exclusively for Darktable. For “stable” releases add this PPA to your sources:

https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-release

Or if you’re feeling adventurous, and don’t mind the occasional problem, you can use our regular development snapshots:

https://launchpad.net/~pmjdebruijn/+archive/darktable-unstable

We’re now working toward a 0.6.1 release with amongst other things some user interface improvements.

The following video tutorial demonstrates a crash with Darktable but the tutorial should be applicable to most applications. And don’t worry the crash in the video got fixed minutes after I made the video.

The above video has been recorded at 1280×800, so it’s best viewed fullscreen. If you’re using Firefox to view the video you can just right-click and choose “Full Screen”. Or alternatively you can download the screencast here.

Video

The BW10 produces 1080p video at a 30fps framerate, encoded as H264 (AVC). Please note the BW10 does real 1920×1080 instead of 1440×1080 (anamorphic) video, so it’s true FullHD. It encodes between 13-15MBit/sec.

Now that all sounds fine and dandy, however, the BW10 seems to not deal very well with full screen motion, the recorded visual quality significantly drops when the camera is heavily shook, or the larger part of the screen is in continual motion.

Because the BW10 is very very light, it is hard to keep it steady at times, and although it has a digital stabilizer, which does seem to work, it can’t work miracles. So I’m considering purchasing a monopod to use as a simple stabilizer. You can obviously take this as far as you want.

Last and least, true to it’s class, it performs poorly in low light conditions, just like all other (more expensive but still) affordable camcorders.

Photo

The BW10′s photo capabilities are horrible and then some less. Some rocket scientist at Toshiba thought it to be a good idea to oversharpen the hell out of everything to the point it produces artifacts. This is obviously a firmware issue, so this could be fixed with a future firmware update, if Toshiba decides to grace us with one.

If Toshiba graces us with a fix, I reckon it’s photo quality could be similar to the better phone camera’s.

Webcam

Funnily enough the BW10 can also function as a Webcam (640×480), which is nice, but not really that special. They did implement this well, it’s USB Video Class, so it’ll work with any modern operation system, without any driver installation woes.

USB Connection

At first glance I foolishly mistook the BW10′s Micro USB plug for a proprietary one. After some reading up, it seems phone manufacturers settled on Micro USB for charging via USB, and it’s great Toshiba went with that. Thumbs up for Toshiba.

Battery

The BW10′s battery is not a sealed internally as part of the unit, so in theory you could buy extra batteries for extended operation. Toshiba lists 70 minute operation for a fully charged battery, while charging an empty battery can take up to three hours. I’ve been able to get 75 minutes of FullHD continous video when shooting directly after charging. Not a particular real-world use-case. I guess it’ll be realistic to expect an hours worth of FullHD video from a single battery with real-life usage.

Notes

Some other things that are nice about the BW10 is the pouch Toshiba includes with the camcorder, it won’t protect the unit from shock damage, but it will protect it from getting scratched by your keys when you have it in your pocket. For serious protection a real pouch like Lowepro’s Apex series will be better.

Toshiba also had the insight to fit the BW10 with a standard screw in mount so the BW10 can be used with a generic tripod or monopod.

Conclusion

All in all the BW10 is far from perfect, not forgetting it’s faults, I’d still say it’s a bargain. Especially considering that most competing products in it’s price class have similar deficits.

So ideally we always want our entropy pool topped up, sourced from a reliable source of true entropy. Some processors and chipsets have a built-in entropy generator, however there aren’t many yet, so chances are your processor or chipset won’t have a built-in entropy generator. So meet the SimTec EntropyKey.

The nice thing about the entropy key is that all of the supporting software is open source, and it does not require weirdo (vendor) ill-maintained kernel modules. And the best part is that it is quite affordable, I think it cost me about 50EUR including shipping.

If you order one of these USB keys (they really look like a clumsy USB memory stick) and want to setup everything, you need to install the ekeyd package from the Ubuntu (Lucid) repositories, no need for third party packages. The ekeyd package has a nice udev rules included to automatically recognize EntropyKeys and give them human readable device nodes (you do need to reboot or reload udev for this to work):

  /dev/entropykey/M_3lUoWERuOdXDFR -> ../ttyACM0

You’ll note that the EntropyKey actually uses the generic ACM USB serial driver to talk to it’s userland tools. The default configuration file in the ekeyd package automatically recognizes all EntropyKeys setup by udev, so in theory multiple keys should actually work without changing the configuration file.

Now you can use the following commands to setup and initialize the EntropyKey:

  cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail

  432

  # sudo ekeydctl list

  NR,OK,Status,Path,SerialNo

  1,NO,Long-Term-Key is bad,/dev/entropykey/M_3lUoWERuOdXDFR,M/3lUoWERuOdXDFR

So we see that the device is not yet running properly, it still needs it’s Long-Term-Key, which is supplied in an envelope included with the EntropyKey. We tell ekeyd it’s Long-Term-Key like so:

  # sudo ekey-rekey M/3lUoWERuOdXDFR AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

So finally we can check the EntropyKey’s status again:

  # sudo ekeydctl list

  NR,OK,Status,Path,SerialNo

  1,YES,Running OK,/dev/entropykey/M_3lUoWERuOdXDFR,M/3lUoWERuOdXDFR

  cat /proc/sys/kernel/random/entropy_avail

  3968

You’ll note that the available entropy has significantly increased, and the EntropyKey should constantly replenish this pool, making sure you never run out of entropy.

The silly thing is… actually we already sortof can… affordably… Since encoding 100 CDs x 70 minutes per disc x 60 seconds x 256kbit/sec VBR MP3 x 8 (bit) / 1024 (kilobyte) / 1024 (megabyte) ~ 13GB of data…

And if we play fast and loose with the microchip term… Oh wait… The future is now… It’s called a 16GB SecureDigital memory card, which can be bought at any electronics shop, for about 40EUR… Doh!

# rm -Rf ~/.gstreamer-0.10

I’ve had a similar problem installing LADSPA plugins for use with Jokosher (Jokosher accesses LADSPA plugins via GStreamer as well).

  audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lame name=enc mode=0 vbr-quality=6 ! id3v2mux

to:

  audio/x-raw-int,rate=44100,channels=2 ! lamemp3enc name=enc target=0 quality=6 ! xingmux ! id3v2mux

It’s highly debatable that a quality of 6 offers CD quality transparancy, hydrogenaudio has a lot of information on how to select a quality rating of your liking.

I’ve already reported this upstream, including a patch, which is being considered for a GNOME patch release.

The general user experience of the Ubuntu One Music Store is pretty good, Canonical by default supplies a Rhythmbox extension to integrate with the store. Banshee users haven’t been forgotten either, these is a extension for them as well.

Enough praise for now… I have been experiencing a severe lag between buying music and actually having it appear in Rhythmbox, I’m guessing this is just a post-release overload spike which will straighten out after a few days.

The shop also has some inconsistencies, for example not all music is made available at the same bitrate, some can be downloaded at 192kbit/sec, some at 256kbit/sec and some at 320kbit/sec. They do explicitly advertise this, so you are aware of the bitrate before purchasing. To be honest I don’t even care that much about any particular bitrate, it’s the inconsistency that annoys me most…

The track’s metadata isn’t perfect as well, lots of tracks do not seem to have been assigned a proper genre, as Rhythmbox just displays Unknown. Also some tracks have coverart embedded in them (which seems like a very good idea), and others don’t, no consistency can be found here either. Luckily Rhythmbox can easily compensate for this by downloading covertart online.

Another thing that’s worth to mention is the fact that the Ubuntu One branding of the Music Store is not just marketing, the Music Store actually integrates with your Ubuntu One online storage account, by uploading the music you buy to your online “cloud” storage. Then your local Ubuntu One client downloads the newly bought tracks to your local machine where Rhythmbox can find them. Pretty cool!

All in all the Ubuntu One Music Store works quite well for most practical purposes, with only some performance and anal retentive issues remaining to solve…

The Fluendo DVD Player is a proprietary application, though a very nice one at that. It’s a proper GNOME application, HIG wise, it truely looks like a native GNOME application (screenshot done on Ubuntu Lucid):

When talking about functionality there’s not much to say, it’s a no-nonsense DVD player, it does what it should, nothing more nothing less… It plays encrypted DVDs, there’s a tool to set your DVD drives’ region, and the DVD menu’s work…

In contrast to most other commercial software available for Linux, Fluendo provides proper stable AMD64 builds, proper packages for Debian/Ubuntu, with all files put in their proper locations. They’re not cluttering up /opt.

The price isn’t bad either, the base price is 20EUR one year of updates included (extending this term isn’t expensive either). Buying from Fluendo is like giving to charity anyways, the Fluendo blokes did a lot of good open source work on GStreamer.