Dmedia 0.3 "made of the web"

Yup, made of the web: http://couchdb.apache.org/

I'm happy to announce the 3rd release of the Distributed Media Library (aka "dmedia"). At this point dmedia is really just for developers and highly adventurous end-users, but the design and implementation are both progressing quickly.

You can download the source tarball here:

  https://launchpad.net/dmedia/trunk/0.3/+download/dmedia-0.3.0.tar.gz

Packages are available for Lucid, Maverick, and Natty in the Novacut Stable Releases PPA (although note that 0.3 has only been well tested under Maverick):

  https://launchpad.net/~novacut/+archive/stable

== What's new in dmedia 0.3 ==

It was a rather slow month for dmedia, largely because I was still quite sick the first 2 weeks of the new year. Ah, winter. None the less, there are some significant new features, but not much in the way of user visible changes. New features include:

  * File content-hash is computed using a hash list, enabling integrity checks with 8 MiB granulatity

  * A robust HTTP downloader aimed at swarm downloading (uses above hash list)

  * Imports use one thread for reading, another thread for hashing and writing, greatly improving IO utilization

  * Imported files are now only copied, never hard-linked, making testing dmedia less invasive/risky

  * Authenticating to desktopcouch using oauth from embedded WebKit now works (run dmedia-gtk to see preview of browser)

If you're an HDSLR user, be sure to check out this video showing off the dmedia import workflow:

  http://vimeo.com/18287329

== Special thanks ==

And a special thanks to:

  * xDev for translating dmedia into Arabic (sorry, didn't have time to add in 0.3!)

  * James Raymond for doing some beautiful design work for the upcoming Novacut player

  * Stuart Langridge for helping me finally get oauth working from within embedded WebKit

I'd also like to give an extra special thanks to the Novacut cofounders, Jeffrey Ballagh and Tara Oldfield, for sticking with me on this wacky and often times immensely stressful journey. Hang in there, peeps, we can do this! And happy early birthday to Jeffrey Ballagh! Please send him lots birthday tweets on January 30th!

And of course, I'd like to give an EXTRA extra special thanks to my mom. Thanks for all your help, we couldn't do this without you!

== Contribute to 0.4 and beyond! ==

We do monthly time-based releases, always releasing on the last Thursday of the month. That means we promise to make a release on time each month, but never promise what exact features will land.

dmedia 0.4 will be released on Thursday February 24 2011, and development is already underway. To see the bugs targeted for this next release, checkout the dmedia 0.4 milestone:

  https://launchpad.net/dmedia/+milestone/0.3

== That's all, folks! ==

Thanks to everyone who is helping make this dream a reality!

Cheers,
Jason Gerard DeRose