This got me thinking it'd be fun to integrate some of this functionality into a web application. A quick search and I discovered Tony Bhimani's Linux Text-To-Speech Tutorial which has a sample PHP application that uses the Festival text2wave utility and the lame mp3 encoder to produce mp3 files from user submitted text.

I mentioned that some of the voices are pretty outstanding. In particular, the "unit selection" voices, demonstrated on the Festival demo page, are able to synthesize a lot of sentences with few noticeable glitches. These voices sound so nice because they contain a much larger database of common sound units, only falling back on heavy processed output on less common utterances. There's a howto and discussion over on Ubuntu Forums that'll guide you through installing and using the more enhanced voices with Festival. With a decent voice file, Festival, and an adaptation of Tony's PHP text-to-speech demonstration, it wouldn't be too hard to add audio output to your blog or create a script that turns your RSS feeds into a podcast for the daily commute.

Have any of your own text-to-speech ideas or demos? Please share them in the comments!

Tony Bhimani - PHP Text-To-Speech Example
The Festival Speech Synthesis System
HOWTO: Make Festival TTS Use Better Voices

Earlier this year, I wrote about project Apricot, an open source game that is currently under development using Blender and the Crystal Space game engine. This isn't the only project that the Blender Institute has been funding recently. Big Buck Bunny, a completely open source animated film, was released at the end of May. It's an impressive case study for what can now be done on the Blender platform.

This Open movie project had as main targets:

• Developing tools in Blender for editing and rendering hair, fur or grass
• Improve character animation tools for cartoonish motion and deformation
• Test Blender with giant outdoor environments, with large grassy fields and many trees with leaves
• Further validate Blender as a professional animation creation suite

And secondary:

• Create a great and good looking animation short, licensed freely as open content
• Provide content for other artists to learn from or to re-use, including documentation and tutorials

And of course: Have lots of fun!

I recognized a few of the film's characters from some of the demos that have been released in the Apricot game development site. The beauty of open source is that a lot of these assets can be shared between projects. There's also something to be said for a development culture that embraces documentation and information sharing. Take this "bunny rig" character animation control demonstration, for example:

The Blender community has already been really good with program documentation, tutorials and howtos. The development of open source games and films, with all the techniques and artwork that is a part of that process, takes things one step further. Now you also have a chance to learn from the techniques that were used in the making of a larger film project, straight from Blender animation gurus. It's not every day you have an opportunity to download full artwork, scene, and animation assets for an entire film.

Big Buck Bunny
Blender - open source 3D content creation suite
Elephants Dream - the first open movie project, made using Blender

Previously: Open source game development

I usually get all excited about tiny, noiseless, low-power PC hardware, but I have to admit that this 24 core, 186 Gflop render cluster built into an IKEA Helmer cabinet is pretty inspiring. Most cool is that when it's not overburdened and jumping to swap, it's still a reasonably efficient setup for its performance specs:

The most amazing is that this machine just cost as a better standard PC, but has 24 cores that run each at 2.4 Ghz, a total of 48GB ram, and just need 400W of power!! This means that it hardly gets warm, and make less noise then my desktop pc.

Render jobs that took all night, now gets done in 10-12 min.

Janne opted for modifying the Helmer cabinet instead of using standard PC cases because the 6 cases would have cost about as much ass the motherboards and CPUs. Most of the modification involved cutting holes for airflow, power supplies, and cabling, but it looks like the Helmer's drawer dimensions accommodate the ATX motherboards almost perfectly.

I'm not all that familiar with the software behind 3D rendering (anyone care to point us to some howtos?), but Janne is using a batch management system called DrQueue that looks quite useful for a lot of distributed applications. It takes care of distributing jobs between the clsuter's nodes, allowing you to manage and monitor each of the nodes remotely from a central interface. Pretty cool stuff.

Helmer render cluster
DrQueue

One of the more interesting recent news items is the announcement of Apricot, a new open source game development effort that is promising to produce a complete 3D game and development/production stack by the end of July 08.

The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together. It is not only the purpose to make a compelling 3D game experience, but especially to improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions.

I've only monkeyed with Crystal Space and Blender in the past, but I'm really impressed to see how far both of these applications have come and how they are now able to integrate with each other. There's a plugin for Blender called blender2crystal which makes it possible to develop maps and characters within the Blender 3D modeler, then export those models (including their physics and animation properties) into scriptable entities that can be used directly in the Crystal Space 3D engine. Tying the functionality of these two applications together is such a good move. Hopefully Apricot will help develop a solid model and some best practices for producing an entire game using these two tools.

If you can't wait until July to start digging through the Apricot code, there are several demos that have been made using Blender and Crystal Space that you should check out. The general outline is that you develop your game's 3D artwork within Blender, use Crystal Space as the underlying 3D engine, and then write your game logic in Python scripts which can control the underlying 3D engine via the CEL (Crystal Entity Layer) API.

Resources:
Project Apricot - Link
Crystal Space (3D Engine) - Link
Blender (3D Modeling Tool) - Link
CEL (Python Scripting for Crystal Space) - Link
blender2crystal - Link
Blender 3D: Noob to Pro WikiBook - Link

Steve Anderson wrote in about an underused feature of our favorite open source video player, VLC.

I discovered yesterday that the wonderful VLC media player has the ability not only to mount a DVD directory that's been ripped to the hard drive, but also to play a .iso image of a DVD. Seeing as I've been using it for ages without knowing this was possible, I figured a lot of other people would be ignorant to this feature!

Maybe you want to test an ISO that you've created before burning it to a disk. Perhaps you'd like to store your DVDs to your harddisk without transcoding them, retaining all the menus and special features. Using VLC, you should be able to do either by entering a "dvd:" url in the Open dialog box.

Example URLs to Open and play a DVD ISO:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/dvdimage.iso

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdimages/dvdimage.iso

Example URLs to Open and play a ripped DVD folder:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/DVDFOLDER

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdcopies/DVDFOLDER

Resources:
VLC DVD Trick - Link
Get VLC - Link

It's still Alpha, but raop_play is an Airport Express client player that will allow you to send audio files, including http streams, to your Airport Express.

Better yet, there's an ALSA driver included with the package, which will make your Airport Express look just like a second audio output device. Once that's set up, you can just configure your preferred music applications to send audio straight to the ALSA raop device. How cool is that?

Apple Airport Express Client Player - Link

Related:
Stream Music to Airport Express Without iTunes - Link

One of its cooler features is that it's capable of transcoding your music files on-the-fly to a format that's playable by your iTunes client. So if you've been building up a huge OGG or FLAC library, Firefly will let iTunes know that these songs are available and it will automatically convert them into a format that can be played on the client.

Links:

• Firefly Media Server
• Firefly/mt-daapd Wiki - quick-start guides for serveral OSs here
• Running Firefly on AppleTV

To make the most of your ripped analogs, you'll need to go a little further than just recording the audio with your sound card. There's the whole process of normalizing and splitting tracks into seperate files, of course, but it's also not a bad idea to make multiple encodings so you can have both mp3 playback and a lossless archival copy. Then there's file naming and ID3 tags to think about...

Luckily, you can do all of the above with free software. There are even tools to make the tagging and naming step as simple as possible. Now, there's still work involved, but think how slick you'll look when you're lugging an iPod instead of that other portable audio device.

Ripping Vinyl with GNU/Linux -Link.

If you have a dual-headed nVidia or ATI card, the binary-only TwinView and BigDesktop drivers (respectively) will probably perform well, but if you don't fall into either of these camps, there are still options available.

Xinerama is a standard X extension which will work with just about anything, but you give up that ability to do OpenGL direct rendering on the second screen. For many uses, this may not even be an issue. If you need the 3d support on both monitors, however, a subset of open source drivers are supported by the MergedFB driver, which does support 3D direct rendering on both screens.

Check out the dual monitor howto on the Ubuntu Forums. It covers all four options and should be relevant for any current Linux distro -Link.