We had a tropical night in Oslo last night, the weather is just smashing these days. Days as these I do enjoy owning a sailboat :)

Fun stuff happening on the GStreamer front.
Ronald Bultje has just commited a Matroska demuxer and is currently working hard on libcolorspace. A Matroska muxer is also on his agenda. Most of this work his is allowed to do as part of his current job which is cool.

There is also a major software company considering to use GStreamer in the flagship product. They have currently mainly done windows software altough clones of their products exist on both Mac and Linux/Unix so their first action would be to port GStreamer to Windows, which would be a nice contribution. But I think the major advantage of them using GStreamer would be the huge increase in mindshare the project would get, in fact I think being able to announce it would firmly cement GStreamer as the de-facto multimedia layer on Unix.

Anyway they are still exploring their options, but I feel optimistic about the whole deal.

Personally I am currently working on creating a standalone package with the monkeys audio plugin and library. We decided to pull it out of the main package due licensing concerns, but since the plugin is done and ready including a full port of the library from windows and a contributed PPC port I feel it would a shame to just let it rott away in the CVS attic.
Making it a standalone package will let people who want it get it, yet at the same time keep software with a stupid license out of our core modules. In fact we have with the help of Brian Cameron been continuing the license cleanup of GStreamer core modules with the goal of making sure that all code in there is LGPL. All non-LGPL code including GPL code we want to push into either separate libraries or at least put in a special directory. This way people who want to make plugins can feel sure that no matter which plugin they use as their template/starting point for their own plugin it has a LGPL license.

Another great piece of news is that someone might
be paid for working part-time on GStreamer soon. dolphy wants to use GStreamer as the framework for the software his company provides as part of their service.

On the SVG front I have slowly started to experiment with cascading stylesheets now. Anyone who have look at Metacity know that it has a SVG like XML language it uses for configuration. It allows for different codes like gtk:[SELECTED] used for color codes. Our plan is to support those kinda color codes in the CSS stylesheets too, through adding support for them in our CSS library libcroco my by dodji. That way the SVG’s are still just using valid XML yet they can be made to color intergrate with the GTK+ theme used. In the same way non-pixmap Metacity themes does. Anyway that is the second step and probably a couple of months away. First step is actually getting the CSS stylesheets with standard color codes working, which they in theory does, but since nobody has actually tested it before it probably has some smaller issues that needs solving.