Have been working a lot on the Flumotion manual over the last few days (flumotion-doc in svn for those interested). Those into this will know that when you encode a stream or file with many formats which are variable bitrate formats you can choose to encode in a specific bitrate (more predictable for streaming) or encode towards a specific quality level which keeps the image looking better but the stream could at times grow in size which of course often is problematic if you are streaming over the web.

Anyway you set this by typing in a number either for the fixed bitrate your want or the quality you want. But of course people without a lot of experience in the field would have no idea what bitrate or quality number they want for their theora video (myself included). So I figured trying to relate the quality and bitrate settings to stuff like DVD or VHS in the manual might be an idea. Well easier said than done, first of all there are no objective ways to measure this and secondly few if any people seemed to have a clear idea on what values would relate to what qualities. That you have to add resolution into the equation too doesn’t exactly make it easier. I found one test online comparing sound quality between codecs on various bitrates, but it only convinced me that my plan was much easier to come up with than execute.

So instead I ended up explaining the difference between setting the bitrate and setting the quality and suggest the person streaming do some tests to find a level that fit their demands :)

jdahlin have been doing some cool work lately on Flumotion getting it to autodetect the available devices on each worker. Which means that if you install flumotion workers on 2-3 machines each with different kind of video/audio input devices and then bring up the flumotion wizard it will give you a selection of devices based on what is available on the machine of the worker in question :) nifty!

Also started to see some really good progress on some work we contracted out and sent out a second contract for our second contract asignment. Since it is part of my job to handle them it feels very good when things seems to work out smoothly. Soon starting some work where we are the ones being contracted so I guess we will know how it feels at both sides of the table :)

New release of the server out yesterday. Glad to see that the issues reported where either known or small. Which means it will be easier to move ahead instead of being ‘stuck’ where we currently are we the server in order to fix basic issues. Thomas and Johan have been doing some fantastic work on the server so far.