Christian Schaller

We just added a separate meeting room to our office this week. Well partly added as the wall separating it from the rest of the office is not yet in place. The meeting room is part of a 30% increase in our office space which we needed due to the rapid growth of the company currently. I couldn’t help but smile looking over at the meeting table counting 13 people around it. It was not long ago we didn’t have 13 people in the company as a whole and now we have that many people in a meeting for one of our 3 departments. Things are sure changing fast, even though it doesn’t feel that long since I came in as employee number 4. When I started the only thing we had was an early version of Flumotion painfully developed using a woobly GStreamer 0.8.

Today we have a rock solid GStreamer 0.10 in place, a very advanced streaming platform using Flumotion, a blooming codec licensing business, an impresive array of high profile customers for our GStreamer consulting business and a highly anticipated Elisa media center under development. Our DVD player which was just a vague idea when I started is taking shape, with Jan adding DVD angle support just yesterday. Projects such as Pitivi is coming into is own and will probably be paying its own way starting next year.

Schrodinger, the Dirac video codec implementation we have been doing together with the BBC is nearing completion and the interest for it is very tanglible.
At the same time the work on adding RTP support to Vorbis and Theora is coming together also with working streaming being done between Flumotion and Totem. Hopefully the final stamp of approval from the IETF will be in soon so we can announce that effort to the world.

Thanks to our collaboration with the guys at Songbird, GStreamer is today fully functional for playback also on Windows and MacOSX. It feels great to finally be able to say that GStreamer is not only portable in theory, but it is actually ported. The number of people testing and providing feedback on Windows and Mac is also very good, and due to our agreement with the Songbird developers we can promise even more goodies to come in the future.

The initial heavy lifting of creating GStreamer 0.9/0.10 was done by Wim almost alone, and I know he was frustrated at times during that process that nobody else contributed. But things change of course and
today we are struggling to keep up with the steady inflow of patches.
New community members have come in and a host of fantastic applications have started popping up. I remember having arguments about GStreamer’s viability for doing a range of applications, but today thanks to projects such as Buzztard, Jokosher,Seamless, Pitivi, Flumotion, Elisa and Freevo we don’t normally have to engange in such discussions anymore ,because people are already doing them.

So while some days feel like a neverending series of problems and challenges to solve, the medicine seems to be to take a step back and look at all the great things we have achieved so far. So a big thanks to everyone at Fluendo for making the last few years such a blast and a big thank you to everyone in the GStreamer community for their incredible effort in pushing both the framework and application collection rapidly forward.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 12:46 pm and is filed under Fluendo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.