Christian Schaller

So as of today Wim Taymans, Edward Hervey and myself are no longer working for Fluendo. The same goes for Tim Muller who has been working as a contractor for Fluendo for a long time now. The reasons for us deciding to leave are many, but essentially I guess the time had come when we felt our prospects outside Fluendo were better than the ones offered inside. Our exact plans are not set in stone yet, but one likely outcome is that we set up our own company doing various kind of software and services around GStreamer, more on that in the coming weeks.

So I have been spending quite a few evenings and hours recently working with Frank Scholz on sorting out the compatability issues between Coherence and the Playstation 3. The playstation 3 being a DLNA device turned out to be not very keen on communicating with systems only doing the ‘upnp a/v’ specification. So I gave Frank ssh access to my home machine and he tested various changes to coherence while I watched how my PS3 reacted to those changes.

It took us quite some time, but in the end we managed to get things working very well. When we reviewed our progress so far we very pretty happy with our progress. I was able to play mp3 songs, view photos both stored locally on my laptop and from Flickr. And finally we also got MPEG2 video playing fine. We still need to do more testing though to make sure all supported formats play well, currently that should include AC3 audio, WMA audio and MPEG4 video at least.

The automatic transcoding also needs more effort to work. But all in all this looks quite good currently and while we tested with the coherence test server all these features (and more) should automatically work in Elisa.

We updated all the plugins in the webshop over the last few days with newer, faster, better versions. So if you have purchased our plugins just log into your account on shop.fluendo.com and ‘view’ your order. You will see a download link inside which will let you download the updated package. Especially the Windows Media packages contains a lot of improvements.

Big new release of Schrödinger

Just cut the 0.6.0 release of Schrodinger, our implementation of the Dirac video codec. This is a major milestone release as it should be fully bitstream compliant. This means that if you use Schrodinger to encode a Dirac file today you should be able to decode it with any compliant decoder in the future.
Of course you should wait for the 0.7.0 release at least before doing a major migration of your media collection as we might still have bugs causing us to not be 100% compliant. Anyway getting this release out is a big step forward for the project, and while there are still many improvements we want to see happen, it at least brings Schrodinger into the realm of being useful outside pure testing scenarios. Tim has also promised a new release of Thoggen soon with experimental Dirac support using Schrodinger.