Just noticed today that the FSF managed to get Stephen Fry to make a video in celebration of the 25th Anniversary of the FSF. Been a fan of Stephen for a long time, ever since I first saw him in Blackadder many years ago, so it is cool to see him doing this sort of promo for free software. Been aware that Stephen Fry has advocated free software in his blog for some time, but it is still nice to see such direct interaction with the community. The video is available in Ogg format using Theora video and Vorbis audio, which also makes me happy. I even ended up emailing them saying I be happy to convert their source material into a HD Dirac+Vorbis version if they are interested. Every time I see stuff being published in free formats it makes me feel very good about the work we are doing here at Collabora and the goals we have set for ourselves.
Dirac Everywhere
On the topic of Dirac there are a lot of fun stuff happening. One thing I failed to mention before, is that there is a Dirac Quicktime component available now. Still alpha quality, but part of the effort done to reach out to a wide a community as possible with Dirac. There has also been work happening on wider Dirac support in GStreamer and integrating that support better into GStreamer. For instance Thiago merged a patch from David Schleef to add Dirac support to the new quicktime muxer Thiago created as part of the summer of code. It already works well, but we need to do a little Pitivi hacking to enable it there. Edward hopes to get at that before the weekend. Finally Sebastian Dröge merged the transport stream muxer library and plugin into gst-plugins-bad, which also can mux Dirac video (the library used to be hosted on the old Dirac website). Sebastian will also be working on making sure that muxer can create some Playstation 3 friendly files going forward.
Also thanks to Fluendo and Zaheer we know have a working transport stream demuxer in gst-plugins-bad which of course also handles Dirac.
Centralising GStreamer plugins
On the back of this I think we will try to do a bigger effort to merge some of the external plugin repositories into GStreamer proper. For instance at Collabora we got the gst-plugins-farsight module which should have its plugins moved over. Our latest team member Mark Nauwelaerts got his GEntrans plugins which should also move over. Having a central set of repositories and plugins makes them easier to find for everyone and will also increase the ease of maintenance. And of course reduce the risk of people doing something which someone else has already done.