I am back home for about a day today after spending a week in Prague for the GStreamer Conference and LinuxCon Europe.
Had an absolute blast and I am really happy the GStreamer Conference again turned out to be a big success. A big thanks to the platinum sponsor Collabora, and the two silver sponsors Fluendo and Google who made it all possible. Also a big thanks to Ubicast who was there onsite recording all talks. They aim to have all the talks online within a Month.
While I had to run a bit back and forth to make sure things was running smoothly, I did get to some very interesting talks, like Monty Montgomery from Xiph.org talking about the new Opus audio codec they are working on with the IETF and the strategies they are working on to fend of bogus patent claims.
On a related note I saw that Apple released their lossless audio codec ALAC as free software under the Apache license. Always nice to see such things even if ALAC for the most part has failed to make any headway against the already free FLAC codec. If Apple now would join the effort around WebM things would really start looking great in the codec space.
We did a Collabora booth during the LinuxCon and Embedded Linux days that followed the GStreamer Conference. Our demos showcasing a HTML5 video editing UI using GStreamer and the GStreamer Editing Services and video conferencing using Telepathy through HTML5 was a great success and our big screen TV running the Media Explorer media center combined with Telepathy based video conferencing provided us with a steady stream of people to our booth. For those who missed the conference all the tech demos can be grabbed from this Prague-demo Ubuntu PPA.
So as you might imagine I was quite tired by the time Friday was almost done, but thanks to Tim Bird and Sony I got a really nice end to the week as I won a Sony Tablet S through the Elinux Wiki editing competition. The tablet is really nice and it was the first tablet I ever wanted, so winning one was really great. The feature set is really nice with built in DLNA support, it can function as a TV remote and it has support for certain Playstation 1 titles. The ‘folded magazine’ shape makes it really nice to hold and I am going to try to use it as an e-book reader as I fly off to Lahore tomorrow morning for my sister-in-laws wedding.