GStreamer Hackfest in Milan

As those of you following the GStreamer development mailing list or the GStreamer Google Plus profile know, we have been having a GStreamer hackfest in Milan over the last few days. We have 17 people here, all hammering away at our laptops or discussing various technical challenges sitting at a nice place called the Milan Hub.

A lot of progress has been made during these days with some highlights including work on fixing the use of Gnonlin with GStreamer 1.0, which is a prerequisite for getting PiTiVi and Jokosher running with GStreamer 1.0. Jeff Fortin, Thibault Saunier, Nicolas Dufresne, Edward Hervey, Peteris Krishanis and Emanuele Aina has all been helping out with this in addition to fixing various other issues in PiTiVi and Jokosher.

Sebastian Dröge has put a lot of work during the hackfest into providing the basic building blocks for doing hardware codecs nicely in GStreamer, and Víctor Jáquez has been working on making VAAPI work well using these building blocks, with the plan among other things to make sure you have hardware accelerated decoding working with WebKit. In that regards Philippe Normand has spent the hackfest investigating and improving various bits of the GStreamer backend in Webkit, like improving the on-disk buffering method used. Also in terms of hardware codec support Edward Hervey also found a bit of time to work a little on the VDPAU plugins.

Speaking of web browsers Alessandro Decina has been working on porting Firefox to GStreamer 1.0, he has also been our local host making sure we have found places to eat lunch and dinner that where able to host our big group. So a big thank you to Alessandro for this.

Wim Taymans has been working on properly dealing with chroma keying in GStreamer, improving picture quality significantly in some cases, in addition to being constantly barraged with questions and discussions about various enhancements, bugs and other challenges.

Edward Hervey has in addition to help out with GNonlin also been working on improvements in our DVB support and improving encodebin so that you can now request a named profile when requesting pads, the last item being a crucial piece in terms of allowing me to proceed with Transmageddons multistream support.

Stefan Sauer spent time on fixing various bugs in the GStreamer 1.0 port of Buzztard and a first stab at designing a tracing framework for GStreamer.

Arun Raghavan was working on various bugs related to Pulse Audio and GStreamer and also implemented a SBC RTP depayloader element for GStreamer.

Tim-Philipp Müller has been working on implementing a stream selection flag in order for GStreamer player to be able to follow any in-file hints about which streams to default to or to not default to for that matter.

As for myself I been mostly working on Transmageddon trying to get the multistream and DVD support working. Thanks to some crucial bugfixes from Edward Hervey and Wim Taymans I was able to make good progress and I have ripped my first DVD with Transmageddon now. There is still a lot of work that needs doing, both in terms of presentation, features and general robustness, but I am very pleased by the progress made.

transmageddon1
Title selection screen, needs a bit more polish, but getting there.

Transmageddon screenshot ripping a DVD
As you see above you can now choose to transcode to different codecs for each sound stream, or drop the streams you don’t care about. The main usecase for different codecs is to you a different codecs for surround sound as opposed to stereo or mono streams.

A big thank you to Collabora and Fluendo for sponsoring us with dinner during the hackfest.

Also a big thank you to Collabora, Fluendo, Google, Igalia, Red Hat and Spotify for letting their employees attend the hackfest.

Taking on a new job at Red Hat

So I assume most of you have read Jonathan Blanfords blog post about leaving Red Hat and me taking over for him as head of the Red Hat desktop team. First of all I would like to thank Jonathan for both his contributions to GNOME and Red Hat, but also for being a good friend for over a decade now. Luckily Linux is also a major piece of his new job, so I am certain we have not seen the last of Jonathan in the community.

For the outside observer I wouldn’t expect any immediate visible changes to happen as part of this transition. My job is to follow up on the many great initiatives that Jonathan started here together with the rest of the team. One major piece I will be tackling is making sure we in the Red Hat desktop team work even closer with the Fedora community to bring forth some great improvements to Fedora and created an even more integrated and seamless experience for those wanting to use the Fedora desktop. This ranges from working with the Fedora team on a new software installer to working on getting Wayland ready for deployment in Fedora. Apart from that we will of course continue to work with the GNOME community on pushing GNOME 3 forward. I strongly recommend following Matthias Clasens blog to get the latest and greatest news on our efforts around GNOME 3.

I hope to post to my blog more frequently going forward to highlight exciting developments the many great projects the Red Hat Desktop team contribute to, like GNOME, LibreOffice, Firefox, Spice, Evolution, X Window/Wayland and more.