I just sent out an email with the latest update on the GStreamer Conference 2011. Mostly to let people know there is an early bird registration fee for signing up to the conference before 24th of September.
I also updated the topics list to reflect some of the talks that will be held this year, even if we are not ready to release the full schedule yet, still some details that needs to be sorted for that.
Anyway, hoping to see as many of you as possible in Prague in October 
Been some discussion recently about Novacut, a open source non-linear video editor project which is trying to raise some money through kickstarter, a crowd sourcing system.
Personally I think that some of the criticism against Novacut and their effort is fair. It does seem extremely ambitious and it hard to reconcile the money requested and the ambitions of the project. That said I am not as sceptical to the endeavour as some, I even pledged some money to it in fact.
The thing is, a lot of open source projects starts out a bit naive about the challenges ahead of them, and frankly if they had known all the problems facing them when starting out, they would never had succeeded. For instance, if we had known up front it would take us 10 years to get GStreamer to where it is today I don’t think we would have ever started.
The other factor that plays on my mind is that even if they ‘fail’, they might be a great success. The thing is they plan on building Novacut on top of GStreamer and GNonlin, the same foundation as PiTiVi. As part of this process I am sure they will find and fix bugs in GStreamer and GNonlin and they will add new features to GStreamer and GNonlin. So even if ‘Novacut’ itself fails to take off, a lot of the work they will be doing will directly benefit GStreamer applications in general and probably PiTiVi especially. And who knows, even if ‘Novacut the application’ fails to ever reach a useable state, maybe ‘Novacut the idea’ will be alive and kicking inside PiTiVi in a year or two.
One could argue that Novacut should be done as a PiTiVi extension from the beginning, and I might agree, but to me, saying no to Novacut for not being a PiTiVi patch or extension is saying no to something good because you want to wait for something utopian.
This week the Collabora office has been filled with a great group of people trying to make sure the instant messaging in GNOME Shell among other things works nicely. For those of us who use GNOME shell, like with latest Fedora, the integration into the shell is quite nice, but it also has some irritating behavioural issues. To resolve these issues some of our top Collabora coders working on Empathy and Telepathy has joined forces with coders from Red Hat, Intel and the community who work on messaging and/or the GNOME shell, to iron out the remaining issues and define any new APIs that are needed. The full agenda and attendee list can be found on the IM hackfest page.
To give you all an idea of the event I took this photo of the group sitting in our meeting room today:
Hackfest at Collabora office
For day to day reporting I suggest following the blog of Bastien Nocera who has been making daily posts from the hackfest. You would also want to read the update from the hackfest from Collaboras own Danielle Madeley.
GStreamer maintainer and code god Wim Taymans just posted an update on the the progress of GStreamer 0.11 to the GStreamer development mailing list. For those interested in learning about the new features coming in GStreamer 1.0 this email (along with the previous update) is must read material.
In addition to the updates on the core coding work and important notice from Wim in his email is that the very first 0.11.x release will happen this week, so that you have a snapshot release to start playing with. GStreamer 1.0 is moving forward at a fast pace, so be prepared
Hopefully we can do a GStreamer 1.0 release part at the GStreamer Conference 2011!
Just sent out this little email with some updates on the GStreamer 2011 Conference. Planning is progressing and a sponsorship leaflet is now available for those interested in sponsoring the conference. The call for paper deadline is also slowly but surely approaching, so anyone who wants to do a talk please send in an abstract before the 1st of July this year.
For everyone else, just register for the conference and set aside October for GStreamer and Prague As always details can be found on the GStreamer Conference 2011 website.
For those who don’t know yet Rygel is an open source implementation of DLNA, a standard for ensuring interoperability between the different media devices on your home LAN. Rygel was started some years ago by my friend Zeeshan Ali and is being used in Meego and GNOME among others. We have been working on Rygel for some time now and thus Collaboras own Luis de Bethencourt did a talk at the recent Meego Summit in San Fransisco. It is an interesting talk about the current state of Rygel and how a lot of the Rygel features are implemented using GStreamer. So if you are interested in the future of interoperable devices check out Luis talk at the Meego website. Seek about 3.5 minute into the talk as they haven’t edited the videos it seems so you get a lot of uninteresting preparation before the talk starts.
I am really happy to see how the new 0.14 version of PiTiVi is garnering so much positive attention. A lot of tweets seen and quite a few people blogging about this recent release, like this entry on omgUbuntu or this entry on Ubuntu corner or this little blurb on Phoronix.
A lot of people here at Collabora are involved with PiTiVi development as time allows and while we for a long while felt that we had a forest of features we could enable in PiTiVi, we seemed to be stuck with a certain feature set for a long while, as we kept going back to maturing the under laying GStreamer plugins and features that we wanted for PiTiVi. I think we have rounded a corner and with a total of 4 Google Summer of Code projects underway around PiTiVi we should be ensured that PiTiVi continues to develop quickly, as the PiTiVi team continue to both stabilize the current feature set and add new ones.
My hope is that PiTiVi will soon be packaged by every major distribution and be seen as a core part of the linux desktop and something that everyone uses when they need to edit their holiday movies or make small projects for school or work.
Hmm, remdinds me need to make sure we got a nice PiTiVi talk at the GStreamer Conference this year
Btw, for those interested in getting involved with PiTiVi, the best place to meet the community and get involved in joining the #pitivi channel on irc.freenode.net.
Updated my own and my wifes computers yesterday to latest Fedora version, which included an upgrade to GNOME 3. Have to say I am quite impressed with it so far, I mean it is definitely a .0 release with a lot of little issues (like not remembering how to deal with my dual screen setup at work). But apart from that it feels pretty sweet, especially like the messaging integration into the desktop. It still got quite a few issues though, but here at Collabora we now have Jonny Lamb and Guillame Desmottes helping out with trying to polish it up.
The biggest change I found that was that of the attitude of my wife, she went from “linux sucks, why do I have to use this stuff” to “this is actually quite cool”.
So a big congrats to the GNOME 3 team for a wonderful release! I am looking forward to seeing how it develops in the coming Months.
I am generally impressed by all the nice work being done across a lot of projects these days, helping to make sure we have a really powerful and nicely integrated platform. It wasn’t that long ago the linux desktop (and server for that matter) felt like a taped together collection of stuff, but for each new release it seems the ease of use and polish increase, with good integration happening between all major layers. Efforts to drain the swamp, like systemd, does make a huge difference over time and draws us ever closer to the goal set when GNOME 2 was being created, remove the need to have configure options in the user interface to make the system ‘work’. If you need to enter a configuration menu to have basic functionality work, then that is a bug, not a feature.
I think there has been a general change in philosophy happening over the last 5-6 years, where we moved from everyone trying to fix the world in their own corner, to people instead trying to work together. For instance in GStreamer we have moved from trying to fix the problem by supporting every sound system under the sun, and instead try to work closely with the best solution out there to actually solve the problems people have, which is why people like GStreamer maintainer Wim Taymans have also been contributing to Pulse Audio over the last year. Enabling people to switch backends between ALSA, OSS, Sun Audio or Pulse Audio isn’t a solution, is it exposing a bug. So while the plugins supporting all those systems are still there of course, as they are useful for people in various situations, I think our thinking now is that when we find an issue that is best solved in Pulse Audio, as opposed to GStreamer, we solve it in Pulse Audio, instead of trying to make a second rate solution in GStreamer itself. And if there is a feature missing in Pulse Audio the solution is not to add an option in the user interface to ALSA, it is to add the feature to Pulse Audio. There are of course still cases where we need to support multiple plugins offering the same functionality of course, codecs being the best example, but if we want to make the open source ecosystem better we need to all focus on making things work well without needing the user to reconfigure which libraries and backends they use for a given task.
Seeing all this other great efforts move forward to plug the remaining holes I am also happy to say that by the end of the year we should have GStreamer 1.0 out the door, Wim Taymans is putting the foundations together as we speak. It should provide a lot of great improvements to GStreamer, like good solutions for handling 3D video for instance, but also provide a lot of speed improvements which will be especially useful for embedded setups (allthough I haven’t met a desktop user so far who hates getting faster software either.)
The website announcing this years GStreamer Conference 2011 is up. I am really looking forward to this years event due to the great fun last years event in Cambridge was. This year we will host the conference in Prague in the Czech Republic, a city I long wanted to visit and now I finally got a great excuse to do so.
For those who missed out on last years conference I think it is safe to say it turned out to be a wonderful place to learn about latest developments in the GStreamer community and hear about some of the challenges and solutions being used when using GStreamer in various devices and projects. This year Wim Taymans will be able to present on all the progress being made on GStreamer 1.0 and let us all know how things are looking in terms of setting a final release date
I moved last years conference page to a new permanent GStreamer Conference 2010 site, I recommend checking out that site for links to videos of all of the talks last year if you are unsure about if the GStreamer Conference is for you. This year we are co-hosting with 3 other conferences, the Linux Kernel Summit, the Embedded Linux Conference Europe and finally LinuxCon Europe, so there should be something for everyone.
Axis and GStreamer
Axis got a new camera out these days called the Axis P3301. Axis is well known for having what are probably the best network cameras on the market and this new beauty is especially nice as it uses GStreamer internally. It also supports Avahi, so you can get access to its services through avahi enabled applications, hopefully a feature we can get supported in Totem so you get access to these kind of cameras in your network very easily. Wim got gifted one of these by Axis while at their office in Sweden, which we got up and running at the Collabora Multimedia office now. Axis also got a video server, the AXIS Q7401 which also use GStreamer internally.
Jokosher
Jokosher is making great strides forward currently too. They did their 0.10 release a little over a Month ago and today Peteris Krisjanis told me that they just landed support for multichannel soundcards, which has been a major missing feature for a lot of potential Jokosher users. The mutichanel code is currently hosted in this branch on launchpad, but it will of course move into head once it gets stabilized.
Pitivi
Things are also moving forward with the Pitivi video editor these days. Edward recently merged the two Google Summer of Code projects that had been happening over the summer and also switched to the so called advanced timeline view to be the default in Pitivi. Thanks to Serat’s work there is now a structure in place in Pitivi for handling live sources, like webcams or DV cameras for instance. The simple timeline feature has also been dropped now as it turned out to be a lot less useful than we originally envisioned. So going forward the focus will be on making the previously named ‘advanced’ timeline userfriendly and easy to use instead. We will have some further cool Pitivi related announcements coming soon
Collabora Multimedia
We had our first ever full meeting of the Collabora Multimedia division over the last few days in Barcelona. It was the first time Wim, Edward, Tim, Mark, Sebastian and myself where all together. It was both a social event to get to know eachother, but also a good chance to discuss various technical issues. For instance Tim and Edward managed to solve a painful python threading issue we have been experiencing in a current project we have been doing together with Canonical and the BBC, which is writing a Totem plugin to enable viewing of various BBC content easily through Totem (as mentioned in the Ubuntu beta release notes. The plan is to push this plug-in upstream also, so that everyone using Totem can get it.
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