Category Archives: GNOME

GStreamer Conference 2011 speakers announced

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We put up the full schedule today for the GStreamer Conference 2011. I am very excited about the agenda this year and all the great talks we got lined up. I am especially happy that the effort to reach out to people outside the immediate GStreamer community has paid off, giving us exciting talks from John Luther and Matt Frost of WebM fame, the legendary Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org and Arun Raghavan speaking about Pulse Audio. This of course in addition to all our great GStreamer talks like Wim Taymans speaking about GStreamer 1.0.

Another talk I am especially excited about is the talk by Joshua Doe and Stephen Burks who works for the US Army RDECOM CERDEC NVESD unit(just rolls of the tongue doesn’t it :). Who will talk about their use of GStreamer. I know that there are quite a few cases in the military world where GStreamer is used, so I think this talk can be an interesting window into that world, which due to its high security nature often can be quite low profile even when things are not directly secret.

A big thanks you to our sponsors this year Collabora, Fluendo, Google and UbiCast. Without their support it would not have been possible to put this event together.

Make sure to register for this years GStreamer Conference before the 24th of September in order to get the early bird fee. Looking forward to seeing you all there!

And if you are still not 100% sure you will attend, make sure to look at the schedule and speakers overview, because I am sure they will convince you to come :)

Collabora at the Desktop Summit

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So like a lot of people I am going to the Desktop Summit this year. And I am not alone there from Collabora as usual, in fact there is quite a few talks during the conference by Collaborans. Having compiled this information anyway I figured that I should put it up here too, so others interested could get an overview of some of the areas we are involved with here at Collabora.

List of Collabora talks at the Desktop Summit this year in chronological order

Folks: Contact aggregation for Free Software by Travis Reitter.

WebKit Clutter Port Present and Future; WebKitGtk Status and Roadmap to WebKit2 by Gustavo Noronha Silva (Collabora), Martin Robinson (Igalia), Alejandro G. Castro (Igalia)

Improving the quality of video calls on the Free Desktop by Olivier Crête.

Gluing Together Usable Desktop Crypto by Stef Walter.

The Slothful Ways of D-Bus by Will Thompson.

The Semantic Desktop for Application Developers by George Goldberg.

GStreamer 1.0 by Wim Taymans and Edward Hervey.

Jeff Fortin and Edward Hervey will also organize a PiTiVi and gst-editing-services hackfest during the conference.

And finally there is the Collabora party on the 9th of August which of course is going to be best party of the conference :)

First GStreamer 0.11 out, GStreamer 1.0 looming on the horizon

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GStreamer maintainer Wim Taymans just released the first 0.11 development release of GStreamer. The 0.11 development series will lead up to the long awaited GStreamer 1.0 release!

The changes from 0.10.x to 0.11 might seem quite technical and obscure to most, with items such as reworked buffer memory management, arbitrary buffer metadata and integrated bufferpool management being among the advertised features, but all these changes are made to help GStreamer make significant leaps forward in terms of integration with hardware codecs like VAAPI and VDPAU and of course hardware codecs on embedded platforms like ARM for instance the OpenMax IL API. There are also a lot of important performance improvements, which will make applications like Totem and Banshee more snappy to use, but you probably will see the biggest improvements in applications like PiTiVi who relies on more complex pipelines and thus more complex pipeline negotiations. For devices which got more constrained CPU resources, like various embedded systems, these performance gains should also be very noticeable.

At Collabora we are putting a lot of effort towards GStreamer 1.0, most visible through letting Wim put most of his work hours into it, in collaboration with our partners at Texas Instruments. GStreamer is not just another open source project for us at Collabora, it is something we are truly passionate about. The open source software ecosystem can not compete with proprietary systems unless we have a top notch media framework and with GStreamer we are providing exactly that. Ever since the release of GStreamer 0.10 the project has gone from strength to strength, and when 1.0 gets released later this year it will be another major milestone towards world domination :)

For those interested to learn more about GStreamer 1.0 you have two good opportunities coming up, Collabora’s own Wim Taymans and Edward Hervey will be doing a talk about GStreamer 1.0 at the Desktop Summit on 8th of August. And Wim will also be doing a keynote speech about GStreamer 1.0 at the GStreamer Conference 2011 in October. So I hope to see you there.

I am also working on an interview with Wim Taymans about GStreamer 1.0 so if you have any questions you would like me to include, feel free to add them to the comments section of this blog post.

We will also be organizing some 0.11 hackfests online where people like Wim, Tim and Edward will be online to answer porting questions and the community can work together to port all important plugins to 0.11. There is some early stage porting documentation to be found here.

For now, go to the GStreamer website and grab the 0.11 tarballs and give them a spin, and if you have any questions, remember you are always welcome in on irc.freenode.net.

Weekend hacking

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Spent some time this weekend hacking on Transmageddon. Fixed various small bugs and UI issues that I had punted up until now for the UI. For instance with latest git when you create a pure audio file it doesn’t automatically get the suffix .mp3, which is nice in the cases when you are not creating a mp3 file :) And if you put aac into a quicktime container the file gets named .m4a instead of .mov.

Also started looking into the issue of how to handle multiple audio streams in the file being transcoded. Currently all streams gets transcoded to the same chosen format if the container format support its, if the container only supports 1 audio stream you get one by random. This is not ideal :)

Ended up filing this bug with a request for how we can improve the GStreamer API to make handling such things easier for application developers. Discoverer, uridecodebin and encodebin makes a lot of things a lot easier, but for handling files with multiple streams of the same type I think we still need some improvements.

Instant messaging hackfest at Collabora office

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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.

On the path to GStreamer 1.0

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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!

Luis talk on Rygel

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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.

New PiTiVi release getting a lot of positive attention

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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.

OpenOffice vs LibreOffice – the next chapter

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Been seeing with interest the latest moves around Open Office. While a lot of people see it as almost a direct attack on Libre Office, to me personally it seems like a clumsy result of Oracle trying to ditch OpenOffice without frustrating their main OpenOffice business partner, IBM. Due to having the Lotus Symphony suite based on OpenOffice under a special license from Sun/Oracle, I wouldn’t be surprised if switching to the pure LGPL Libre Office seemed painful to them. And thus the idea of an Apache licensed OpenOffice must have seemed endearing.

Personally I hope people stick with LibreOffice and build upon their existing success. Chasing a big company like IBM might seem tempting, but big companies change their mind and change priorities all the time, just look at Nokia, so if you have something viable without a big company involved, stick with it, and let the big company contribute on your terms if they want, as it will then have the ability to stay around even when the big company goes elsewhere.

Sometimes the bleeding edge cuts

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One thing I like with being a Fedora user is that it usually gets me a bleeding edge stuff, but at the same time it tends to be well maintained and tested enough to not break my system. Since a lot of the most important and cool new developments in the Linux world is done by Red Hat engineers they of course are able to bring out quite stable and working versions of the new stuff in Fedora first.

Of course once in a while there are some painful hickups. Gedit had been crashing for me since the upgrade to FC15, so I decided to run a yum upgrade this weekend. It grabbed an updated gedit along with some other stuff. Gedit now seems more stable, but unfortunately a lot of other stuff stopped working. Most critically it seems NetworkManager is down and out, so I had to fall back to the trusty old ‘ifup’ command to get online. Also it seems docking station support got an accidental axe in the back, because if I connect my laptop to the docking station, both screens just go black now.

Seems I am not the only one as I found 708445 in the Red Hat bugzilla for the network manager issue and 708530 for the docking station issue.

Hopefully things will get sorted soon, Red Hat tends to be quite good and getting fixes out fast in these situations, but I guess I once again learned the hard lesson about living on the bleeding edge :)