Christian Schaller

Thought I should let the world now we have a new employee at Collabora Multimedia. I think most of you know him already as Sebastian Dröge is one of the biggest patch reviews and bug fixers in the GStreamer community already. While Sebastian will be helping out with some of our internal projects we also plan on letting Sebastian continue his great community work. In fact the first assignment we have given him is simply to try to help out with some hard bugs thats been troubling Jokosher for a long time. So a big welcome to Collabora Sebastian, and an especially big thanks for starting your new job by taking GStreamer once again out of the top 10 bugzilla list

Currently sitting at the X Developers Summit at the Googleplex waiting for some time to pass before getting on the airplane this evening. X Development isn’t exactly what interests me mostly, but there has been some movements in terms of thinking about multimedia support issues. David Schleef did a talk here yesterday where he talked about colour handling. For a lot of Linux users, especially in the content creation industry, the lack of good colourspace correction support is a big issue.

Earlier this week I was at the CE Linux Forum meeting doing a talk about GStreamer. Talk ended up taking quite a lot less time than what I had expected it would, but still got a lot of nice feedback on it afterwards.

Bought myself one of these noise reduction headsets while here, so I am looking forward to testing out how well they actually work on my flight back to the UK.

Only thing I wish now is that I could blog about the two little ’secret’ GStreamer projects that Edward and David Schleef are working on

Been in the US for about a week now together with Wim. Our first stop was the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas. It was a nice conference and I got to talk to a lot of people in and around the linux desktop and embedded linux. Was happy to learn how many people, especially in the embedded sector, who where aware of Collabora and our expertise around GStreamer and Telepathy.

Once the collaboration summit was over Wim and I flew up to San Fransisco and attended a meeting at Mozilla Corporation discussing how to improve the story of embedding the Mozilla engine on embedded devices. With the improvements done for Firefox 3 the current Mozilla engine kicks ass in terms of speed and memory usage, the stats they showed for running Firefox on ARM where absolutely amazing. So if their plans for a reasonably stable embedding API comes together I can see great things for mozilla/firefox in the embedded space. At Collabora we have already been helping customers with both Webkit and Mozilla work so far and it will be interesting to see which of these two engines we will end up helping our business partners integrate on their devices the most going forward.

Currently attending LUGRadio Live USA, which is an attempt at moving the LUGRadio conference concept to the US. Working out pretty well so far, although troublesome US regulations have cut away the customary beer sale at the venue. David Schleef did a lightning talk here yesterday about Dirac and the room was packed full with people, so I was very happy to see the interest around Dirac. The early buzz is just amazing. David’s Dirac talk wasn’t the only GStreamer related talk at the conference, Aaron Bockover did a nice presentation about Banshee which is progressing really nicely. I need to grab latest SVN when I get back home to test out the new video support and the super fast song database. Later today there will be a Songbird talk which I am also looking forward too. With their recent switch to GStreamer across all platforms and Mike Smith starting work there on Monday, to be their resident GStreamer expert, I think Songbird is going to be absolutely rocking.

Wim will be travelling back to Europe this afternoon as he is needed onsite at a customer site, personally I will stay another 5 days here in the bay area as there are some more open source conferences being organized which I wanted to attend. For instance I hope to be able to stop by the X Developers summit before I leave to hear about the plans Keith Packard talked about in Austin in regards to XvMC for instance. Seems media playback is a growing concern for the X hackers in terms of their priorities.

Songbird hacker Steve Krulewitz posted a blog entry yesterday outlining the progress made on using GStreamer for the Songbird music player and browser not only on Linux/Unix, but also on Windows and MacOS X.Collabora’s very own Edward Hervey has been spending the last Month in San Francisco, working with steve on getting everything going. As you see in the screen shots posted by Steve in his blog, the native codec wrappers are up and running fine, and Songbird even added a nice about:gstreamer URI for the Songbird browser, just wish all browsers had that So be sure to check out the blog entry from Steve.

I was also very excited to see Aaron Bockovers blog entry of having added video support to Banshee. Great stuff Aaron!