Christian Schaller

I have known for some time that there was a work being done on improving the sound handling in GNOME, but I somehow missed out on it until today. Decided to test a USB headset and figured I would need to edit a GStreamer pipeline to get Banshee to output to this USB device. Then someone pointed out that there is GNOME sound properties now which I then used and noticed a ‘USB audio’ option having popped up. And it just worked.

So to the authors of gnome sound properties a big thank you from a happy user!

I picked up a copy of the International Herald Tribune today (which is sorta the internationally targeted version of The New Your Times). On the front page these was a small entry called ‘The End User: A revolt against MP3′ pointing to an article inside the paper. The article talks mostly about how increased bandwith and storage is causing a lot of people to look at lossless audio formats for the music collections. While the article mentions that both Apple and Microsoft have such formats available most of the article talks about FLAC and mentions some tools available for creating FLAC files.

The article made me think a bit as I have been pushing for a bundling of a surround sound tuned version of Vorbis with Dirac to create an open source ‘killer combo’. But reading this article, which also mentions that Dolby and DTS are offering lossless codecs for surround, I started thinking that maybe I was thinking of a response to yesterdays challengers, and what should be done is work on surround sound with FLAC and then create a killer bundle of Dirac and FLAC. I mean FLAC is already the leading lossless codec, and while the iPod only supporting ALAC might help make that format relevant, we might have a good chance to build upon the success of FLAC going forward by putting it to use in a wider array of usecases.

One thing I wanted to do for a while, is write up an entry praising this years Summer of Code students working on GStreamer related projects. The success rate of a Summer of Code project is a highly uncertain thing for a variety of reasons including things like overly optimistic time estimates, underestimation of the difficulty in doing the task at hand, bad/missing communication between mentor and student and so on. And of course even in the cases where a student manages to meet the objective goal of the summer project it do not necessarily mean that the upstream project will be able to merge the results without further work.

Anyway, this year things seems to be progressing extremely well with few or no major hickups.

Michael Sheldon have been steadily progressing on integrating Telepathy and Jokosher and his recent screenshots of his progress are truly exiting. Applications taking advantage of the advanced infrastructure that has been built to do some innovative things is something we wanted to see happen for a long time and this one has also been on the blue-sky plans for Jokosher from early on. Some nice screenshots available here and here.

Sebastian Droge have been hacking on improving our infrastructure for doing media editing/manipulating applications as part of his Summer of Code and most of his fixes are already in GStreamer CVS. He is currently working on fixing the long term painful issue of accurate seeking in mp3 files, which has been causing pain and problem for both Pitivi and Jokosher for a long while. Not a highly screenshootable effort, but none the less a very critical one.

Thanks to the incredible work that Brandon Lewis has been doing on Pitivi as part of his Summer of Code we now have cutting in Pitivi which is a major milestone in getting Pitivi to a stage where its actually useful and not only showing a lot of promise. More on that including a screenshot in Edward’s blog.

I guess you all have read Daniel Siegel’s great blog entries outlining the development of Cheese. This photoboot like application just kicks ass and what is more I am sure we will be able to resuse a lot of the work of Cheese in for instance Empathy as that efforts gears up to take on iChat in the blingy chat client space.

Alessandro Decina has also been kicking ass on improving GStreamer’s DVB support, which he is working on for the Freevo project. He is initially focusing on DVB-S, but to make sure those of us viewing DVB-T didn’t get left out in the cold, I bought a DVB card for my own money and sent of to Alessandro

So to sum up, you guys rock!

So I have been spending quite a few evenings and hours recently working with Frank Scholz on sorting out the compatability issues between Coherence and the Playstation 3. The playstation 3 being a DLNA device turned out to be not very keen on communicating with systems only doing the ‘upnp a/v’ specification. So I gave Frank ssh access to my home machine and he tested various changes to coherence while I watched how my PS3 reacted to those changes.

It took us quite some time, but in the end we managed to get things working very well. When we reviewed our progress so far we very pretty happy with our progress. I was able to play mp3 songs, view photos both stored locally on my laptop and from Flickr. And finally we also got MPEG2 video playing fine. We still need to do more testing though to make sure all supported formats play well, currently that should include AC3 audio, WMA audio and MPEG4 video at least.

The automatic transcoding also needs more effort to work. But all in all this looks quite good currently and while we tested with the coherence test server all these features (and more) should automatically work in Elisa.

Due to being asked about it I checked the number of subscribers today to gstreamer-devel mailing list. Turns out we have 723 people subscribed to the list at this point. I don’t know if that is a lot of not as I don’t admin that many other mailing lists, but it seems a respectable number for a development mailing list for a fairly low level library.

Found out the other day on the recently launch Ubuntu Media Center Team and their plans to use Elisa as their primary interface. This is great news indeed and I am going to follow this effort closely. With my recently purchased DVB-T card I very soon need
some media center hardware and software at home

All Sun blocks are not equal

Went to the beach on Sunday and applied the sun block I had bought the day before. My procedure for buying sun block is simple, a) it is a brand I have heard of before and b) it has a factor number between 5 and 10. This has always served me well before, but this time it didn’t work out exactly as expected. While the Hawaiian Tropic sun block did work in terms of not getting me sunburned it had a tiny side effect. It gave my body a metalic glimmer, due to containing lots of little pieces of gold glitter. So while some people might think ‘hey cool, I look like glitter spray Ken preparing for my date with glitter spray Barbie’, I instead felt like I looked like a Modern Talking wannabe. Especially since the sunblock I had put on my face made my lips look like I was using sparkling lipstick.

So to my fellow sun bathers, next time you buy sunblock I suggest taking a look at the bottle to make sure it doesn’t say something like ’shimmering sheen’ as a subtitle. It turns out to be more than just an empty marketing term for sunblock. Of course if you are a fourteen year old girl or a drag queen feel free to ignore this warning

So Wim has been hacking on with the GStreamer RTP support and we have managed to play all our internal streams correctly now testing with the Darwin Quicktime Server, Axis RTP network camera and the RTP branch of Flumotion. There are still a few cosmetic things not working perfectly like getting Totem to display the name of the codecs being used, but all in all things are looking very sweet.

So if you want to help us out make it truly robust we ask that people grab latest CVS of GStreamer and the plugins modules and try to test out using Totem and playbin against local and internet RTP streams they have access too. GStreamer contains depayloaders for most MPEG/3GPP related payload types and Fluendo will soon add Windows Media RTP support to our codec package. The only major RTP (or rather RTP like) thing not supported yet is Real media and also Apple RTP of their older proprietary formats (Sorenson/QDM2). And of course we support Vorbis, Speex and Theora RTP streams

I have blogged before about our support for the most recent Apple streams like the Jobs keynote and here is a little screenshot of Totem viewing that stream.

Update:
I made a claim that sync was solved in current CVS and this turned out to be wrong and based on some miscommunication. Sync is still not fully done and it will still be a few weeks before it is so. According to Wim the only reason sync is better atm is purely coincidental. Testers are still very welcome though as it would allow us to sort out issues such as server compatability and so on.

Update 2:
After some lunchtime discussion it turned out my claim about sync was true afterall. Sync is now perfect for RTSP streams. What is missing is RTCP sync.

Also regarding the question of serving RTP there will be some rudimentary support in GStreamer once this work is done. Furthermore there are people from Axis working on enabling GStreamer as a RTP serving system so expect to see further updates on that front.

So Jan and I are participating at this years CELF Embedded Linux conference. It is my first CELF and it seems an interesting group of people from most of the major embedded system makers. The participation in this event from Asia is particularly good.

Lot of familiar faces from the GNOME community here too like Jeff Waugh, Matthew Allum, Robert McQueen, Carlos Guerreiro, Quim Gill, Robert Taylor and Marcel Holtmann.

Jan is doing a presentation/tutorial on GStreamer tomorrow and will also quickly demo the Fluendo DVD player as part of that talk.

Having a great time apart from the problems presented by the airline losing my luggage on the way over. Hopefully I will get it them today or I will have to start borrowing clothers from Jan; which is likely to make me have as tight fitting clothes as Steve Irwin used to be known for.

So I thought I should compose a list of all GStreamer related approved Summer of Code projects:

• GNU Project: Gnome/GStreamer Desktop sound integration for Java
• GNOME: GStreamer plugins and extensions for multimedia content creation applications
• GNOME: Signal processing block for GStreamer
• GNOME: PiTiVi, an Open Source Video Editor
• GNOME: Jokosher VoIP Integration
• GNOME: VoIP and video call client using Telepathy
• Mono: Banshee - Porting Banshee to Windows
• Freevo: DVB CAM support
• Freevo: Gstreamer Integration

A big thanks to both the students and organisations involved.

Special mentions

Not related to GStreamer, but I found two projects I think deserve special mention looking over the approved projects.

The first is a project for OpenOffice to create proper SVG import support, I really hope this one pans out well as proper SVG support in OpenOffice would be a big step forward :
Draw/Impress: SVG Import Filter

The second project I found I noticed for somewhat other reasons, in fact I would like announce the winner of this years ‘Biggest Optimist in the Universe and Beyond 2007 Award’ to this project:
Dirac encoder and decoder.

Considering how long we have spent on getting Schrodinger up to scratch I am amazed that anyone even manage to believe they can create both a decoder and an encoder for Dirac in 3 Months.

I guess most have seen the story about how EMI and Apple are going to offer big parts of EMI catalogue in AAC format without any kind of DRM protection. If this pans out well I think it could be the begining of the end for widespread use of DRM.