GStreamer « Christian Schaller

Archive for the ‘GStreamer’ Category

cdparanoia now LGPL v2

Thursday, August 7th, 2008

Some time ago I blogged about cdparanoia switching from GPLv2 to LGPLv3 on our request. After that time we have been discussing in the GStreamer community about licensing and what is the exact and implicit licensing promise we are and have been making with GStreamer. The conclusion was that since the LGPLv3 is more restrictive than the LGPLv2 we do not want LGPLv3 dependencies in gst-plugins-good and gst-plugins-base. As mentioned before we always tried to be very serious and coherent with our licensing in GStreamer and suddenly reducing the rights we offer application and plugin developers is not something we feel should be done without very good reason. This is a policy I hope also other important libraries decide to follow, personally I would think it would be a very sad thing if Glib and Gtk+ for instance started taking away rights from their users without a very well reasoned explanation.

Luckily Monty is a very kind soul, and starting from yesterday there is a new version of cdparanoia III out, 10.1, which is dual-licensed under the LGPLv2 and the GPLv2. So even in the future there will be cdripping support offered in GStreamer gst-plugins-base package.
So go to the cdparanoia download page and get yourself this minty fresh version of cdparanoia. We recommend distributions to update to this version as soon as possible to ensure there are no licensing conflicts in their distribution.

Posted in GNOME, GStreamer | 6 Comments »

Let it Rip, Let it Rip, Let it Rip

Tuesday, June 10th, 2008

We take some pride in the GStreamer community about our policy of keeping a tidy ship when it comes to licensing. Even though we did most of the sorting based on common sense, mixed with a bit of hobbyist lawyering and a conservative reading of the GPL it looks like we have succeeded. Tons of organisations are now shipping GStreamer core, base and good with their products and often combine them with their own plugins and packages.

Yet, we recently realized that we had let something slip through the cracks, in the sense that both the cd ripping libraries we supported, cdparanoia and libcdio, where under the GPL. According to our policy that means those plugins should be in gst-plugins-ugly and not in base or good where they currently reside. Just moving them was seen as rather painful though as it would have left many linux distributions in a difficult situation, with applications like Sound Juicer depending on one of those plugins being available to work properly.

Luckily a quick talk to Monty Montgomery, creator of cdparanoia and Vorbis, resolved the issue. As of yesterday there is a new version of cdparanoia available which is LGPL instead of GPL. A big thanks to Monty for this. We will update GStreamer so that the next version of gst-plugins-base requires this new version and correctly reports it as LGPL through gst-inspect. As for libcdio we will move that over to gst-plugins-ugly as that library is still GPL.

So if you are a distribution maker grab cdparanoia 0.10 to decrease the amount of license checking you need to do

Update: Seems MikeS spotted something that I failed to notice. Monty choose the LGPLv3 for libcdparanoia which means the situation is a little different, as it would mean the plugin is not compatible with GPLv2-only applications. Luckily most GStreamer apps are GPLv2 or Higher or more liberally licensed. A lot of them also have a special clause allowing non-GPL compatible GStreamer plugins. Guess this proves that those exception clauses are now also valuable even if you are not targetting non-free plugins.

Posted in GStreamer | 3 Comments »

Ubuntu Disapointment

Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008

One thing I ranted about multiple times in my blog over the years is how Linux distributions have failed to provide their content in Ogg format. Especially when the content is targeted at Linux users it suprise me that they do not make sure to have the video available in the format that basically all linux users have support for out of the box. That said both Red Hat and Novell has actually taken this feedback to heart and more often than not they do provide Ogg videos these days (in addition to various other formats).

It saddens me then when I checked out the link in Jono Bacons latest blog entry. Where the Ubuntu MOTU videos seems only to be available in the proprietary Flash format. For a distribution which likes to drape itself so loudly in the colours of community and freedom this is a huge letdown. And while you can view these videos with things like swfdec you still need to have the patent encumbered codecs available through gst-ffmpeg to actually view the videos. Would it be so hard to also offer those videos as a Ogg Theora torrents for instance?

Update: Talked to Jono. Turns out they do plan on making Ogg’s available, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. While I kicked Ubuntu here, it wasn’t really about them specifically, but the fact that even though the tools have gotten quite good and widespread over the last few years in terms of creating Ogg’s the open source or free software community is still rather lackluster in its willingness to try to help push the free formats. Its kinda how I used PNG images on my website even before there was widespread PNG support, cause if my page got just one person (hi mom) to use a PNG supporting browser it was a step forward.

Posted in GStreamer, Patents and Copyright | 15 Comments »

Jokosher fixes inbound

Wednesday, May 21st, 2008

As I mentioned in my blog entry about Sebastian Dröge joining Collabora he would among other things work on some low level GStreamer issues which has held Jokosher back. Thanks to Sebastian working on improving the GStreamer audioconvert and deinterlave elements things are now looking very good for Jokosher, a big thanks to Peteris Krisjanis of the Jokosher community for testing the fixes so quickly for us. I have now even challenged Jono and Stuart about recording a LUGRadio episode using Jokosher as that was in some sense the original reason for Jokosher being created so I feel it would be a good milestone on progress

Sebastian still has some work on the interleave element left before he will switch over to focusing on some improvements for Pitivi mostly improving our Matroska and MPEG support.

Personal life

Starting to settle pretty good into Cambridge life I think. My ongoing golf lessons are starting to pay off and I can now go to the driving range and feel pretty happy at what I do there. Not to claim I am at a useful level yet, but at least some of the basics are starting to fall into place. I also finally got myself moving on starting up a second activity, in addition to the golf, so I had my second riding lesson this morning. I am so far enjoying the riding quite a lot, apart from the dorky looking helmet and the new boots giving me blisters. Still working on finding a good timeslot for the riding though, seems the horses do not enjoy an early morning as much as my golf instructor.

The Cambridge Beer Festival is currently underway and yesterday I got to try the cutely named Norwegian Blue. Not named after the country with the fjords as much as after a parrot in a Monty Python clip

We are heading back there this evening with Michael Meeks joining us for some further beer sampling, travelling from the distant planet of Newmarket. We tried getting Edward Hervey also to join us, as he is actually in London currently, valiantly helping one of our customers, but even the famous beer festival cheese selection was enough to lure him away from his task

Heading up to Norway tomorrow evening for a long weekend in conjunction with my cousins daughters confirmation. I tried to get her to take a valiant stance for atheism instead, but the lure of presents and a big party strangely enough won out Its also my mothers birthday early next week and while I normally do not travel up to Norway I felt it was the right thing to do this year considering my mothers recent brain surgery with the (small) stroke that caused.

Posted in Collabora, General, GStreamer | Comments Off

Sebastian Dröge joins Collabora Multimedia

Tuesday, May 6th, 2008

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

Posted in Collabora, GStreamer | 5 Comments »

More SoC Pitivi hacking

Thursday, April 24th, 2008

So it turns out we got 2 Summer of Code projects working on improving the Pitivi non-linear video editor. Sarath Lakshman will be hacking on Pitivi this summer as part of the Fedora Summer of Code. This is in addition to the work that Brandon Lewis will be doing. So hopefully by the end of summer Pitivi will be useful for a lot more people.

Posted in GStreamer | Comments Off

Summer of Code Projects

Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008

GStreamer

Seems the slot count for Summer of Code is now as close to set in stone as it will be so I guess its time to announce the four projects that got approved as part of the GStreamer SoC.

First our we got Thiago Sousa Santos who will be writing a mp4/qt/3gpp muxer for GStreamer. This will fill a big hole in our current lineup of muxers. This project will be mentored by Wim Taymans.

Then we got Brandon Lewis working on Pitivi. He will among other things be adding still image and transitions support to Pitivi. This project is mentored by Edward Hervey.

The third project is Richard Ronald Spiers working on MSN support in Farsight2. This means that any Farsight2 using application will be able to communicate with MSN users. This project is mentored by Olivier Crête.

And last but not least is Roberto Fagá Jr who will be working on a video transcoder using GStreamer. Another critical project as it will help us keep our muxers and encoders well tested and working. This project will be mentored by Stefan Kost.

Dirac

The Dirac project ended up with two projects in this years Summer of code. Matthias Bolte will be working on OpenGL acceleration for Dirac and Bart Wiegmans will be working on a Java implementation of Dirac. Both projects to be mentored by David Schleef.

GNOME

As every year a ton of GNOME projects got approved. Of special interest to the GStreamer community is the DVB Manager to be done by Sebastian Pölsterl, the Cheese OpenGL effects by Filippo Argiolas, Empathy bases IRC client by William Christopher Farrington, speech recording for tomboy notes by Gabriel Geraldo França Marcondes and Corvalan Cornejo Gabriel working on Empathy VoIP support.

Posted in GStreamer | 2 Comments »

Last day in the US

Friday, April 18th, 2008

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

Posted in Collabora, GStreamer | 6 Comments »

Visiting the United States of America

Sunday, April 13th, 2008

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.

Posted in Collabora, GStreamer | 1 Comment »

Monday is final SOC proposal deadline

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Ok, so this is my final blog for this year suggesting that people sign up to do a Google Summer of Code projectwith GStreamer. Even with Google extending the deadline on Monday it the gates are closing. We got some good projects proposed for both GStreamer and Dirac (and there are some really nifty GNOME ones also), but more is always welcome.On Tuesday myself and the other SoC administrators for the various projects will start voting over the various Summer of Code proposals we have received, and hopefully yours will be among those getting the most votes.

So for the final time check out our page of instructions for how to create a GStreamer SoC proposal and if you don’t already know what you want to do as a project you can check out some of the ideas GStreamer developers have proposed.

Posted in GNOME, GStreamer | Comments Off

Christian Schaller