With all the talk generated by Arun Raghavans blog post comparing PulseAudio and Audioflinger I thought it would be good to follow up with an interview with Arun about the latest developments in PulseAudio and the way forward for the project. You can find the PulseAudio interview here. I also made a new page listing all the Collabora developer interviews done so far. Enjoy 
Archive for the ‘Streaming’ Category
Interview with Arun Raghavan about PulseAudio
Wednesday, January 25th, 2012Farstream and libnice, an interview with Youness Alaoui
Monday, December 5th, 2011After the success of the GStreamer interview with Wim Taymans I thought we follow up with another great interview with a Collabora developer.
This time we are talking with Youness Alaoui who is one of the maintainers of Farstream, the audio and video conferencing framework built on top of GStreamer. We also cover another of Youness Alaoui projects, libnice, the NAT traversal library. So if you want to know what is happening with audio and video conferencing on Linux be sure to read the full interview with Youness Alaoui here.
Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP standard, ST Microelectronics, Fraunhofer and GStreamer
Friday, October 7th, 2011Edward Hervey pointed out to me this morning that there are some nice articles online about an effort between ST Microelectronics and Frauenhofer, around the 3GP DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) standard. There is for instance this article in Thinq magazine and this article on TMCnet. What you might not know and which is even cooler is that Emanuele Quacchio will be speaking this GStreamer based DASH implementation at the the GStreamer Conference later this Month. So if you haven’t signed up for the GStreamer Conference already, then maybe this is the time to do it
I am really excited about this years GStreamer Conference as we have a lot of ongoing efforts about to come to fruits. From Collabora we got Wim Taymans will be talking about GStreamer 1.0 effort, which we expect to have out before years end and Tim-Philipp Müller will speak about a lot of the other incredible advances we made over the last year. Being in the middle of it I think its easy to go a bit blind due to the gradual process, but things like the new parsing libraries that Thibault Saunier have been working on, which will enable much quicker and better support for things like libva and vdpau plugins in GStreamer. Or the new baseclasses that Mark Nauwelaerts have ported most of our plugins over to now, which in one fell swoop improved our plugin quality by leaps and bounds. And of course there are things like the GStreamer Editing services (GES), discoverer and encodebin which Edward Hervey created, which will make applications like Transmageddon video transcoder and remuxer and the PiTiVi video editor a lot easier to develop.
We will also be doing some real cool demonstrations of stuff we have been working on at Collabora at the Linux Con Showcase on Thursday. Thanks to GES we have a great demo of a mobile editing solution using either QML or HTML5. We have HTML5 video calling using Telepathy and we have Video calling using Telepathy from the Media explorer media center solution.
Another talk that I will be sure not to miss is Jan Schmidt who will be talking about Blu-Ray playback with GStreamer. In addition to being technically interesting Jans talks are always fun, like last year he did his presentation using GStreamer instead of something like LibreOffice, having created his slides as a DVD menu through a small program he wrote to turn SVG files into DVD menus
Media Explorer
Thursday, June 16th, 2011Discovered a new piece of software using GStreamer the other day called Media Explorer. It is a nice media center type solution for the desktop and Meego devices. The system has been developed by mostly Intel engineers, but they have now made it freely available. I tried it on my Fedora system last evening and it seems to have a bit of a MeeGo bias currently, as it complained about Connman being installed and also didn’t look for media in the desktop Media directories, but I am sure those are smaller issues that can quickly be sorted out. Thomas Wood did this nice blog entry about it a couple of weeks ago, with some more details.
Anyway if you are looking for a linux based media center UI this might be what you are looking for, personally I will try to see if I can get it going on my little Panda board at home.
Update: Also noticed there is a nice article about Media Explorer on linux.com.
GStreamer Conference 2011 update
Wednesday, June 8th, 2011Just 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.
Software and Copyright
Monday, October 2nd, 2006Had an interesting conversation today with Wim about copyright and software. We are currently working on integrating some RTSP patches into GStreamer and it turns out these patches contain some code originating in Xine which means we need to get a relicense on the code to the LGPL or replace the GPL parts.
Part of the problem is that people in the free software community tend to be rather sloppy with copyright statements when copying code around. So when people take code from a GPL project to put into another GPL project they often don’t copy all the needed copyright headers over as well, and also a lot of people when making significant changes don’t add their names to the copyright header of the file.
On top of that there are issues like the hard to grasp definition of what exactly constitutes a copyrightable contribution and the general problems with programming languages not being very expressive by nature, meaning that there isn’t that many (non stupid) ways of doing something.
Neither of us being a lawyer probably doesn’t help either
Anyway all of this makes it a quite extensive task to a) identify all (potential) copyright holders on a specific piece of code. b) track all these people down. c) get their permission to relicense d) if anyone says no, identify exactly what is their contribution and figure how that can be removed. Figuring out what to do when things are not easy to rewrite in any intelligent way, as a rewrite would basically look like the original and so on.
In terms of rewrites being identical to the original copyright law addresses this with rules saying that only the expressive elements of code is copyrightable, but its not easy for a layman to have a clear feeling on what that translates into in terms of a specific piece of code. In many cases you can never really know, even with a good lawyer to help you, before a judge gives final verdict on it. And having a judge give final verdict is what you probably want to avoid in the first place as that process costs a lot of time and money.
What is certain is that it do seem clear to me that copyright law was not made with gigantic collaborative efforts, which open source software is an example of, in mind. (ok, I am not expecting any awards for spotting the obvious
Vorbis and Theora RTP
Thursday, March 2nd, 2006Quite some time ago Fluendo funded an effort to get RTP specifications written for Vorbis and Theora. It has taken longer than we hoped at the outset, but things are coming together now. A big thanks to Luca Barbato who have been working on our behalf over the last 4-5 months on getting things sorted out.
The Vorbis RTP specification is now
available in a close to final version which has prelimenary IETF approval. The Theora
specification is a close behind, currently awaiting the initial stamp of approval from IETF.
Having these specifications ready I hope we will see a lot of projects implement them now and free formats start taking further steps forward into the world of VoIP, video conferencing and mobile streaming.
New man at the Xiph RTP helm
Friday, August 26th, 2005I announced today that Luca Barbato would take over as project lead in charge of sherpherding the Theora and Vorbis RTP specifications to completion. Due to various reasons this work got stalled, but hopefully with fresh blood at the helm we can move things to conclusion. A lot of people are expression interest in ‘Ogg’ RTP and it would be nice to have something ready for them to start implementing and adding to their programs. With Thomas and Wim having worked much lately on RTP streaming support in GStreamer and Flumotion it would also be nice to be able to have it ready so we could start implementing support for it in the GPL version of Flumotion.
New librsvg release
Helped send out the release announcement today of
librsvg 2.11.0. It will probably be our last libart only release as most work goes towards CVS head where the Cairo support is added.
Desktop Glitz
Seems quite a few people agreed with my previous blog about eyecandy. Been thinking about how we could proceed with the issue. One thing which could be interesting to do was to host a call on for instance art.gnome.org where we ask artists to come up with mockups for what kind of themes or effects they would like to have available. Then we review those mockups and proposals and try to come up with a todo list for the various projects like GTK+, gnome-panel and Metacity for what they need to add in order to enable such things. Like if we want animated or shaped borders in metacity what would need to happen and how should it happen. If we want to have the gnome-panel look like a Giger like cloud of swarming larvas to go with our Giger inspired desktop, what would need to happen. The goal would be that GNOME continues to look like today out of the box, but people can grab themes and extension packs that can give them very dazzling looks to the desktop.