Christian Schaller

Edward pointed my to this blog today which brought up a point I myself have been making in regards to Android. I spoke to several people at the CE Linux meeting a couple of weeks ago about this for one. To quote from the blog:

Android is an island of its own, and useful code sharing is largely limited to the kernel.

At Collabora Multimedia we are currently working with both Maemo and Android systems and while I can see the appeal of Android from a phone makers perspective I can’t help but be a little saddened by how worthless it is to the general linux eco-system. One of the things I always loved about Nokia’s Maemo effort is that since its using so many of the standard components that we use on the Linux Desktop, it means that when a feature is added or a bug is fixed in Maemo, it directly helps also the linux desktop. Nokia and Maemo has had a strong and direct impact on a lot of open source projects, ranging from GStreamer, D-bus, GTK+, Telepathy, Matchbox, X Window System and more. And Nokia’s work on Qt going forward will of course have a direct impact on the quality of KDE.

Android on the other side has a much more marginal impact. I know they have contributed some patches to Webkit, but apart from that they offer little value to the rest of the linux eco-system. Been even told by some kernel developers that an Android kernel driver is about as immediately useful for the mainstream kernel as a FreeBSD or OpenSolaris driver. Meaning that porting is needed.

So for me personally I can’t help but feel a lot more positive about Maemo (or Moblin for that matter as they too share the same kind of philosophy as Maemo) and getting a N900 is definitely on my TODO list. That said Android is a work in progress and hopefully we can get them to abandon their essentially proprietary stack going forward and instead incorporate more and more shared libraries with the server and desktop. Maemo has proved that for a smartphone these libraries works just as well as Googles homebrew. Some of the efforts we are involved with are pushing in that direction and hopefully Google will realize that the secret to the success of open source is synergy.

We have recently added 3 new members to our growing Multimedia team and GStreamer consulting business. The first one onboard was Thiago Sousa Santos who I think many of you probably already know as he has been a regular GStreamer contributor for the last few years. He also wrote some important plugins for GStreamer as part of the last two Google Summer of Code projects, namely the Quicktime/MP4/3GPP muxer for GStreamer and this year the ASF muxer and ASF RTP payloader. Having been so impressed with his work as part of the community over the last few years we made sure to snatch him up as soon as he graduated from University

The second person we added to our team was Robert Swain. He might not be familiar to people following GStreamer or GNOME, but he has been an active contributor to the ffmpeg project, working for instance on improving the AAC support in ffmpeg. A lot of the work we do at Collabora Multimedia is of course low level multimedia handling and optimisations and Robert will strengthen our capabilities in that field. Also with his experience with ffmpeg we can hopefully use his knowledge to improve the GStreamer ffmpeg plugin where possible.

And finally we have Arun Raghavan, who will be joining us next Month. Arun comes to us recommended by Pulse Audio maintainer Lennart Poettering and will be part of our effort to officially support the Pulse Audio sound server as part of our portfolio of open source projects we offer expertise and consulting services around. Wim Taymans have been moonlighting a bit as a pulse audio developer over the last year, but with Arun on the team we now have a person dedicated to Pulse Audio development, making sure Pulse Audio works great for our customers on their embedded systems. We also hope his efforts will pay dividends for Pulse Audio users on the desktop too in terms of more features and better stability. The synergy we are able to create between the embedded world and the desktop is part of our core mission here at Collabora and with Arun on the team we hope to continue and deepen the great working relationship we have established with Lennart. As a sidenote Arun comes to us from NVidia so maybe we can even have him help improve the GStreamer vdpau plugins

Speaking of synergies between embedded and desktop work, I hope everyone read Guillaume Desmottes blog post about Collabora’s increased effort behind the Empathy chat,VoIP and video conferencing client

Its been an interesting week here Grenoble, been talking with a lot of people about linux on consumer electronics in general, but also of course about the GStreamer consulting we offer at Collabora Multimedia. It is also always encouraging to see the number of people at an event like this who already have heard about Collabora, be it in conjunction with GStreamer or Telepthay or Webkit or any of the other projects we either have the lead on or are contributing heavily or been told about us by an existing customer.

We ended up having a very nice conference dinner yesterday evening at one of the restaurants on top of the mountain travelling there by cable car.

Getting ready to start my journey back home now, and while I have to say Grenoble has made a very positive impression on me, I am looking forward to getting home to Cambridge.

I am currently in the town of Grenoble in France, attending the CE Linux conference. Or rather the official conference starts tomorrow, so today I am attending a workshop hosted by ST Ericsson talking about their open source effort around the Nomadik platform, more specfically the NHK-15 platform. Looks like a very interesting piece of kit and I also got a nice development board to take home. Met a few known faces already here, for instance Dave Neary is also attending the workshop today, but I am sure there will be more people when the official conference kicks of tomorrow.

Anyway, if anyone else are attending CE Linux and want to talk about Collabora, GStreamer, Telepathy, PulseAudio and so on, be sure to look me up.

I also noticed that I tend to try to speak Spanish to everyone here. Not sure why, but I guess my mind on some level assume that they might have a better chance to guess what I mean if I speak Spanish and they only speak French. Or maybe its because my new housemate, Abigail, is Spanish, so due to speaking with her my mind is now tuned to jump to trying to use Spanish words

Pushed out a new release of Transmageddon today. It is mostly
about fixing bugs and trying to make things more robust. But I also added the PSP and Google G1 profiles to this release.
Remuxing should be more robust now and if it lacks the plugins it needs it will let you know and let you choose something else instead.

My next step is going to be to combine the device profiles with remuxing, so that if the device you are targeting supports
for instance the audio and/or video format used in the incoming media Transmageddon will just remux it instead of decode and re-encode it. Should eventually in combination with a AC3 parser plugin enable you to just remux Matroska files with H264 and AC3 audio to MPEG TS when you choose the PS3 profile to get a playable file. Only problem there of course is the bitrate requirements of AC3 when used in MPEG TS on the PS3.

Seems I did a very classic mistake with the new Transmageddon release I did this weekend. I was about to release, but at the last minute I decided to add MPEG PS support as it was ‘only a few lines of code’. As it turns out those few lines where enough to break the profile support and thus things like the iPod profile ended up broken.

So a new 0.13 release is now available fixing the profiles again. And to show the world I haven’t learned the lesson I also added drag and drop support in this version. So you can drag and drop a file from Nautilus onto Transmageddon and it will be put into the filechooser for you. This feature came about due to extensive nagging from Stuart Langridge and cut and paste code from the pygtk FAQ

So if you tried 0.12 and the profiles didn’t work for you, try 0.13

Finally managed to sit down today and clear up all the lose ends I had left in the code since GUADEC. For instance in my mind remuxing was ‘done, but when I started testing and looking at the code this was not the case at all . To celebrate these cleanups I pushed Transmageddon 0.12 today and I hope it will work reasonably well for people. The major new feature available is the remuxing support, which will let you keep the original audio or video track in the file. Stability should also be a little bit better as I added more error checking, but there is still some way to go there. Things should work fine as long as you got all the GStreamer plugins needed, but if you don’t your success will vary on what type of plugin is missing

Also added ASF and MPEG PS support in this release, but in order to create those you need either latest release of gst-plugins-bad for ASF or git master for MPEG PS.

Transmageddon now also sports its own icon thanks to Emily and Liam of fightingcrane.com, a big thanks for that.

Screenshot of the latest release also available of course.

Sorry for taking so long to get this, but I was trying to get DVD ripping support in, but that effort stalled unfortunately. Focus for next release will be to switch from Glade to GtkBuilder and add some more device profiles.

Today we launched the new Collabora website. I am really happy with it as it much better represents who we are and what we are doing now. Collabora is a fairly sizeable company these days with over 40 developers and 3 offices, not only that we had a few cases with the old website where people have told us that they looked at it and assumed we didn’t offer the kind of services they where looking for, hopefully that is a thing of the past with this new website.

Another goal with the new website is to make it easier to update, so hopefully we will be able to both add more content more easily now and of course improve the text that is already there as we go forward. A big thanks to our project manager Sumana who has been slaving away to get the new site launched, writing a lot of the copy herself.

Anyway, I go back to adoring our new Collabora website now