Month: February 2007

The FOSDEM weekend went down great as usual. Met the usual folks, and many more new people. Alway refreshing to put a face and personality behind a IRC nick 🙂

The talk I gave on “GStreamer: What’s New?” was well received. I had a hard time in fact both reducing the talk to fit in the limit of 45 mins and keeping it not too technical, but it seems to have paid off. The slides are available here in OOo format.

As I mentioned during my talk, we’ve been working hard on making GStreamer work on other platforms, including Windows and MacOSX. We’d love to receive more feedback on their usage, especially from MacOSX users/developers. If you want to give a ride, install fink and either use the available package (although they’re a bit old now) or compile your own GStreamer from releases or cvs. BTW, if a fink maintainer sees this post, updates to the existing GStreamer packages would be nice 🙂

The native MacOSX video sink is coming on nicely… but sometimes you hit some wall, like NSAutoReleasePool (objective C explicit garbage collector) not being able to work across multiple threads, which makes it impossible to avoid some warnings about objects leaking. In GStreamer plugins your entry points (pad functions, element methods, …) can be called from different threads, and you shouldn’t have to care about which thread it is (well you need to protect data that can be called by different threads with locks, but you get the drill), but with ObjectiveC you apparently need to create one of those pools for each new thread… tricky since I’m not the creator of those threads, they’re created outside of the scope of my plugin. If an ObjectiveC guru knows the trick, I’m dying to know it.

A New year, and plenty of surprises…First of all, hello to Planet GNOME and thanks to Jeff for adding me. Quick presentation for those who don’t know me. I’m the author of the PiTiVi video editor, maintainer of the python bindings for GStreamer, the GStreamer GNonLin plugins (used by PiTiVi and Jokosher) and the ffmpeg GStreamer plugins. I’ve been hacking on GStreamer ever since I started PiTiVi, wanting to fix issues at the lowest level instead of making yet-another pile-of-hacks application, and I carry on doing so by debugging and implementing new features in GStreamer core. Not only do I spent a lot of time doing all this hacking during my free time , I am lucky enough to also be able to do so as part of the consulting department of Barcelona-based Fluendo along with a great team of hackers.

What can you expect on my blog ? Mostly insights on PiTiVi and GStreamer development, my views about GNOME, FOSS and the world of today and also sometimes ramblings about French cheese not being weapons of mass destruction.

Good news ! PiTiVi 0.10.2 was released 2 weeks ago, with a truckload of bugfixes. Tests, bug-reports or comments are more than welcome. I’m currently working on the editing interface for the simple timeline with the goal of being able to *finally* show some real editing at FOSDEM.

So yes, I’m going to FOSDEM, where I will be giving a talk about what’s new in GStreamer and what’s currently being developed under the hood. This talk will happen in the GNOME developer room. If you want to see what niceties are coming round the corner, come along !

Finally, hacking and having a real life is not always that easy, so LOTS of love to Emma, my girlfriend, who’s been an angel for the past 7 years, and whose birthday it is today.