Hard won success is so much sweeter.

After strugling with the threading issues in GStreamer so long it feels very good to finally be able to put them behind me. I have compiled glibc more times than I would ever want to over the last few weeks in an attempt to help solve the threading issue. One of the major headaches with this is that we have felt that our thread code was not the issue, but we hadn’t managed to pinpoint what in glibc was to blame either. Of course the more time went by without a solution the more one starts to question the sanity of our own code. But after submiting a bug report to Red Hat (and getting a reply the same day!) I ended up compiling glibc from Rawhide to use with phoebe. And like magic our threading code started working also on i686 optimized glibc.

Only downside was that I was thinking we could offer the new glibc as an rpm for people on RH80 to use, but it seems the new glibc has some dependency on a newer kernel than the one shipping with RH80. So I guess we just have to tell people to either use i386 glibc with RH80 or wait for RH81.

With the threading issue resolved this weekend I found energy again to do some series media testing and thanks to the help of Wim we managed to get many little issues fixed that had crept into the code over the last few months of thread paralysis :)

Was also shown that GPE has a nice little media player for handheld devices using GStreamer, very cool.

I also saw someone posting about MAS the other day and comparing it to GStreamer. Well we (GStreamer) do not consider MAS to be direct competition even if there are some areas of overlap. In fact we have met up with Mike and Leon on several occassions and are planing on making a MAS plugin as soon as MAS is released. We are also considering to propose MAS as the official sound server for GNOME if it turns out ok.

Only downside is jorn‘s little temporary defection, but I feel confident we can get him back on track after 8.1 comes out :)