Something struck me the other day. I no longer know everyone who hangs out in #gstreamer. Somewhere between 6 months and 1 year ago I would know who everyone was, what they where working on etc., I even tended to remember people who had just been in the channel a couple of times before.

So what has happened? Well we became to big. Earlier we where so few in that channel that is was natural to say hi and start a conversation with everyone that popped in, but at some point to many people where starting to pop-inn and the number got so large that I had trouble remembering who the people who held a low profile where.

While the size of the channel is a nice confirmation about the success of the project I must say I also miss the old ‘small village’ charm of the channel.

I guess this happens with most IRC channels cause it happened with the Abiword channel too. In the begining we where just 4-5 people who tended to be there, today I only know ‘who’ half of the people are and I feel I only really know the people who where there from those early days.

Anyway we are enacting a hard freeze on GStreamer in preparation for our 0.6.0 release which we will in about a week. The 0.6.x series is meant to be a stable series we maintain for use with the GNOME 2.2 series. Hopefully we will feel prepared for a 1.0 release togheter with GNOME 2.4 and maybe move GStreamer down into the GNOME Development plattform.

obi: Possible I do misunderstand the scope of MAS. But the target for GStreamer is to be a toolset for creating such things as Non-Linear Video editors and advanced sound mixing tables etc. GStreamer is also being used as the backend for audio and video web streaming solutions, like web radio for instance. We also provide and backend for creating simple audio and video playback applications.

MAS is to me primarly a sound&video server to replace ESD and artsd. I know they do have an architecture for video and audio manipulation, which I guess could make them a competitor as a backend for media playback applications like XMMS and such, but I do not think MAS intends to be or would be suitable as the basis of a NLE. I could be wrong of course not having studied MAS extensivly. There is also the question of being theoretically able to do something and actually doing it.