Ok, so we have a public holiday in Spain and the whole team is gathered at the office working on trying to perfect GStreamer playback. The goal is to make sure Totem can go into Fedora 3 with a GStreamer backend which works very well for it. Kinda nerdy way to spend a holiday, but that is the sorta people we are :)

Had a cool time in Firenze at the free streaming media conference. Talked a lot with Michael Sparks from BBC about Dirac and future developments around that and about the upcoming Fluendo streaming server. Cool to see how aligned we where on a lot of ideas and issues. One thing we discussed was the need for a new open and free protocol for streaming video. RTP is ok in many cases, but as Michael’s talk showed it has some severe issues for large scale streaming. When I meet Michael again at the airport this morning I suggested that maybe the free streaming group could try to get EU funding for development of such a new protocol, so today I mailed that suggestion of to the freestreaming mailing list.

Also talked briefly with Manuel Lora from Xiph.org after his talk. It was a very nice talk from a Fluendo standpoint as it contained a lot of positive talk about Fluendo’s efforts and our sponsorship of Xiph.org.

I also completed readig Lawrence Lessig book Free culture while in Italia. It is easy to despair a bit when reading his book, but I think there are some light in the tunnel. Basically while I am begining to wonder if democracy is sustainable, or if it like all other forms of government before it will end up eating itself, I am not prepared to give up on it just yet. I think Lawrence and others are actually making relativly good progress in building understanding and mindshare for their ideas, so maybe both EU and US politicians will come around eventually. First step I guess is stopping the EU patent directive, but even if it does go through maybe through the continued effort of public education will we be able to turn the tide.