So the GStreamer Summit is over, but some of the participants still linger. The summit went very well with thomas posting a nice summary to the gstreamer list. Hopefully these plans will let us move fast forward toward GStreamer 1.0 and world domination :)
We had a discussion today with David Schleef about liboil and how to make it widely used. Liboil is a library containing optimized asm routines for a variety of platforms for common functions, like memcopy/setcopy for instance. Currently we have a situation where most projects add their own asm optimizations for common routines, which has the sideeffect that most things are only optimized with mmx and maybe altivec, but little else. By centralizing this into liboil we hope to get implementations for more obscure platforms and through that helping people not using i386 or PowerPPC to also get optimizations and make such optimizations more common also for apps on the two major platforms. David have already added SPARC optimizations to liboil for instance.
So what we need now is for a lot of central pieces to start using liboil, and the way to accomplish that was what we discussed. Currently GStreamer and swfdec uses among popular products. We want and are trying to get projects such as libtheora, cairo, gdkpixbuf and others to also start using to get critical mass. Hopefully we suceed and you will get a much faster system in the future, no matter what CPU architecture you use :)
Been playing World of Warcraft a bit during the last few days. Its a really addictive game and it works very nicely under Cedega. Mike Hearn pointed my to a long WoW thread on the Wine mailing list today which gives me hope that also standard wine will support it soon, maybe even using the OpenGL option.
I ended up buying a license to Cedega to play WoW. I am ok with having done that as it have enabled me to play the game. Question now of course is wether to keep subscribing to Transgaming. Their voting system is ok, but the system is a bit confusing for a newbie and there is no clear way for me to make it clear I bought Cedega to WoW and without further WoW related fixes being worked on there is little motivation for me to keep subscribing when this initial period ends. While fixes for updated distros for instance is nice it is also clear that before the current Cedega stops working I will probably be over my urge to play WoW and have no need of Cedega anymore anyway.
On the topic of gaming, Epic-Megagames have still not released the patch to Robin Hood they promised which sucks. On the other side the game has worn out its interest for me anyway, so it doesn’t matter that much. I grow tired of a game usually after 3-4 days and since there are relatively few games coming out for Linux it means I don’t play games that much :)