Got good news on SMIL today, the LiveSupport
project which is a software package for managing Radio stations (and which uses GStreamer have written some SMIL elements for GStreamer already. And they are willing to relicense them to LGPL for inclusion in GStreamer.
The Ambulant project which I also blogged about earlier also got back to me today saying that the next version of Ambulant will be LGPL, which at least takes away the licensing hindrance for GStreamer intergration.
The advantage of Ambulant of the LiveSupport stuff is that it is much more complete in terms of implementing the SMIL spec, the downside is that its design might be more painful to integrate in a nice way. Anyway Flavio Oliveira is planning on investigating the issue further and working on it, so hopefully a good solution can be found in the end.
VoIP
Currently having a Asterisk server set up for use by the GNOME board meetings, the current phone setup is costly and unpractical and I can’t help but feel that if such a technical group of people like the GNOME board is not able to switch to using a VOIP conference solution the who is.
I think I have the protocol that google talk uses for voice chats down, it really needs someone that knows RTP to implement it tho. I’ve been tinkering with converting the google talk signalling into SIP/SDP so that you can use google talk to connect to an asterisk server, so far without much success (mostly because of my limited knowledge of SIP/Asterisk I feel).
One caveat with Asterisks for Teleconferences, the inbuilt conferencing stuff doesn’t scale very well once you get past three or four participants in terms of quality.
See the VOIP Info Wiki for more information.