Wim has been working adding Quality of Service support to GStreamer. For those who don’t have any familarity with that term in this context is means that when you are playing back something which you don’t have enough CPU power to play back GStreamer tries to cope with it nicely. This usually means dropping/skipping video frames and for instance only decode the keyframes in a video file. One of the things you need to get right in such a setting is that no matter how many video frames you need to skip audio and video should still stay perfectly in sync. So when movement in the video slows down a bit again and your CPU is once again able to cope the audio and video hasn’t lost sync. You also want audio to keep playing perfectly through it all. Well Wim has the start of it working now and its already doing better on his selected testclip than the alternatives he is testing with. There is of course still more work that needs doing in terms of both enabling this for more formats and fine tuning the core, but its looking pretty sweet. Not as sweet of course as actually having enough CPU to play it perfectly, but still a waste improvement of what you are experiencing today.

House on fire

Seems the house of my mothers neighbour burned to the ground yesterday. Nobody got hurt, but it still feels kinda strange to have a house thats ‘always’ been there, now be gone.

The Legend that is Mike Smith and Theora

Mike Smith, our resident Xiph.org master at Fluendo, put together a new Theora decoder plugin today. It is based on the alternative theora-exp code from Xiph.org svn and should give very significant performance improvements over the current one in the 30% to 50% range. A big thanks to to Mike for this. All we now need is a release of theora-exp and distributions and users have a much higher performant Theora playback option.

GStreamer on Windows

We long have had some basic Windows support in GStreamer including building using Visual Studio and output plugins using DirectShow. Sebastian Moutte just commited a lot of fixes to our -good plugins package making sure most of the plugins in that package also build on Windows. What will be the second GStreamer application for Windows after Ixion?.

Pitivi

Plan on keeping up with my Pitivi blogging as Edward is such a lazy blogger. Edward has been working on improving robustness of Pitivi over the last few days with better handling for unloadable streams and also various smaller memleak fixes. Getting Pitivi memleak free is actually an important goal for us as we want to use the Pitivi engine also as a backend system for video processing which means it needs to be able to keep running for weeks without choking your server. A new release is planned soon and the goal is to have the features in there working as robustly as possible before then. It is in some ways similar to the development strategy we took with GStreamer 0.10. We defined a core set of plugins (which is what you today know as -base) which we felt represented many of the most important plugin types and usecases. We then worked on making GStreamer and these plugins work really well. Only when that had reached a high level of maturity did porting other plugins start becoming a priority. Apart from practical coding advantages to this approach it also came from a thinking that its better to do a few things really well and build on that instead of trying to do a lot of things right away and do them all badly. I think it worked out well for GStreamer 0.10 (as opposed to 0.8 where I guess we almost did the ‘add enough plugins and the core will fix itself’ strategy :). Hopefully it will work out equally well for Pitivi.

Jokosher

The Jokosher team continues kicking ass and taking names. The latest updates with screenshots of recent additions is simply amazing. I really hope they are planing on submitting a Jokosher talk for GUADEC today (last day before deadline!) or as a minimum do a Jokosher talk at LUGRadio live.

Thoggen

Tim-Philipp Müller has been reviewing patches and fixing bugs at a high speed in GStreamer for a long time now. I often feel he doesn’t get enough credit for this work as it is a little ‘behind-the-scenes’ kinda stuff. So I was very happy to see that his personal project Thoggen got a positive review on linux.com. With all the work Tim has been putting in on fixing the DVD and mpeg plugins in GStreamer 0.10 I think a GStreamer 0.10 based Thoggen should be possible in the not so distant future.

Diva

Michael Dominic just released his first 0.0.1 release of Diva today along with some really sweet looking demo videos. Thumbs up to Michael for his work so far and especially the work he has put into making such a sweet looking user interface. We are sure to borrow some ideas for that for Pitivi when the time comes to add more bling to the Pitivi GUI. Cool stuff Michael!

Diva and Pitivi

So why are there two efforts to make a GTK+ non-linear editor using GStreamer instead of one you might ask. Well as usual the answer is disagreement on design and component choices. While Diva and Pitivi are written in C# vs Python that isn’t the important divide, although it has some secondary implications in that regard as it makes it a little easier for Novell to integrate Diva with f-spot and Banshee when its done with Mono, while for us integrating Pitivi with Flumotion to do live editing on video streams is easier when both are done in Python. Both are possible of course anyway, but using the same language does makes things easier. But as said these are secondary items.

With Pitivi we sincerely feel that the under laying design is sounder and more flexible and that the path taken with gdv, the library Diva is built upon is suboptimal and much less flexible compared to the direction we have taken with GNonLin, the library/gstreamer plugin that Pitivi is built upon. Michael obviously disagrees which this assessment which is why he wrote GDV in the first place. Time will tell who is right and not.

That said the competition between the two projects is friendly and the redundancy in work is luckily kept to a minimum due to both projects using GStreamer. A lot of the work involved for both projects is of course writing various GStreamer plugins to enable support for various formats and effects and here everything that benefits one benefits the other. Both Edward and Michael is also looking at each others code and applications for ideas and discussing technical problems, so even though there are two codebases on two languages there is a good deal of cross pollination going on.

So no matter what happens the community should have one or two kick ass non-linear editors within a year. Personally I am putting my eggs in the Pitivi basket, but I will be genuinely happy about people contributing to any of the two projects.

Took my own suggestion from yesterdays blog and did some work on the Pitivi non-linear editor today. So for any aspiring hackers out there be aware that the task of adding a window manager decoration appicon is now done :). I also took the chance to do a little work on the website, by improving the description text there and adding a favicon to the page based on the great menu icon done by Andreas Nilsson. I also filed some bugs on issues I discovered. My goal is that the next version of Pitivi is stable enough that when people ask for an easy way to create Theora files we can point them to Pitivi. No more gst-launch pipelines or ffmpeg2theora.

After a long and steady period of bugfixing on GStreamer 0.10 we know have so few bugs that we are out of the GNOME Bugzilla Top 15 buggiest projects list. With Tim being on second place in the top bug closers ranking. One of the reasons we managed to push our bug count down so quickly is because a lot of the bug reports we got over the last months have not only pointed out the problem, but also included patches which of course makes things much easier. So a big thanks to both new and old GStreamer contributors.

The Farsight and Telepathy RTP work for GStreamer seems to be taking shape too these days. Philippe’s blog entry about getting Google Talk working with the Telepathy, Farsight and GStreamer stack was very encouraging. Combined with the work being done to enable RTSP in playbin I think we are going to have a very complete RTP story with GStreamer within the next 3-4 months, with both working conferencing applications and working RTSP streaming support in applications. Will of course be some time before we support ‘all’ protocols and formats, but the most common ones should be covered.

In regards to format support in GStreamer there has been some requests for a 0.10 version of the Windows dll loader, pitfdll. There has been a ready and working version in Sourceforge CVS for quite a while now, and which is just blocking on Ronald getting around to making a new release. For those wanting/needing it please grab the CVS snapshot and give it a spin.

Pitivi

Pitivi is really looking sweet these days. It is now ported to GStreamer 0.10 and the stability and performance increases compared to the GStreamer 0.8 version are just incredible. Currently it lets you transcode for instance Quicktime movie trailers to Ogg’s and also glue different videos together into one clip. More advanced editor features being worked on, but the core of Pitivi is now up and running well. Of course a lot of polish here and there is needed, in order to support both more input and output files properly, make the GUI look nicer etc. This means it is a great time for people interested to get involved in the Pitivi project. Being done in Python it should be easy for new people to grok the codebase and there are lot of little things that new people could have a go at to get started, ranging from writing a patch to add a window manager icon to Pitivi, improve the logic for thumbnailing to decrease the chance of getting a black thumbnail, enabling more output formats (anyone interested in helping with getting Matroska ouput working?) and so on. Since a lot of the work going forward is just enabling features available from GStreamer and gnonlin you should be able to add a major feature to Pitivi with just a few hours of work and testing. So grab the latest Pitivi version, join the Pitivi mailing list and either send in your first patch or ask Edward (bilboed) for suggestions for things to get you started hacking pitivi. If just a couple more people get involved Pitivi should be a killer application for GNOME 2.16.

More on cheap GUADEC flights

Noticed that Sterling Airways have restarted their direct flights between Oslo and Barcelona now. This means that people coming here for GUADEC should check out both Sterling and SAS for their tickets. SAS have been quite cheap recently actually so I am not sure if the new Sterling tickets are big savers, but it never hurts checking.