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.