Realized I hadn’t blogged in a while so I figured I should get back into the groove by highlighting some of the cool developments at Fluendo and around GStreamer.

Elisa is making great strides forward. One of the latest features being worked on is DVB support with Zaheer working on the GStreamer side of things, and it is starting to come together with audio playing yesterday. Hopefully soon we will have video going too. Getting DVB working will not only be useful for Elisa of course, but also be of great use for Flumotion.

On the playback side there are some nice developments as well. Wim committed some changes to GStreamer last week which improves network buffering quite a lot, as soon as Tim updates Totem this will improve Totem/GStreamer as a streaming client. Wim is also working on integrating a series of patches by Lutz Müller which improves our RTSP support and will also give us support for RTSP in playbin/Totem. Combined with the work that has been going on by Bastien and Christian Persch to improve the Totem browser plugin I think web media handling will be greatly improved. Using Fluendo’s Windows Media plugins I am now able to view the videoclips on cnn.com for instance.

Edward is putting final touches on some major GStreamer decodebin changes these days too. The new version will allow decodebin to not only output raw audio and video, but also output compressed data. This is very useful for use with digital output like s/pdif where you want to output AC3 or DTS not raw audio. The changes will also improve our handling of media files which contain more than one audio or video track and last but not least will solve the problem of handling chained oggs we have been seeing for a good while now.

Another cool addition coming soon is a MPEG Transport Stream muxer for GStreamer which Jan is working on. This project is done in collaboration with our friends at the BBC R&D. As part of this Jan is also defining a mapping for Dirac in MPEG TS so that other players and projects can use compatible mapping with ours.

Speaking of Dirac, work is still continuing at full speed on Schroedinger our Dirac implementation. David Schleef is currently polishing up the code to make sure the produced bitstreams are 100% compatible with the ones created by the Dirac library. Once that work is finished we will cut a new release before moving on to a optimisation phase to make sure Schroedinger is a really high performance Dirac implementation.

Another nice GStreamer change we hope to get into upstream GStreamer soon is a binary registry for GStreamer. Matthieu have been working on it for a while and the main advantage is that it improves both performance and of course gives GStreamer one less dependency as it removes the libxml requirement.

Also thanks to the work and support of Nokia, including the hard work of Edgard Lima and Stefan Kost, we will soon be able to move the video4linux2 plugin into -good. This means that we feel confident that the v4l2 plugin has reached a quality level where we can officially support it as part of the GStreamer project.

Another fun development at Fluendo without any direct community effect is that we have been doing a lot of training sessions recently for our customers. Fluendo trainers have been flying of so far to the US and China, but India , Taiwan and Brazil are on the agenda too now. As the adoption of GStreamer in the embedded market is rapidly growing in momentum the need for developers to get trained in how do develop with the GStreamer framework has given us a nice and interesting side business.

Also some long legal negotiations are being rolled up these days, meaning that we expect to launch a big slew of new plugins into our webshop very soon. Been beta-testing the Windows Media ones for quite some time now, but I hope to add MPEG2 and MPEG4 to the beta program this week in preparation for the launch. There has also been some significant fixes done to the MP3 plugin we offer so a new version of that will also be pushed out.

I am also very happy to see all the nice GStreamer developments happening elsewhere, like the OpenOffice and GStreamer integration work reported on by Michael Meeks. The ongoing greatness of Jokosher and the really sweet UI revamp that will happen to Pitivi partly due to having recently hired a graphical designer here at Fluendo who has been working with Edward on coming up with some radical new UI ideas.