Monthly Archives: April 2007

Call for community RTP testers

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So Wim has been hacking on with the GStreamer RTP support and we have managed to play all our internal streams correctly now testing with the Darwin Quicktime Server, Axis RTP network camera and the RTP branch of Flumotion. There are still a few cosmetic things not working perfectly like getting Totem to display the name of the codecs being used, but all in all things are looking very sweet.

So if you want to help us out make it truly robust we ask that people grab latest CVS of GStreamer and the plugins modules and try to test out using Totem and playbin against local and internet RTP streams they have access too. GStreamer contains depayloaders for most MPEG/3GPP related payload types and Fluendo will soon add Windows Media RTP support to our codec package. The only major RTP (or rather RTP like) thing not supported yet is Real media and also Apple RTP of their older proprietary formats (Sorenson/QDM2). And of course we support Vorbis, Speex and Theora RTP streams :)

I have blogged before about our support for the most recent Apple streams like the Jobs keynote and here is a little screenshot of Totem viewing that stream.

Update:
I made a claim that sync was solved in current CVS and this turned out to be wrong and based on some miscommunication. Sync is still not fully done and it will still be a few weeks before it is so. According to Wim the only reason sync is better atm is purely coincidental. Testers are still very welcome though as it would allow us to sort out issues such as server compatability and so on.

Update 2:
After some lunchtime discussion it turned out my claim about sync was true afterall. Sync is now perfect for RTSP streams. What is missing is RTCP sync. :)

Also regarding the question of serving RTP there will be some rudimentary support in GStreamer once this work is done. Furthermore there are people from Axis working on enabling GStreamer as a RTP serving system so expect to see further updates on that front.

Silverlight for Linux

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Noticed that Miguel speculating about a Linux version of Silverlight. Personally I hope
we do not see such a announcement. Everytime Microsoft has promised Unix support its been done to rob their cross platform competitor of the argument and in the end not delivering. I remember Windows Media Player being announced for Unix back in the day when Microsoft where in the process of trying to kill off Real networks as a competitor in the streaming media space. In the end all they ever produced was a broken alpha release for Solaris and in the end they never released a final version for either Solaris or any other promised platform. Another example of such a sabotage targeted ‘port’ was Internet explorer for Unix, which Microsoft made as part of their effort to take down Netscape, which never came further than some hackish versions for Solaris and HP-UX before getting canceled.

Do we really want to see Microsoft try the same technique again? Sadly enough I doubt the mainstream press is observant enough to call Microsoft on their game even if its the Nth time they do it.

New job opening in the Elisa team

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So our Elisa team is growing fast and we are looking to hire one more person. We are primarily looking for someone with good linux and python experience, but knowledge of
OpenGL, DirectFB and GObject is also of interest. We are looking for someone with a European work permit who are interested in re-locating to Barcelona, Spain. As someone who have been living here for a while I can say that it is a wonderful city to live in, with good food and drink, beautiful architecture, great beaches and a fun gang of crazy hackers to work with.

If you are interested in joining our wild and wacky team please send an email with your resume to Lionel Martin, who you can reach at lionel[at]fluendo_dot_com. Non-french speakers are especially encouraged to apply :)

At the CE Linux Forum

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So Jan and I are participating at this years CELF Embedded Linux conference. It is my first CELF and it seems an interesting group of people from most of the major embedded system makers. The participation in this event from Asia is particularly good.

Lot of familiar faces from the GNOME community here too like Jeff Waugh, Matthew Allum, Robert McQueen, Carlos Guerreiro, Quim Gill, Robert Taylor and Marcel Holtmann.

Jan is doing a presentation/tutorial on GStreamer tomorrow and will also quickly demo the Fluendo DVD player as part of that talk.

Having a great time apart from the problems presented by the airline losing my luggage on the way over. Hopefully I will get it them today or I will have to start borrowing clothers from Jan; which is likely to make me have as tight fitting clothes as Steve Irwin used to be known for.

Animated gnome’s

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Came accross some old drawings made by Larry Ewing (the guy who created Tux) where he had tried making a GNOME mascot it seems. I hadn’t seen them before, but they are actually quite cute.

There are more sketches and animation variations available at:
Larry’s GNOME directory.

GStreamer projects in the years Google Summer of Code

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So I thought I should compose a list of all GStreamer related approved Summer of Code projects:

A big thanks to both the students and organisations involved.

Special mentions

Not related to GStreamer, but I found two projects I think deserve special mention looking over the approved projects.

The first is a project for OpenOffice to create proper SVG import support, I really hope this one pans out well as proper SVG support in OpenOffice would be a big step forward :
Draw/Impress: SVG Import Filter

The second project I found I noticed for somewhat other reasons, in fact I would like announce the winner of this years ‘Biggest Optimist in the Universe and Beyond 2007 Award’ to this project:
Dirac encoder and decoder.

Considering how long we have spent on getting Schrodinger up to scratch I am amazed that anyone even manage to believe they can create both a decoder and an encoder for Dirac in 3 Months.

GNOME Summer of Code

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Would just like to remind all established project contributors that the GNOME Mentor Summer of Code deadline is approaching fast. In fact we want most mentors ‘signed up’ within two days. So if you haven’t signed up to be a mentor already do so quickly. If you already have signed up as a mentor please use the ‘request mentorship’ button to ask for mentorship of your relevant projects. Projects which do not have someone requesting mentorship for them within a few days will have less a chance of getting approved among the final projects than projects who only aquire a mentor at a later stage. You find information on how to apply for being a mentor on the Google Soc page.

RTP in GStreamer

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So we had a meeting here at the office last Friday with Robert McQueen, Phillipe Khalaf from Collabora and Stefan Kost from Nokia. The reason for this meeting was to sort out the final points on RTP support in GStreamer. The Collabora guys have approached the issue so far from the VoIP side of things while we at Fluendo have approached it from a RTSP /streaming point of view. The point in time now had come to make sure our efforts stayed complimentary as our work here at Fluendo started pushing into areas which up to this point had been solely the the domain of Collabora. A lot of beautiful diagrams and drawings where made with Wim Taymans and Phillipe being the major designers at the meeting. The result was an agreement on an overall design and also a fairly clear roadmap for how we get there. The first steps taken will be Wim working on adjusting the Farsight Jitterbuffer plugin, including moving it into GStreamer CVS, to also catering for streaming needs and also working on the new RTP session manager design. The plan is then that after a while Phillipe will take over the torch and make sure the updated components fit into the wider needs of Farsight and Telepathy. All in all a very good and productive meeting.

Apart from coming up with some great specs I also think we managed to feed Rob, Phillipe and Stefan with some great tapas and also pour into them a couple (aka a lot) of beers :)