New queue element for GStreamer

One of the things which reduce the user experience of GStreamer today is that the current element used for buffering is not very nice. Meaning that if you have bandwith problems with streaming audio or video it will be very noticeable and give you a less than nice experience. Wim just made sure we took a big step forward in that
regard today with the new ‘queue2’ element commited to CVS. While it doesn’t take us all the way there it do improve upon the current situation a lot. This work combined with Wim’s recent code magic to improve RTSP support should take us a big step forward towards being a very good library for doing network streaming clients.

That the RTP work has been highly anticipated seems obvious based on the huge number of questions about RTP support we get onto gstreamer-devel mailing list. The same goes for the windows support which seems to have a lot of people testing it out. If only we could get more people onto testing our MacOSX support also to make sure it gets rock solid. Hopefully when we get a new release of gst-plugins-good out with both the MacOSX and Windows support included it will get us more users also on the Mac platform.

Jokosher

Getting a new piece of software stable and widely usable is hard and one quickly realize that working on the developers machines is not the same as working for everyone else. Which is was nice to see this blog entry by Niels Kjøller Hansen where he talks about latest version of Jokosher working for him. Still a lot of work remaining for Michael, Laszla, Jono and the rest of the crew before Jokosher has reached its full potential. I guess there are two major items on the todo going forward as I see it which need being taken care of, one being support for more advanced multichannel soundcards for recording, the second being making sure all the needed GStreamer plugins are in gst-plugins-good so distributions can package them easily. Today a few of the needed Jokosher plugins are in CVS of plugins-bad which of course makes it harder for people to get everything they want/need.

Tribal Trouble

I have blogged before about the game Tribal Trouble which is available for Linux. I was happy to see that they decided to
release their sales statistics recently. The most interesting point is probably that Linux sales accounted for as much as 11% of their total sales. I think that is a high enough number to make doing a linux port interestinng, especially for smaller game publishers.
The nice guys at Oddlabs also released the terrain generation engine they made for Tribal Trouble under the GPL.

I also came accross this recent Ryan “icculus” Gordon interview on linuxgames.com. If Linux ever becomes a mainstream games platform I think Ryan personally probably deserves something like 75% of the credit.