One thing I wanted to do for a while, is write up an entry praising this years Summer of Code students working on GStreamer related projects. The success rate of a Summer of Code project is a highly uncertain thing for a variety of reasons including things like overly optimistic time estimates, underestimation of the difficulty in doing the task at hand, bad/missing communication between mentor and student and so on. And of course even in the cases where a student manages to meet the objective goal of the summer project it do not necessarily mean that the upstream project will be able to merge the results without further work.

Anyway, this year things seems to be progressing extremely well with few or no major hickups.

Michael Sheldon have been steadily progressing on integrating Telepathy and Jokosher and his recent screenshots of his progress are truly exiting. Applications taking advantage of the advanced infrastructure that has been built to do some innovative things is something we wanted to see happen for a long time and this one has also been on the blue-sky plans for Jokosher from early on. Some nice screenshots available here and here.

Sebastian Droge have been hacking on improving our infrastructure for doing media editing/manipulating applications as part of his Summer of Code and most of his fixes are already in GStreamer CVS. He is currently working on fixing the long term painful issue of accurate seeking in mp3 files, which has been causing pain and problem for both Pitivi and Jokosher for a long while. Not a highly screenshootable effort, but none the less a very critical one.

Thanks to the incredible work that Brandon Lewis has been doing on Pitivi as part of his Summer of Code we now have cutting in Pitivi which is a major milestone in getting Pitivi to a stage where its actually useful and not only showing a lot of promise. More on that including a screenshot in Edward’s blog.

I guess you all have read Daniel Siegel’s great blog entries outlining the development of Cheese. This photoboot like application just kicks ass and what is more I am sure we will be able to resuse a lot of the work of Cheese in for instance Empathy as that efforts gears up to take on iChat in the blingy chat client space.

Alessandro Decina has also been kicking ass on improving GStreamer’s DVB support, which he is working on for the Freevo project. He is initially focusing on DVB-S, but to make sure those of us viewing DVB-T didn’t get left out in the cold, I bought a DVB card for my own money and sent of to Alessandro :)

So to sum up, you guys rock!