I search for GStreamer and related topics on news.google.com from time to time to see what kind of press coverage and interest there is. Usually it is interesting articles like this one about Songbird 1.0 and GStreamer, but sometimes I also come across some really silly stuff.

Today I found this press release which apart from mentioning linux and GStreamer is an incomprehensible collection of attempted buzzwords and random product names. I guess if one knew all the products and technologies from this company intimately already, one would have an idea what they are talking about. For the rest of us its just utter gibberish.

One of the first things I ever did after getting involved with the open source community was conduct various interviews for the now long gone linuxpower.org website. I continued doing that for quite a while after I got involved with GNOME and GStreamer, but it has now been quite a few years since I last did an interview. Been planing to restart my effort many a time, but never seemed to get around to it. But some weeks ago I decided to kick myself into action again.

So I present you with an interview with none other than Laszlo Pandy the maintainer of the Jokosher audio editor. So head on over to gnomedesktop.org (which I felt could use a little injection of activity) and hear about the current status and future plans for Jokosher and the state of linux multimedia.

If people like the interview I will follow-up with more multimedia related interviews in the weeks and months to come.

Sebastian Dröge is finishing up a major piece of work these days in terms of adding support for the MXF container format in GStreamer and Pitivi.
This is a complex format and we found that there is not a lot of easily findable sample content out there on the interweb. So we request that those of you out there with applications which can generate MXF files, like Avid and Final Cut Pro, please provide us with short samples along with a description of which codecs are inside and which application generated the file. Attach any such files you are able to generate to reports in GStreamer bugzilla.

We are happy to announce the latest team member joining us here at Collabora Multimedia. Jorn Baayen, well known for his work on projects such as Rhythmbox, Muine and most recently GUPnP. Jorn will be working on a range of things for us, but first and foremost he will be our UPnP and DLNA expert. We figured that getting Jorn on board with be a great way to make sure that the world still had access to a company offering consulting services around GUPnP after Opened Hand got bought by Intel.

So welcome aboard Jorn, we are very happy to have you on our team!

As most I have participated in a lot of competitions and lotteries over the years. Only time I previously won something was when I got a digital calculator wristwatch from the Disney Book Club when I was 12 years old.
Well this time I actually won something I think is rather cool. Thanks to a competition hosted by the cool people at Bit Tech in collaboration with Ubisoft I just won this cool PS3:

My new PS3

The conspiracy theorists among you might think I only won this because I work with Wim Taymans and this is a way for Ubisoft to show their gratitude for Puffys Saga, the game Wim wrote which essentially secured Ubisofts success :)

But no that is not the case, this was pure luck. Only thing that suprised me though is that after spending so much time and money on making this price they didn’t bother throwing in a copy of the actual Farcry 2 game, but I guess that is where they hope to recoup their cost :)

Update: Seems I was a bit quick about the game. Got a package from Ubisoft in the post with not only Farcry2, but 3 other Ubisoft PS3 games too. Thanks! :)

In case people missed it there was an article on our Pitivi effort by Nathan Willis posted on Friday at linux.com. The article mentions our current plans in terms of accelerating the development of Pitivi.

On the topic of Pitivi, Brandon Lewis posted a blog entry recently describing and showing a screenshot of his work on improving audio handling in Pitivi.

For those who might have missed it George Wright of the BBC blogged on Thursday about the Totem BBC plugin we are doing with them and Canonical and which I blogged about earlier. As George pointed out this plugin is not the iPlayer in terms of content, but I still hope a lot of you will end up using it. The more popular it is the more mindshare it will have, including within the BBC, and thus easier it will be to get further content added.

The content distribution system is also fully open sourced, so it should be possible for any broadcaster who is interested to use it for their content.

For those of you who wants to test this plugin, who are not using Ubuntu’s test packages, the patch for Totem is available in this bugzilla entry. As the totem progress and we work towards merging the latest versions will be posted to there.

Pitivi video editor

For those of you interested in the latest news on Pitivi I recomend you track Brandon’s blog. He posted yesterday a big update on his latest work to drill the Pitivi UI into shap. Keywords for this entry is cleander default layout, detachable components and a property editor.