One question we have often got in the GStreamer community is how to quick and easily port a multimedia application not using GStreamer to GStreamer. The answer to that question is still what it always has been, to port your user interface to the GStreamer application API and turn your processing logic into GStreamer plugin modules. But for many that is not really an option and they have been looking for an intermediate step to start out with.

Two plugins that where recently moved into GStreamer-plugins-base aims to provide exactly such an intermediate step, AppSink and AppSrc. These two plugins will allow your application to get access to raw buffers from GStreamer and provide raw buffers to GStreamer. Doing this you can take whatever output your application produce, send it into GStreamer for further processing, and then take it back into the application layer again, or have GStreamer output the data to for instance an audio or video sink. Not as efficient as having all the processing happen within the boundaries of GStreamer of course, but as mentioned, for a mature existing application that porting process might be to big to take in one step.

So if you have an application already in which you want to start taking advantage of GStreamer, these plugins might be the starting point you have been looking for.

So Sebastian Dröge has continued to work hard on getting full support for the MXF container format in GStreamer. MXF is a quite complex format so this has taken some time, but the demuxer is really getting there these days. We should now be able to handle most standard MXF files and Sebastian recently added full seeking support to the demuxer. Screenshot of MXF playback in action below.

MXF file played in Totem

We are not 100% there yet though as there are still some formats we need to add support for and there is also the non-standard Avid file support which mostly works, but can use a little more love. As an added bonus Avid’s standard way to storing media is to put Audio and Video into separate MXF files which makes them a fun thing to try to support in Totem. :) Supporting those files is also needed to support the Digital Cinema extension of MXF.

So the demuxer is basically ready for testing for those of you with interest in our MXF support. Sebastian will start on the muxer soon and its development will push forward in parallel with further polishing of the demuxer.
Also some other minor issues, like Totem not yet knowing about MXF files so the file picker do not list them as ‘Supported files’, but I am sure we will clear that up quick enough.

GStreamer now got what I think its fair to say the best open source MXF demuxer out there thanks Sebastians effort and it is a big step forward for our overall effort here at Collabora Multimedia to push Pitivi forward as a video editor, especially in terms of it being able to exchange files with major video editors.

Been following the approval hearings in the US for two of Obama’s appointments, first for Timothy Geithner and now for Tom Daschle and Nancy Killefer. So I do not know these people, so I am not passing a moral judgment here and I have no idea of how easy it is to do the kind of tax mistakes that these two have done. What I do not understand though is how its possible that someone with incomes ranging in the hundreds of thousands a year, end up sitting at home doing their tax returns themselves instead of using a professional accountant? I mean it is a given that when you have that level of income there will be complex tax issues that you want to handle properly, especially if you operate in the political sphere where everything you do is heavily scrutinized. And even if they consider themselves competent enough to do these kind of tax returns, do they really have the time?

I mean if I where a politician one thing I would feel compelled to do was to make sure I had an accountant making sure my taxes was a 110% correct as no matter how innocent the mistake made would come out looking very bad as these 3 cases prove.