Been a great week at the Gran Canaria Desktop Summary. Met up with a lot of old and new friends, seen a lot of great talks and even managed to improve my tan quite a bit. Yesterdays GStreamer summit went well, we managed to snag the labs 2-6 room and had a long and mostly fruitful discussion about GStreamer 1.0. The general plan going forward will be to increase our number of element baseclasses, in order to both improve the general quality of elements, but also to make the job having all 0.10 plugins available with 1.0 more viable. Our general goal is still to match GStreamer 1.0 with GNOME 3.0, but it will be a tight fit so we can’t be sure to make that deadline, unless GNOME 3.0 slips a bit. A big thanks to Jan for leading the meeting and to Thomas for taking on the job of writing a technical summary of the discussion.

It was also nice while here to meet Daniel Taylor of Arista fame and to discuss some of the practical challenges ahead for both Arista and Transmageddon.

After a bit disappointing experiences with the food the first few days we found a wonderful tapas place two days ago called La Tasca de Los Vinos. It specializes in wines, but also serve a lot of really nicely done tapas. And they also have some really nice meat which they bring out a large raw slab of to your table and then you negotiate the piece they will cook for you. The owner promised us some special succulent pork if we came back there again today, so we might have to do that :). Had a lot of fun during dinner, like Jan starting of speaking like a nihilist with a german accent and after a few iterations, drinks and challenges doing a stuttering nihilistic pirate with a german accent, with great success :)

Been also hacking steadily on Transmageddon while here, moving closer and closer to remuxing support. Was reminded of the great tool done by Stefan which lets you generate a graphical representation of your applications pipeline when you get an error. So in Transmageddon GStreamer buswatcher function I now have a line that reads:

gst.DEBUG_BIN_TO_DOT_FILE (self.pipeline, gst.DEBUG_GRAPH_SHOW_ALL, 'transmageddon.dot')

Which in combination with the GST_DEBUG_DUMP_DOT_DIR environment variable dumps a file that graphwiz can use to generate the linked image. Laszlo of Jokosher fame mentioned during the GStreamer Summit that he mostly use that these days for debugging issues rather than the GST_DEBUG logging (which can be quite verbose).

Finally, I was also very happy with the Collabora Multimedia Polo shirts we got made. People seemed to really like them and I ran out of the smaller sizes very quickly even if I generally only offered them to people with a GStreamer track record. I think the conference went really well both for us in the Multimedia group and for Collabora in general. Wims tutorial on developing RTP applications with GStreamer was well attended and Wim is really good at explaining stuff, I have no problems seeing why we have customers asking Wim to come back time after time to do GStreamer training sessions and assist with design discussions. Edwards talk on PiTiVi also went really well and I think people where quite impressed with how far it has come. With the additional features being rolled out in the coming Months and the discussions I had while here, I think PiTiVi will quickly end up being shipped by all the major distributions as part of their default desktop setup. Tim also got some positive feedback on Thoggen and I think finally accepted that he actually do have quite a lot of users. He even promised to finally add Dirac support to Thoggen.