Thought I should remind everyone that starting from today one can submit proposals for the Google Summer of Code. So if you are a student and interested in doing a GStreamer SoC project (or one of those obscure other projects participating for that matter :) this summer then be sure to get your proposal inn.
Monthly Archives: March 2010
GStreamer and Google Summer of Code 2010
So a big thank you to Leslie and her team at Google for also this year accepting GStreamer as a mentoring organisation. Last few years we had some great projects coming out of the Google Summer of Code, including MPEG PS muxing, Quicktime Muxing, ASF muxing, LADSPA version 2, Avisynth, MHEG support and more.
If you are a student and want to get some useful experience while getting paid this summer, developing multimedia software, I think there is no better way to do so than a GStreamer GSoC project, for instance you could help us develop our first native VAAPI elements or any of the other tasks on our SoC project suggestion list.
Of course don’t limit yourself to that list, personally for instance I would love to see some proposals from students interested in extending PiTiVi.
With it being shipped with Ubuntu now and transition support getting merged very soon it is a great time to help userfriendly video editing on linux become a reality. Just be sure to keep it stable as you add your features though as we don’t want join the other efforts out there in the click and crash category ;)
Interested students should check out the Google Summer of code website for details on how the project works and how to sign up.
Please feel free to ask questions on the GStreamer-devel mailing list or on the #gstreamer channel on irc.freenode.net.
Update: Thought I should also link to the Google Summer of Code timeline. As you see the student application period starts on the 28th of March and ends on the 9th of April. Every year I strongly recommend people to get their applications in early as it lets you get more feedback on them and update them to a state where your chances of getting approved is significantly higher. The earlier in the process this happens the more discussion you can have with a potential mentor and thus better are your chances of making your proposal something the mentoring organisation wants to let got forward.
And as a sidenote, on the other end of the scale I should also mention that I seen good proposals which has been dropped as the student doesn’t seem to bother responding to feedback and questions.
Latest Dirac (schrodinger) release is really fast
I thought I should let people know that they really should grab latest version of the Schrodinger encoder/decoder from diracvideo.org. If you saw David Schleefs blogpost about Dirac you would have seen him mentioning it is much faster.
Having tested with GStreamer I can confirm that it is the case, it is really fast now, and CPU usage which used to be the achilles heal of Dirac doesn’t seem to be an issue now. Be sure to also grab gst-plugins-base 0.10.28 too though, as it contains a critical fix for playing back Dirac in Ogg containers.
GStreamer on Windows
While GStreamer has been working on Windows for a long time and one can compile GStreamer using Visual Studio, the lack of pre-made binaries for Windows developers has been a bit of an issue. Various groups and people have tried providing windows binaries for a while, but most efforts have stalled after a short while. The GStreamer winbuilds project however seems quite solid however and have now been doing good windows packages for quite a while. If you have been looking for Windows builds for GStreamer this is a good place to start. They already have a list of users on Windows and the reason I became aware is that the jokosher guys are using it for their windows porting effort.
Stepping into the future with GNOME Shell
Decided to join the early adopters crowd today and use the desktop of the future by switching to using GNOME Shell on my desktop. Luckily with Fedora its dead simple, you just yum install gnome-shell and then switch using the desktop effects widget under Preferences. Scarily simple.
So far GNOME shell has been very stable for me and the user experience has been mostly good. Still feels a little alien compared to what I was used to before, but nothing annoyingly alien. Only irritant so far is that the clock on the shell is using the luddite AM/PM time system instead of the proper 24H clock and I can’t figure out how/where to fix it. :)
Will report back next week if I decided GNOME shell is here to stay on my desktop or if its still needs some more love before I am ready to let it rule my life.