Summary of GStreamer Conference 2010

Had a really great time organizing and running the GStreamer conference this year. We had a ton of people attending and all the talks where packed (some of them maybe too packed even, like David Schleefs Orc talk. To bad not more people know about Orc because if widely used and deployed it could revolutionize the performance of Linux systems.

For those wondering videos (and slides) of the talk should start appearing online from next week, I will link to them from the conference web page and also send out an announcement.

Was also happy to see LWN picking up on the plans for GStreamer 1.0 (you have to wait a week unless you are a subscriber, but I do recommend to subscribe) that Collabora Multimedias own Wim Taymans announced in his keynote. Together with the rest of the GStreamer community members we will push forward next year to get the long awaited beast out the door, with Collabora Multimedia dedicating Wim to the task. This time it will happen.

In general I also think we managed to put together a good mix of talks at the conference, with a lot of technology talks centered on things like the mobile editing system we are building for GStreamer and MeeGo with Nokia, the advances in the Telepathy VoIP and video conferencing system and the drop inn ready DLNA support through Rygel. It clearly shows how we moved beyond the basic playback/recording scenario in GStreamer and moved on towards more advanced solutions and at the same time how we in the Collabora family are at the heart at driving a lot of those developments. Cheesy as it sounds I am extremely happy about how we are at a point now where we are not only able to provide a fun and challenging work environment for a lot of people, but also have the resources now to drive the development of projects like GStreamer and Telepathy forward beyond just addressing our clients most immediate needs.

I was not the only one enjoying myself at the GStreamer and CE Linux conference, for instance one of the newest members of the Collabora Multimedia family, Mauricio Piacentini and our Qt and KDE multimedia expert was here, reporting on his experience from the conference and talking a bit about our ongoing effort together with Nokia to great some great Qt C++ bindings for GStreamer.

Robert Swain reports on both the fact that his been with us for a year (time flies crazy fast) and on the talk by Benjamin Gaignard about the GStreamer and Android work we have been doing with them over the last year. I saw Harald Welte was a bit disappointed the glue code between GStreamer and Android has not been released, but as Robert points out, there was still major contributions happening from ST Ericsson to the code of GStreamer through this project, fixes and improvements that will greatly help anyone wanting to us GStreamer with Android.

My friend Thomas Vander Stichele also blogged about the event pointing out that we are a decent sized group of GStreamer greybeards at this point, with quite a few developers around who have about 10 years or more of GStreamer experience ;)

Anyway, considering what a great success the conference was I think there is no way forward except doing a new conference next year, so hope to see everyone I met at next years conference. Co-locating with ELCE seemed to work out really well for both us and them, but we have to wait and see what happens next year due to the big changes for the CE Linux conference due to the Linux Foundation merger, maybe Jim Zemlin doesn’t love us for instance :)

And for those I didn’t get to talk to or only speak to for a short while, I apologize but being the first one there was a lot of little things that needed sorting and fixing to make it all run smoothly, so I am sorry if I seemed stressed and distracted :)

7 thoughts on “Summary of GStreamer Conference 2010

  1. ORC is a great idea, but I would like to know when they are going to pick up the Sandybridge AVX instructions. I haven’t been able to find any info about this. Regardless, like you I think it needs to be adopted widely across Linux. A relatively cheap way to make use of various SIMD ISAs would be invaluable for mobile software as well (since it supports NEON).

  2. liam: You should probably ask David himself. His contact details can be found on the Entropy Wave website and the ORC code can be found there too.

    I attended David’s talk and despite never having written or even read and understood any assembly before, within a day I had written 4 working ORC functions for some code on which I am working that performed some simple and less simple metrics on two or more scalines. The overall processing time dropped by 75%. After just a few hours work I’d gone from a filter that couldn’t be used in realtime to one that could. Amazing. :)

    • Thanks, Robert. I hadn’t noticed the host location of ORC before.
      Congrats on the perf improvements. That reinforces Uraeus’ point about it’s utility.

  3. Thanks for the update.
    I missed this most awaited conference, due to VISA issues, where I could have met so many people whom I had been talking offline :)
    I am waiting egarly for the video..

    Cheers

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