The new deadline for Google Summer of Code proposals is 26th of March. So I strongly recommend any interested students to get moving on sending in their GStreamer related SoC proposals to the Freevo project. You find their project suggestions list here.
All posts by uraeus
GStreamer GSoC Projects
Dirk Meyer of the Freevo mediacenter project gst-devel today pointing to
the Freevo summer of code projects page. As you can see they have a lot of GStreamer related things as they are moving a lot of their infrastructure over to GStreamer these days. So I strongly encourage interested students to sign up for Freevo projects.
Aaron Bockover pointed on his blog to some interesting Banshee projects which also involve GStreamer, like making a GStreamer using Windows port of Banshee work perfectly. You find these projects here.
Also a general note to mentoring organisations who have students submit interesting GStreamer related proposals, please be aware that there are many people in the GStreamer community willing to mentor/co-mentor such projects. So if you need mentors with strong GStreamer knowledge for your projects please let us know.
Forking GTK+ for Google Summer of code
Having discussed how to evolve GNOME on LUGRadio I figured that
an interesting proposal for a Google Summer of Code project would be to fork GTK+. Many people in the community have talked about how GNOME 3 would need to happen outside the current structures. I also think that nothing fundamental will change in GNOME without a new GTK+ giving the impetous for such a change. So a enterprising student could put together a proposal for taking GTK+ and trying to make a ‘Beryl’ version. The goal might not need to be to create something that would actually become GTK+, but instead come up with changes to GTK+ that enables some stunning graphical effects inside GTK+ applications, kind what they are doing with Beryl on the window manager level. So the ‘fork’ would not care about things maintainability, portability or sensibiilty, but instead try to enable some select demo applications to do some amazing looking things. Enlightenment (which also sports a GUI toolkit these days) would be a good example for ideas for some cool effects, Beryl another. Another idea could be to try to integrate librsvg with GTK+ and use it to do interesting things. The goal of such projects should simply be to try to inspire the GNOME community into taking the leap.
When GNOME originally came out its themeing capabilities essentially set the bar for letting users and developers change the look and feel of their desktop. Lets try to do so again 
And to make it clear. With Fork I don’t mean an actuall fork in the sense of a new project meant for a life of its own, more of doing a wild and wacky experiemental branch.
GStreamer and Google Summer of Code 2007 (part 2)
Ok, so it seems GStreamer didn’t make it into GSoC this year. I haven’t gotten any official explanation and I don’t think I will ever get one either. What it do seem like is that most projects which participated last year got close to automatic re-approval unless they fucked up last year. This is course meant the number of slots open for new organisations was very small and looking at the new entries compared to last year it seems they focused on getting organisations doing something that felt a little different from the already participating organisations. So while I part of my feel almost insulted on behalf of GStreamer looking at some of the projects accepted, I think it is important to remember that they are there because they where there last year and did a decent job of mentoring their students, not because Google did any kind of importantance/relevance evalulation of the participating projects.
For for students looking into doing GStreamer related projects my suggestion is the same as we proposed last year and which worked out well for many students. Submit your proposal to another project which is relevant for your proposal, the most easy targets being GNOME and KDE for application projects using GTK+ and Qt. But also other projects are of course possible candidates.
LUGRadio and me
So in case anyone missed it I participated in the most recent edition of LUGRadio mostly talking about various multimedia related things. Had a fun time hanging out with Ade, Matt, Jono and Stuart in the English heartland for one evening. Listening to oneself recorded like that is quite scary, one realize how mangled some sentences come out and how badly some words get pronounced
Schrodinger 0.5.0
So I cut a new release of Schrodinger today, our Dirac implementation. David Schleef has been kicking ass lately and this release feature much much improved image quality over the previous development snapshot.
.
We are still not 100% there yet, but things are moving forward at a good pace. You can get the latest package at the Schrodinger website.
GStreamer and Google Summer of Code 2007
So in order to not miss out like last year we have managed to get our
application for participating in Google Summer of Code submitted in time this year. So if everything goes as we hope GStreamer will be a separate GSoC project this year. We invite any application developer using GStreamer to add projects proposals to our SoC2007 wiki in addition to any GStreamer ‘internal’ proposals you might have.
UK trip
So I spent most of this week in England doing various meetings. Spent Monday and Tuesday at Brunel University participating in a project meeting for a EU project we are involved inn. While the University buildings didn’t look terribly exciting I have to say that my impression when walking around campus was that they have managed to create a very interesting multi ethnic environment at Brunel with a very wide specter of cultures and backrounds and without any specific one to be the clear majority.
On Tuesday evening I headed down to London and crashed at Matthew and Soz place. Its always a blast to hang out with Matthew exchanging the latest news and discussing items of shared interest. Still think his dogs looks freaky though, but it also has to be said that I don’t think I ever met more friendly and good natured dogs either.
Wednesday morning I went travelled into downtown London to have a meeting with Dolby. My contact at Dolby was a nice fellow named Andy Dowell who funnily enough was going to Barcelona later the same day.
Might be heading over to Dolby HQ in the US later this year to discuss further how we can work together as it turned out we and Dolby might have further common interests than I first thought.
After the Dolby meeting I took the train up to the English heartlands, that tranquil place where people live a happy and content life following in the footsteps of their forefathers. This place, also known as Wolverhampton, is also the location of four large gents who wants to turn this rural paradise into the information technology pulpit of England. We did a recording of LUGRAdio in the evening where apart from serious topics related to Linux and open source we managed to discuss embarassing sexual desires and orange underwear.
Interesting comments
Found this interview today with Jeff Bonforte, a Yahoo VP. He talks a lot about usability of web applications and claims a focus on usability is the reason Yahoo messenger and email is more popular than Google’s services. I would have been more impressed if he had also mentioned that a large part of those numbers might be related to Yahoo’s email and chat being around for quite a few years before Google got into those markets.
He has an interesting quote in the article though:
On Yahoo! Messenger for the Mac client, I reduced the functionality by 30 per cent and increased usage by 35 per cent. As we take out features, it tends to do better with the mainstream users.
Apart from being an interesting quote in terms of the eternal discussion about GNOME usability it did strike me that being an online application maker has some great advantages, like being able to measure exactly how each change you do influence usage patterns and popularity.
New Schroedinger release out
So David Schleef is kicking ass currently and our Dirac implementation, Schrodinger, is moving quickly forward these days. I just cut a new development releases of both Schroedinger and libtsmux so be sure to check them out.
The plan is to try to make much more frequent releases from here out as things are coming together fast now and the package is at least generally useful for testing.
Be aware that the weakest link in the package is currently the encoder, but this is also what David is focusing on at the moment so expect to see big strides forward in the next few weeks and months in terms of quality of encoded video. Could be we need to tweak the encoder setting further also, although David tried add some sensible defaults for this release.
Here is a couple of screenhots of Totem in action playing a movie I transcoded from a HD Quicktime clip.
The pipeline used to create this movie was:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=animusic2dvd_m720p.mov ! decodebin2 name="decode" decode. ! ffmpegcolorspace ! videoscale method=1 ! "video/x-raw-yuv, width=(int)640, height=(int)360" ! ffmpegcolorspace ! schroenc ! queue ! oggmux name=mux ! gnomevfssink location=file:///tmp/anime.ogg decode. ! audioconvert ! vorbisenc ! queue ! mux.
OpenOffice almost ate my document
I spent quite some time yesterday trying to editing a document I had been sent. I didn’t actually check the file format before I loaded it into OpenOffice, but today I found that it was a RTF file. Anyway, the editing went well and I saved my changes without thinking about it and sent the document of to the people I was corresponding with. Then today I got a mail back that the document was unreadable. It was at this point I realized it was a RTF file and not a Doc file I had been sent.
I tried loading the file in OpenOffice and it failed miserably. So it turns out that OpenOffice exports RTF which neither it or Microsoft office is able to read.
Out of the blue came my saviour. Abiword was able to import the document and save it again in a RTF format that OpenOffice was able to read and all my changes to the document were saved from oblivion.
Abiword had a weird error where it ‘blinked’ on certain section of the document, but that was a small issue compared to the almost destruction caused by OpenOffice
The beauty of free software
So I spent quite a bit of time this weekend working on an article I’ve been brewing on for quite a while. Don’t know if the article ever will reach a state where I will publish it, but as I was writing it suddenly two of the things I where writing about people where blogging about already working on. So a big thanks to John Stowers for his work on Conduit and to Ryan Lortie for his work on panelcompositebin. Thanks to guys like you doing great stuff my article almost become redundant even before its out of first draft status
