Michael Dominic posted a blog entry on the state of Diva. One of the major announcements he did was that he was looking into moving from GStreamer to MLT.

I usually try avoiding commenting on such decisions and instead let time decide wether they are wise or not, as making a comment on such things easily just cause bad feelings. Of course sometimes the need to make a comment overrides such concerns

One thing that Michael forgot to mention in his blog entry was that almost from the begining most of the GStreamer developers disagreed with the design choices he made in terms of Diva’s usage of GStreamer. Multiple times we tried to say that the Gnonlin approach was what we recommended and would be working towards enabling for these kind of applications. Michael disagreed and instead tried various alternative routes, which is why I feel somewhat unhappy about his claims about GStreamer in his blog. The rapid progress of Jokosher I feel validates our claims about Gnonlin to a large degree and I hope with our renewed effort into Pitivi we will have a 100% comparable application to Diva to prove our point with.

Edward added a reply to Michael’s blog pointing out some of the issues involved here, but one thing I want to expand upon and that is the issue of framework readiness. It is impossible to develop a framework such as GStreamer in isolation as there are always usecases and trouble areas that get lost or design decisions who seem clever from the framework point of view but which is a complete fuck up from the application developers point of view. This is a big part of the reason why GStreamer have taken so long to get to where it is today. Every time a new application type started using the framework we discovered that there where basic assumptions made in the core which simply didn’t hold true. This do make life for application developers a bit frustrating as they can get sucked into long periods of having to work on the framework and fixing bugs there instead of moving their application forward. I think people such as Stefan Kost with his Buzztard project and Edward Hervey with his Pitivi project can testify to that. The same is probably even true for the Totem and Rhythmbox projects who where among the early adopters of GStreamer. But thanks to the dedication and continous feedback of our application development community we have managed to ramp up the framework and also managed to keep the design pretty sane through it all.

I think this process is true for any major software project and I think no matter what multimedia framework Diva ends up using it will run into problems and deficiencies in the framework. The only framework which is sure to provide an application with all the features you could want working perfectly ‘today’ is one which already have applications using them sporting all the features you want. Which is why most music player developers for instance are pretty happy with GStreamer today, as there already are fully working high featured music players using the framework.

So on the GStreamer side applications such as Pitivi, Jokosher and Buzztard and Flumotion will continue to push the framework forward and resolve bugs and missing features as we find them. And while all the work going into for instance enabling DVD’s under GStreamer might feel like a unwanted distraction for a video editor developer I am pretty sure the long term effect of being able to easily import video from DVD’s directly into the editor will be a highly welcomed feature by the users.

I wish Michael good luck with Diva and trying out MLT, but I am pretty sure he will find that life there is just as painful, just with different set of bugs and missing features.

Andy Wingo reminded me that the 5th of December last year we did the first release of GStreamer 0.10. So Tuesday was actually our 1 year aniversary of GStreamer 0.10. We felt it was a major milestone for GStreamer, turning a corner in stability and usefullness. That said the move wasn’t completely without its detractors as the 0.10 branch did have some regressions compared to the 0.8 one. Now one year later I think its safe to say that GStreamer 0.10 has been a gigantic success. The number of developers contributing or using GStreamer have mushroomed and the status of the GStreamer project is much improved. There are still a few feature regressions left in GStreamer 0.10 compared to 0.8, DVD playback being the most noted example, but I think that is overshadowed by the improved capabilities of the framework and the much improved stability provided by the new framework.

The fact that we don’t try to ‘jury-rig’ new feature in place, but instead take the time to do them properly seems to win us more friends than having ‘all’ features available in a flaky manner.

Not everything is perfect though, we know for instance that some of our demuxers are still not perfect and applications like Pitivi and Jokosher breaking new ground are hitting new bugs. But the good thing is that unlike the 0.8 experience, with 0.10 we feel that when we fix bugs they stay fixed, instead of playing bugzilla whack-a-mole like we did with 0.8. For every day we see bugs getting fixed or new plugins getting made, all bringing us closer to give the community the media experience they deserve.

So congratulations to the rest of the GStreamer community with 1 year of GStreamer 0.10 rocking hard!

Edward got his first major patch for Pitivi yesterday. Cool thing was that it was from an old GStreamer hero who we hadn’t heard from in a long while, namely Richard Boulton. Richard is one of the few people who I think pre-dates my own involvement in regards to GStreamer apart from Wim and Erik. Welcome back Richard

What Richard provided for Pitivi was the save/load Project feature which is critical going forward where Pitivi is reaching a level of usability that makes saving and tweaking projects become a real priority. Cool stuff.

Novell bashing at Groklaw

Have to say I agree with Jono on the latest Novell bashing story on Groklaw. It feels more like an attempt at smearing than anything else. As anyone who have followed OpenOffice for the last years would have known, Ximian and later Novell always maintained a large set of changes for OpenOffice due to the process of getting them approved and merged upstream being long and painful. A lot of nice stuff like the GTK+ support and a much improved icon set created by TigerT and Jimmac is the heritage of this effort. Michael Meeks has probably pulled in more people to help out with OpenOffice than anyone else in addition to the incredible work he personally have done on OpenOffice. This is just a few of the contributions done by first Ximian and later Novell to OpenOffice.org. Starting to accuse them now of forking is just childish.

PJ, it is fair to critisize the Novell & MS deal, but please try to keep things at a intelligent level, more postings like that one and you lose all the cred you built up over the last few years.

So I blogged about Texas Instruments work around GStreamer yesterday. Today I found this article about GStreamer and Texas Instruments on EETimes.com. Lots of lovely quotes in the article like:

Since GStreamer is a very popular and well-known framework, which has become a standard in digital video development, the ability to access the capabilities of the DSP from within this environment saves programmers from the need to learn the proprietary DSP programming language.

Yes, you heard it here first, GStreamer has become a standard for digital video development.

Ok the wait is over, the new Decodebin element has landed in GStreamer. It will be part of the new GStreamer core and base release next week. It will not be used by default for this version though, instead you have to set the USE_DECODEBIN2=true Environment variable to have playbin use it instead of the old decodebin. Once it gotten some testing during this release it will be the default in the release afterwards.

So what new features do this bring? Well for the end user nothing will change overnight, but for developers it opens the path to fixing things like Chained Ogg playback, DVD handling and non-raw media output (for instance outputing AC3 to your S/PDIF port). A big thanks to Edward for fixing this.

Jack and GStreamer

Paul Davies of JACK Audio fame popped up on GStreamer-devel list last week asking about GStreamer JACK support. The discussion on both the mailing list and on IRC has since been about when to pull and when to push :). Anyway Wim decided to do take a stab at a JACK sink for GStreamer and its scheduled to hit CVS tonight.Update: It hit bugzilla today

Mentioned some time ago that Edward and Christoph had worked out some mockups about how the ‘simple’ view in Pitivi should work and look. As many of you might beware of we are aiming for a two view model in Pitivi, with a simple view which should allow anyone to do some basic editing and an advanced view meant for the more technical user who wants more detailed controlled of the timeline.

Edward Hervey blogged about these mockups last week after they are not cleaned up and commented. Be sure to check them out, we don’t know exactly when we will get to implement them all, but they do show the direction we are heading with Pitivi.

Jokosher roadmap

Another must read blog is Stuart Langridge, hacker extraordinaire on Jokosher and Jackfield. He had a recent blog entry discussing the outcome of the Jokosher 1.0 planing meeting with links and information on what the Jokosher community priorities are going forward. Be sure to check it out.