Category Archives: Collabora

Collabora at Intel Developer Forum

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Collabora will have a big presence at the Intel Developer Forum in San Fransisco next week. So if you are attending make sure to visit us at booth 525. We will be demonstrating some cool technologies at the conference, like our mobile video editing solution and video calling integrated into Media explorer. Rob McQueen, Philippe Kalaf, Guy Lunardi and Travis Reitter will be at the conference to discuss Collabora and the solutions we can offer. Be sure to check out our IDF 2011 mini-page with a lot more information on what we are doing at IDF this year. And if you are in the San Fransisco area and are interested in talking with us, but are not attending IDF, please contact us on idf@collabora.co.uk to arrange for a meeting.

Also early next week I will be traversing the exhibition part of the International Broadcasters Conference in Amsterdam, so if anyone wants to meet up there you can get hold of me through the IDF email address above.

Collabora at the Desktop Summit

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So like a lot of people I am going to the Desktop Summit this year. And I am not alone there from Collabora as usual, in fact there is quite a few talks during the conference by Collaborans. Having compiled this information anyway I figured that I should put it up here too, so others interested could get an overview of some of the areas we are involved with here at Collabora.

List of Collabora talks at the Desktop Summit this year in chronological order

Folks: Contact aggregation for Free Software by Travis Reitter.

WebKit Clutter Port Present and Future; WebKitGtk Status and Roadmap to WebKit2 by Gustavo Noronha Silva (Collabora), Martin Robinson (Igalia), Alejandro G. Castro (Igalia)

Improving the quality of video calls on the Free Desktop by Olivier Crête.

Gluing Together Usable Desktop Crypto by Stef Walter.

The Slothful Ways of D-Bus by Will Thompson.

The Semantic Desktop for Application Developers by George Goldberg.

GStreamer 1.0 by Wim Taymans and Edward Hervey.

Jeff Fortin and Edward Hervey will also organize a PiTiVi and gst-editing-services hackfest during the conference.

And finally there is the Collabora party on the 9th of August which of course is going to be best party of the conference :)

First GStreamer 0.11 out, GStreamer 1.0 looming on the horizon

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GStreamer maintainer Wim Taymans just released the first 0.11 development release of GStreamer. The 0.11 development series will lead up to the long awaited GStreamer 1.0 release!

The changes from 0.10.x to 0.11 might seem quite technical and obscure to most, with items such as reworked buffer memory management, arbitrary buffer metadata and integrated bufferpool management being among the advertised features, but all these changes are made to help GStreamer make significant leaps forward in terms of integration with hardware codecs like VAAPI and VDPAU and of course hardware codecs on embedded platforms like ARM for instance the OpenMax IL API. There are also a lot of important performance improvements, which will make applications like Totem and Banshee more snappy to use, but you probably will see the biggest improvements in applications like PiTiVi who relies on more complex pipelines and thus more complex pipeline negotiations. For devices which got more constrained CPU resources, like various embedded systems, these performance gains should also be very noticeable.

At Collabora we are putting a lot of effort towards GStreamer 1.0, most visible through letting Wim put most of his work hours into it, in collaboration with our partners at Texas Instruments. GStreamer is not just another open source project for us at Collabora, it is something we are truly passionate about. The open source software ecosystem can not compete with proprietary systems unless we have a top notch media framework and with GStreamer we are providing exactly that. Ever since the release of GStreamer 0.10 the project has gone from strength to strength, and when 1.0 gets released later this year it will be another major milestone towards world domination :)

For those interested to learn more about GStreamer 1.0 you have two good opportunities coming up, Collabora’s own Wim Taymans and Edward Hervey will be doing a talk about GStreamer 1.0 at the Desktop Summit on 8th of August. And Wim will also be doing a keynote speech about GStreamer 1.0 at the GStreamer Conference 2011 in October. So I hope to see you there.

I am also working on an interview with Wim Taymans about GStreamer 1.0 so if you have any questions you would like me to include, feel free to add them to the comments section of this blog post.

We will also be organizing some 0.11 hackfests online where people like Wim, Tim and Edward will be online to answer porting questions and the community can work together to port all important plugins to 0.11. There is some early stage porting documentation to be found here.

For now, go to the GStreamer website and grab the 0.11 tarballs and give them a spin, and if you have any questions, remember you are always welcome in on irc.freenode.net.

GStreamer Conference 2011 Update

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I just sent out an email with the latest update on the GStreamer Conference 2011. Mostly to let people know there is an early bird registration fee for signing up to the conference before 24th of September.

I also updated the topics list to reflect some of the talks that will be held this year, even if we are not ready to release the full schedule yet, still some details that needs to be sorted for that.

Anyway, hoping to see as many of you as possible in Prague in October :)

Comments on Novacut

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Been some discussion recently about Novacut, a open source non-linear video editor project which is trying to raise some money through kickstarter, a crowd sourcing system.

Personally I think that some of the criticism against Novacut and their effort is fair. It does seem extremely ambitious and it hard to reconcile the money requested and the ambitions of the project. That said I am not as sceptical to the endeavour as some, I even pledged some money to it in fact.

The thing is, a lot of open source projects starts out a bit naive about the challenges ahead of them, and frankly if they had known all the problems facing them when starting out, they would never had succeeded. For instance, if we had known up front it would take us 10 years to get GStreamer to where it is today I don’t think we would have ever started.

The other factor that plays on my mind is that even if they ‘fail’, they might be a great success. The thing is they plan on building Novacut on top of GStreamer and GNonlin, the same foundation as PiTiVi. As part of this process I am sure they will find and fix bugs in GStreamer and GNonlin and they will add new features to GStreamer and GNonlin. So even if ‘Novacut’ itself fails to take off, a lot of the work they will be doing will directly benefit GStreamer applications in general and probably PiTiVi especially. And who knows, even if ‘Novacut the application’ fails to ever reach a useable state, maybe ‘Novacut the idea’ will be alive and kicking inside PiTiVi in a year or two.

One could argue that Novacut should be done as a PiTiVi extension from the beginning, and I might agree, but to me, saying no to Novacut for not being a PiTiVi patch or extension is saying no to something good because you want to wait for something utopian.

Instant messaging hackfest at Collabora office

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This week the Collabora office has been filled with a great group of people trying to make sure the instant messaging in GNOME Shell among other things works nicely. For those of us who use GNOME shell, like with latest Fedora, the integration into the shell is quite nice, but it also has some irritating behavioural issues. To resolve these issues some of our top Collabora coders working on Empathy and Telepathy has joined forces with coders from Red Hat, Intel and the community who work on messaging and/or the GNOME shell, to iron out the remaining issues and define any new APIs that are needed. The full agenda and attendee list can be found on the IM hackfest page.

To give you all an idea of the event I took this photo of the group sitting in our meeting room today:

Hackfest at Collabora office

For day to day reporting I suggest following the blog of Bastien Nocera who has been making daily posts from the hackfest. You would also want to read the update from the hackfest from Collaboras own Danielle Madeley.

On the path to GStreamer 1.0

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GStreamer maintainer and code god Wim Taymans just posted an update on the the progress of GStreamer 0.11 to the GStreamer development mailing list. For those interested in learning about the new features coming in GStreamer 1.0 this email (along with the previous update) is must read material.

In addition to the updates on the core coding work and important notice from Wim in his email is that the very first 0.11.x release will happen this week, so that you have a snapshot release to start playing with. GStreamer 1.0 is moving forward at a fast pace, so be prepared :)

Hopefully we can do a GStreamer 1.0 release part at the GStreamer Conference 2011!

GStreamer Conference 2011 update

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Just sent out this little email with some updates on the GStreamer 2011 Conference. Planning is progressing and a sponsorship leaflet is now available for those interested in sponsoring the conference. The call for paper deadline is also slowly but surely approaching, so anyone who wants to do a talk please send in an abstract before the 1st of July this year.

For everyone else, just register for the conference and set aside October for GStreamer and Prague :) As always details can be found on the GStreamer Conference 2011 website.

Luis talk on Rygel

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For those who don’t know yet Rygel is an open source implementation of DLNA, a standard for ensuring interoperability between the different media devices on your home LAN. Rygel was started some years ago by my friend Zeeshan Ali and is being used in Meego and GNOME among others. We have been working on Rygel for some time now and thus Collaboras own Luis de Bethencourt did a talk at the recent Meego Summit in San Fransisco. It is an interesting talk about the current state of Rygel and how a lot of the Rygel features are implemented using GStreamer. So if you are interested in the future of interoperable devices check out Luis talk at the Meego website. Seek about 3.5 minute into the talk as they haven’t edited the videos it seems so you get a lot of uninteresting preparation before the talk starts.