Category Archives: General

GStreamer Conference 2010 Update

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So the preparations for this year GStreamer Conference 2010 is progressing at a healthy pace. Today I put the list of speakers and abstracts online, which combined with the conference timetable should let you plan the event pretty well.

I recommend everyone to look over the list of speakers and abstracts, because I am sure there will be things there everyone will find interesting.

I would also like to remind everyone that we got some great talks happening as part of CE Linux as well like Benjamin Gaignard of ST Ericsson talking about Android and GStreamer, Stefan Kost of Nokia talking about Meego and GStreamer and finally Arun Raghavan from Collabora Multimedia speaking about Pulse Audio. So make sure not to miss the CE Linux days.

You find registration information on the main conference website and be sure to register early as space is limited, so if you wait to long you might not be able to register at all.

Respect to the web developers

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I been working on a web page for my wedding in November. This has turned out to be quite a lot more painful
than I expected and I have to admit my respect for web developers have increased a lot due to it. Getting a webpage to look nice across all browsers seems to be a really painful job.

Currently the only browser in which my page works perfectly is Firefox, Opera also does a mostly fine job, while Chrome fails on handling a dynamic SVG image I embedded in the page, and IE8, well lets not talk about what horrendous results it gives :)

Collabora Multimedia at GUADEC

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The full Collabora Multimedia crew is in The Hague this week for GUADEC and our annual get together. It is the first time all 12 of us are together and its nice to spend some time face to face to get to know each other beyond IRC.

Currently doing a little hackfest at our hotel, pushing forward some cool stuff like echo cancellation, PiTiVi and more.

GStreamer Conference 2010

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The preparations for the GStreamer 2010 conference is moving ahead at full speed. Today I was able to put the speakers list and program online showing out strong lineup of presenters and topics.

The actual GStreamer conference website is here for those of you who missed it the first time.

So be sure to mark 26th of October in your calendar so you can attend.
There are some great GStreamer related talks that will happen as part of
the CE Linux conference too, but I will wait until that program has been announced before letting you know more about those :)

OpenOffice and GStreamer

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Was happy to see this OpenOffice and GStreamer blog entry today about how OpenOffice has chosen GStreamer to power the multimedia support in OpenOffice going forward. While users of OpenOffice on Linux have been able to enjoy GStreamer support for quite some time thanks to the efforts of Novell, it is still good to see that the upstream project is also coming around to officially supporting this. Currently only enabled by default for Unix/Linux systems I hope we will see it used on Windows and on MacOS X eventually. A big welcome to the OpenOffice community into the GStreamer community :)

One man against the elements

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Every once in a while a man is faced with what seems like an insurmountable obstacle, at that point he has two choices, give up and despair or tackle the challenge head on. Yesterday I was faced with such an obstacle and in honour of my mountain dwelling ancestors I did the right thing and of course took on the challenge.

So what peril came across my path you ask? What challenge lead me to having to reach for new heights in ingenuity and problem solving? Well I will tell you. It all started in those days that Cambridge was bathed in blue skies and sunlight for over a week, it being such a rare occasion I felt a special tribute to the sun needed to be built and with no one else stepping up to the plate it was left to me to take on this Herculean and potentially dangerous task. The first component of my sun altar came from a land far away, known for its huge amounts of sunlight and its skimpy bikinis. This crucial building block was called the Amazonas Paradiso Terracotta Hammock and yesterday morning it was delivered to my humble abode.

However standing there with my new hammock I realized all was not well in the land, my garden only got one tree in it. And while others might have looked to the sky and screamed ‘why me?’ I instead decided to take matters into my own hands. So after a quick trip to B&Q I had gathered the materials I needed to create my own tree, my frankentree one could say. After a lot of digging, hammering, drilling and rope cutting, my act of creation was done, and a wonder had appeared in my humble garden.

And thus it had happened, against all odds and mother nature herself fighting against me, I had endured and in the end succeeded in my mission.

So now I can spend the rest of the summer relaxing in my wondrous hammock, enjoying Pax Romana

NLNet, Collabora Multimedia and Echo Cancellation

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One of our main goals here at Collabora is to move the open source multimedia platform forward. Due to this we are investing a lot of time and effort into projects such as GStreamer, Telepathy, PiTiVi, Empathy and PulseAudio. So when we are able to play our part in making sure open source and linux desktops keep abreast of current development, like our work on WebM with Google and Entropy Wave we of course feel extra happy.

Well I thought it was time to announce another important effort we have just undertaken. Thanks to the generous support of NLnet, the same guys who helped Collabora make the Muji multi party chat extension for XMPP, we are now kicking of an effort to add echo cancellation support to Pulse Audio.

The goal of this effort is to make it possible to hook in various kind of audio effects into PulseAudio, including echo cancellation, so that as an application you can just tell PulseAudio that you want it to give you echo cancellation between an incoming and outgoing channel. As a starting point we will port some open source echo cancellation implementations to this framework, with one of them ending up as the default (the goal is that applications can just ask for the default, but that they can also ask for a specific one if it doesn’t want the default for some reason).

We hope this work will have a lot of positive long term effects, easier support for echo cancellation in applications, new improved echo cancellation algorithms and implementations being released and improved audio drivers on the linux desktop (not all drivers are doing a good job currently).

So in the coming weeks Wim Taymans will be leading this effort on our side and I will try to keep you up to date on it as it progresses.

So a big thanks to NLnet for making this possible.

Deadline for submitting talks to GStreamer Conference

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Thought I should remind everyone that if you want to do a talk at the GStreamer Conference 2010 you need to submit an abstract before end of June. We already got some really great talks and presentations lined up, but there are still some slots up for grabs.

We are currently looking at splitting the day up into a batch of 45 minute presentations of GStreamer technologies and projects, some 10 minute lightning talks, and finally some 30 minute case-study type talks. So if you are interested in any of those make sure to send in an abstract. Looking forward to seeing as many of you as possible in October!