After getting a lot of updates on the GStreamer DVD menu support bugzilla entry, I figured it was time to make sure Jan Schmidt got some well deserved credit for the work he is doing getting the GStreamer DVD support fixed. Up to know people have had two choices for GStreamer based DVD playback, either Seamless which is a stand-alone DVD player, or using Totem. However the DVD playback you got in Totem using GStreamer up to know has been fairly basic, without DVD menu support for instance. With Jan’s ongoing work on his new resindvd plugin we are on the way to having full featured GStreamer-based DVD playback in Totem.

The resindvd plugin currently resides in plugins-bad, and Totem will automatically use it if you have it installed (and do not have the dvdnav plugin installed). Below is a screenshot of Totem displaying a fully functional DVD menu using the new resindvd plugin.

Only hick up I had was that was something weird happening in the Pulseaudio sink, so in the end I had to kill Pulseaudio to get audio to work when playing DVDs.

So if you like me are very excited about this stuff Jan is doing be sure to test it out and file bug reports if any of your DVD’s fail to work properly. You can also ping thaytan on IRC and tell him you will get him a beer at the next free software conference he attends

I guess I am not the only one to try out Pitivi from time to time to check its progress. Edward has been working on Pitivi, GStreamer and Gnonlin for quite a few years now, but of course urgent tasks at work has tended to take presedence of course, leading to a pace of development which hasn’t always been blazing. But a lot of things seems to be coming together these days. When  I checked out SVN head of Pitivi today I had a much better experience than before as almost everything I tried work fine for me. I was able to import both an AVI and a MP4 file into Pitivi and easily trim of some uneeded stuff of the clips. I was also able to output them in nice looking Ogg files using Dirac video. All this worked without any hickups on Pitivi’s side. I tried both using Vorbis and FLAC for audio output. Vorbis worked perfectly, but FLAC had some issues with audio/video syncronisation. This is probably caused by a GStreamer bug as embedding FLAC in an Ogg file together with video hasn’t really been widely tested up to now. Sebastian Droge is on the case so hopefully it will be sorted soon

But in addition to having reached a point where it has a stable foundation things have also started to pick up pace for Pitivi on the developmer side of things. With two Google Summer of Code students and multiple other community developers starting to dive into the code there is a good chance for Pitivi starting to take much bigger leaps in functionality between releases going forward.  My hope at this point is that we can offer a version of Pitivi by Christmas which contains most of the functionality the hobbyist want. So you can edit your Christmas recordings using Pitivi.

Anyway, if you are interested in Pitivi development the best place to keep abreast of things are of course #pitivi on irc.freenode.org.

Screenshot of our editing friend:

Arrived in Istanbul on Friday in preparation for GUADEC. Had a great time so far visiting the main attractions like Haga Sofia, The Blue Mosque, the Sultans palace and the underground water cistern. Last night Wim, Tim, Edward and myself went out to met Jan and Jaime for some food. A lot of other people ended up there too and it was nice seeing people again. Turns our there is a really nice street close to the Golden Horn Hotel which provide you with a lot of pillows to sit on as you see in the picture below:

I got myself a Lumix TZ4 camera just before leaving the UK as I wanted to be able to take some good pictures. Compared to my earlier cameras this camera is a huge step up. 10x optical zoom makes a world of difference in terms of what kind of pictures I can take. Was also very happy last night to find that GStreamer is able to play the .mov files generated by the camera easily. Some time ago now we did a call for people to provide us with camera video files, and it seems that work has paid of in handling a lot of the semi-standard mov files that cameras create.

Today we have gathered in front of our hotel for a little impromptu GStreamer summit. So far discussion has been about Git and the possibility of migrating to it from our current CVS repository. While using CVS do give us an air of age, wisdom and venerability there is an inkling in the GStreamer community that we might be using a slightly outdated version control system

So Sun Microsystems video codec effort is now public. Actually its been public since the 11th of April, but I missed it until today. I think it is an interesting effort and wish them good luck. That said I noticed from the comments that people where wondering why they where not instead pushing Theora or Dirac forward instead of making their own codec. Well the answer to that question is implicitly given in Rob Glidden’s blog post, Sun wanted something which they felt was 100% sure to not be under any current patents and thus they started with the sure to be patent free H261 codec (due to its age).

Of course that is similar to the approach the BBC took with Dirac, but instead of using an codec implementation they used old text books and research papers as their baseline.

That said neither the OMS video codec or Dirac can be 100% sure that there will never be any patent lawsuits, to many bogus patents for that. So all they can do is what they have been doing, which is to ensure that their prior art story is so strong that if a case ever is brought they should be able relatively easily defeat it.

And while I would of course love even more people contributing to improving out existing codecs like Theora and Dirac and think that getting new codecs launched which has used different strategies for ensuring their royalty free status is only a good thing as it gives us more angles of attack. And once one of these codecs reaches critical mass in terms of consumer adoption I think it can actually open the door to the others as it will reduce the current ‘stigma’ around royalty free codecs.

In the meantime we just need to continue improving our tools as I feel that is the next step we need to take to help push free codecs forward. My goal is that we will get Pitivi and Jokosher to a stage where we have them running on all three major platforms and thus the threshold for getting your marketing department etc., to publish their audio clips and videos with free codecs is greatly reduced. The two Summer of Code students we have working on Pitivi and the renewed Jokosher effort should help push us forward.
I am also hoping that the codec support provided in HTML5 through Firefox will open some doors. While Apple and Microsoft are still trying to sabotage it there is still hope that the market share of Firefox is large enough to make a difference and force the issue.

Was saddened today to read about the death of Gary Gygax. As the creator of the original Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game I owe him thanks for countless hours of fun playing AD&D and I also give him indirect credit for both helping create an audience for fantasy litrature and set the stage for MMORPG games like World of Warcraft.

Happy to see him get a mention on most major new sites and of course on gaming related sites such as Penny Arcade.

To see the kind of influence he had on today’s computer games I think the quotes on the Bethesda blog. sums it up quite nicely.

Rest in peace Gary.

So the Dirac specification is now frozen and has a 1.0 release. This means that video encoded with any Dirac 1.0 compliant encoder is sure to keep working in future Dirac decoders. David Schleef is working hard on getting Schroedinger 1.0 ready which will feature both a Dirac encoder and decoder, both specification compliant of course. I have big hopes for Dirac is it provides the free and open source software community with an absolutely top notch codec comparable to things like H264 and VC1.

More on the World of Transcoding

I got a lot of feedback in regards to my previous blog entry about transcoding applications. Based on that feedback I tested Movic and OGMRip (thanks to Billl and Michael Kanis for those links), both of which had GUI’s which was closer to what I wanted. That said neither of those two applications supported the container format/codec combination I wanted.

So up to this point dvd::rip is still the application that has come the closest to doing what I needed. However it turns out that some of the rips I did using dvd::rip the audio and video got horribly out of sync a bit into the video. Hopefully if we get a GStreamer based application going we will be able to sort such things out as keeping audio and video in sync is among the things we have spent a lot of times on getting right in GStreamer.

People also pointed out other parameters that would be useful for a ripper application which I hadn’t included in my mockup. And while I agree that other parameters can be essential at time I fear that one would quickly end up back in the dvd::rip style GUI if one includes them where there are just a ton of options which for the common user might as well be ancient Egyptian. The reason I wanted a new application was to offer users a more friendly alternative, not to replace dvd::rip as the application of choice for highly technical users.

Spent Yuletide and New Years in Oslo this year with family and friends. Was nice to be back for an extended period of time seeing everyone. The first few days in Oslo was particularly nice as many days of frost had caused all trees to be covered in frost, creating a very scenic experience. Unfortunately the temperature jumped above zero the day before christmas eve and stayed in the single plus digits until the day before I left.

Always nice to fill up with Norwegian yuletide foods like roasted ham, cooked dried smoked lamb and moose casserole. Only cloud somewhat hanging over the celebration this year was the fact that my mother is going in for brain surgery at the end of February. While it is supposedly a relatively routine operation, the fact that they are going into her brain makes it a bit worrisome nonetheless. Might end up taking a few days back in Norway in February to be there for moral support.
Had Jan and Jaime visit Norway for a few days around New Years Eve, had a good time and while the New Years Party was quite low key, it was pleasant and fun. Also since the current Norwegian government believes that anything that people find entertaining and fun should be banned, as some people being happier than others go against their philosophy of equality (and its always easier to make everyone equally unhappy), there was a lot of fireworks on New Years Eve due to this being the last New Years Eve where private airborne fireworks is allowed.

Managed to get a flu a couple of days before my return to Cambridge and due to the plane needing to get de-iced I got delayed with about and hour and a half at least when flying out. Stumbled into the house at 3am this morning, hating the world (and Ryan Air in particular) due to my flue and the long journey.

Brought quite a bit of food from Norway, so I be hosting some dinner parties serving fermented fish, reindeer steak, minced moose and whale meatcakes in the coming weeks.

Seems the Collabora Winter collection is in. This winter we sport a fashionable blue or black fleece jacket with a discreet yet eye pleasing Collabora logo on it. In the picture below you see Collabora’s very own Daf showing of the new jacket on our office catwalk.

For anyone wondering about the superb image quality be aware that this was achieved using the professional camera bundled with my mobile phone.