I search for GStreamer and related topics on news.google.com from time to time to see what kind of press coverage and interest there is. Usually it is interesting articles like this one about Songbird 1.0 and GStreamer, but sometimes I also come across some really silly stuff.

Today I found this press release which apart from mentioning linux and GStreamer is an incomprehensible collection of attempted buzzwords and random product names. I guess if one knew all the products and technologies from this company intimately already, one would have an idea what they are talking about. For the rest of us its just utter gibberish.

One of the first things I ever did after getting involved with the open source community was conduct various interviews for the now long gone linuxpower.org website. I continued doing that for quite a while after I got involved with GNOME and GStreamer, but it has now been quite a few years since I last did an interview. Been planing to restart my effort many a time, but never seemed to get around to it. But some weeks ago I decided to kick myself into action again.

So I present you with an interview with none other than Laszlo Pandy the maintainer of the Jokosher audio editor. So head on over to gnomedesktop.org (which I felt could use a little injection of activity) and hear about the current status and future plans for Jokosher and the state of linux multimedia.

If people like the interview I will follow-up with more multimedia related interviews in the weeks and months to come.

Sebastian Dröge is finishing up a major piece of work these days in terms of adding support for the MXF container format in GStreamer and Pitivi.
This is a complex format and we found that there is not a lot of easily findable sample content out there on the interweb. So we request that those of you out there with applications which can generate MXF files, like Avid and Final Cut Pro, please provide us with short samples along with a description of which codecs are inside and which application generated the file. Attach any such files you are able to generate to reports in GStreamer bugzilla.

We are happy to announce the latest team member joining us here at Collabora Multimedia. Jorn Baayen, well known for his work on projects such as Rhythmbox, Muine and most recently GUPnP. Jorn will be working on a range of things for us, but first and foremost he will be our UPnP and DLNA expert. We figured that getting Jorn on board with be a great way to make sure that the world still had access to a company offering consulting services around GUPnP after Opened Hand got bought by Intel.

So welcome aboard Jorn, we are very happy to have you on our team!

As most I have participated in a lot of competitions and lotteries over the years. Only time I previously won something was when I got a digital calculator wristwatch from the Disney Book Club when I was 12 years old.
Well this time I actually won something I think is rather cool. Thanks to a competition hosted by the cool people at Bit Tech in collaboration with Ubisoft I just won this cool PS3:

My new PS3

The conspiracy theorists among you might think I only won this because I work with Wim Taymans and this is a way for Ubisoft to show their gratitude for Puffys Saga, the game Wim wrote which essentially secured Ubisofts success :)

But no that is not the case, this was pure luck. Only thing that suprised me though is that after spending so much time and money on making this price they didn’t bother throwing in a copy of the actual Farcry 2 game, but I guess that is where they hope to recoup their cost :)

Update: Seems I was a bit quick about the game. Got a package from Ubisoft in the post with not only Farcry2, but 3 other Ubisoft PS3 games too. Thanks! :)

In case people missed it there was an article on our Pitivi effort by Nathan Willis posted on Friday at linux.com. The article mentions our current plans in terms of accelerating the development of Pitivi.

On the topic of Pitivi, Brandon Lewis posted a blog entry recently describing and showing a screenshot of his work on improving audio handling in Pitivi.

For those who might have missed it George Wright of the BBC blogged on Thursday about the Totem BBC plugin we are doing with them and Canonical and which I blogged about earlier. As George pointed out this plugin is not the iPlayer in terms of content, but I still hope a lot of you will end up using it. The more popular it is the more mindshare it will have, including within the BBC, and thus easier it will be to get further content added.

The content distribution system is also fully open sourced, so it should be possible for any broadcaster who is interested to use it for their content.

For those of you who wants to test this plugin, who are not using Ubuntu’s test packages, the patch for Totem is available in this bugzilla entry. As the totem progress and we work towards merging the latest versions will be posted to there.

Pitivi video editor

For those of you interested in the latest news on Pitivi I recomend you track Brandon’s blog. He posted yesterday a big update on his latest work to drill the Pitivi UI into shap. Keywords for this entry is cleander default layout, detachable components and a property editor.

I am currently at the Google Summer of Code mentors summit together with representatives for a many of the open source projects involved in the Google Summer of code. Had some interesting discussions so far, for instance we had a informal gathering of multimedia developers yesterday which reviewed the bugzilla entry for automatic support for interlaced media in GStreamer. Thanks to having a lot of people present like David Schleef, Mike Smith, Edward Hervey, Timothy Terriberry allowed us to map out all important interlacing variations and review the design proposal done by Jan Schmidt.

With the new deinterlace2 plugin fixed up by Sebastian Dröge it will be nice to be able to autoplug that plugin into our pipelines when we get this design completely implemented.

Another nice think discovered here is the Gerrit code review tool which they released alongside Android. It intergrates closely with Git and thus would be something that would be very nice to get running on freedesktop alongside the GStreamer CVS to Git migration.

So as I mentioned in a preceding blog entry, we at Collabora Multimedia are looking at increasing the pace of development for Pitivi. The first step we took in that regard was hiring Brandon Lewis. We are now ready to take the second step and are now looking for good candidates to join our team. So if some of the bullets points below fits your profile and you would be interested in taking open source video editing to the next level, please send me your CV.

• Solid C or C++ development skills
• GStreamer experience
• Video editing experience
• Python development experience
• Video codec development experience

We are not expecting someone to have all of these points down, and we are looking just as much for people who got any kind of experience with non-linear video editors as people with specific GStreamer skills. So for instance if you worked on any of the many open source video editing projects out there you could be our perfect candidate, even if this editor was not using GStreamer. As long as you are a generally proficient developer, it is more important for us that you know what chroma keying is than what a GstSegment is.

So if you are interested in joining one of the coolest companies in the world and especially if you wouldn’t mind coming to work in one of our offices in either Montreal Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom or Barcelona Spain, please send me your CV and short intro at christian-schaller-at-collabora-co-uk.

Saw a story on OpenOffice 3 today which reminded me of a question I been asking myself recently. What does the free desktop need to grow in market share?

Up to this point I guess I my thinking about the free desktop (grouping GNOME, KDE, XFCE etc. as one) and its growth has mostly been about seeing it as a dam filling up. The mass migrations from Windows would be trickling in slowly until at some point we have added enough features and polish to the free desktop for the dam to break. Kinda like how linux in the server space lived many years without a lot of adoption outside academia and or specific fields before suddenly becoming an ‘overnight’ success.

But at this point I am not so sure anymore. I mean is what holding us back from rapid gains in marketshare really just better MS Word import in OpenOffice? Or better support for exchange servers in Evolution? Or better drawing tools in Inkscape and Gimp? Or better support for muxing Quicktime files in GStreamer? Or improved ways of embedding a blingy clock widget into the desktop background? Or just adding an application that can do XYZ? Or is it the lack of a good driver for hardware ZYX? Sure these questions are part of the answer, but I can’ t help but wonder if they are a smaller part than I have given them credit for so far.

I have sometimes seen the lack of games being mentioned, but the Windows game market is suffering terribly these days, caught between piracy and console dominance. So if people care about games I think they probably got themselves a Wii, PS3 or Xbox360 to satisfy that need. So I can’t see lack of game support as being the tipping point either.

Not that there isn’t progress made. There are good migration stories out there from the major Linux vendors and PC makers like Dell do seem to try to offer better sales support for Linux desktop systems. But I can’t help but feel that we might be missing something in terms of understanding what needs to happen for the market share to grow more rapidly. And if we don’t diagnose the issue we will not be able to resolve it.