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an air of age, wisdom and venerability there is an inkling in the GStreamer community that we might be using a slightly outdated version control system :)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.

So I been pining in front of the mailbox everyday since middle of last week. The reason is that in order to progress on setting up here in the UK I need the utility bill as a proof of address. Specifically I am not able to get a bank account without it which in turn holds up a lot of other things.

Where to report a bug

Noticed suddenly that with the latest Fedora kernel update my network card stopped working properly. Booting into the previous kernel it still works fine. But having this problem I realized once again the pain of reporting bugs in some of the lower level modules. In this case I feel belongs clearly in the Red Hat bugzilla due to it being only Red Hat kernel patches which have changed between the two modules in question.

But I have filed a lot of bugs there over the years and Red Hat’s engineers are understandably not to keen in being bug report routers. On the other hand Red Hat, Novell, Ubuntu etc., is going to be the only entity known to a lot of linux users coming in now and expecting them to figure out and file bugs/send emails etc., to various upstream groups and projects is not very likely to happen. This could be either a blessing or a curse I guess. For someone being involved with GStreamer I guess the fact that only people cluefull/interested enough to figure out that there is such a thing as GStreamer on their system and also understanding it has a separate bugzilla will mean that even as the user population grows the project will not get swamped in ‘useless’ bugs, as the people filling bugs have already shown some technical understanding by figuring out where to file it. On the other hand one can also easily risk that important bugs never reach upstream and instead goes to the great bugzilla limbo that can be distro bugzilla’s.

There are a few things I have been hoping to see in the bug tracker space for a long time. The first is a way to mark a bug as depending on upstream bugfixes. I mean getting a patch into a driver or upstream library is often of little help unless that bugfix makes it into your distro’s package (unless you want to roll your own files, but then you run the risk of losing your fixes everytime you update the system unless your careful). Being able to have Red Hat bugzilla mark a bug in GNOME bugzilla as a prereq would be nice for instance.

The other is a good way to figure out where to file bug reports. I mean I know some bugzilla’s and other bug trackers out there, but there are shitloads of projects I have no clue on how handle bugs. And some of the projects that theorectically have a bugzilla, like some freedesktop projects, do not seem to use it, so filing a bug there is next to useless. Maybe it would be possible for the distro packagers, who hopefully have some contact with the upstream projects to add some kind of bug reporting info to their packages. But even that takes you so far as for example with the kernel I often get the feeling you need a specific developers name and home phone number if you want to report a bug :)

So I arrived in Cambridge on Saturday, meeting up with Alp and our new landlord Bernard at the house. The house is a pleasant little two story building with a small garden at the back. Seems Cambridge decided to give me a warm welcome as its been blue skies and sunny since I arrived. Will posts some photos of the place as soon as my camera arrive with the rest of my furniture and apparel in a few days.

Its a bank holiday today, but I took care of the most important thing today anyway; ordering internet access for the house. Or rather I picked the package and then had Alp put in his details as I still don’t have a UK bank account.