Up to this point the two main contenders for controlling your living room of tomorrow has been Microsoft with their Windows Media Center solution and Apple with their AppleTV/Frontrow system. At least in terms of media coverage. In reality it is still a very open and fragemented space with a host of systems being offered from a long list of vendors and groups. In the open source space we have of course projects such as Freevo, Elisa and MythTV.

But with Sony’s announcement yesterday of their Play TV add-on for the PS3, turning your PS3 into a HD content PVR I am wondering if Sony is actually going to take the throne soon. The media handling features of the PS3 has been steadily improved since its release and even with Paramounts HD-DVD agreement from a few days ago I think its clear that the PS3 is causing Blu-ray to win the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war. I have blogged before about their support for the PS3 being a DLNA client and its already a nice cd-ripper and handler of music. Its main weakness at this point its support for some common video formats out there, especially DivX clips which are very common.

Sony also did the clever move of allowing people to upgrade the internal harddisk of the PS3 themselves so that even disk hungry media center needs can be taken care off. I am sure a lot of shops selling PS3’s will soon start offering harddisk upgrades as a service for those customers not feeling comfortable doing it themselves.

And with the TV/PVR functionality announced yesterday the PS3 suddenly is starting to look really serious as a contender in the space. Of course it will hinge on what kind of TV streams etc., it is able to connect to. I think a minimum for it to be a success it will need to work with DVB-T, but maybe Sony can manage to convince DVB-S providers to also let the PS3 interface with them.

Another cool feature announced is the PSP integration with this system. Being able to program your PS3 to record your favourite show at home and then stream it to your PSP which you have brought with you on your trip might be a killer feature for both systems.

Anyway, interesting times for those of us working in the multimedia space. Hopefully also Sony’s efforts to improve the hardware access when running Linux on the system will pay off so that you have the choice of using linux based media center solutions on this hardware too.

Been working hard over the last few days packing all my stuff here in Barcelona. Its strange to think that in just a few days my time here in Barcelona is over. Its been an interesting 3 years and I think I learned a lot, including learned many new things about myself. As I am writing this I am pondering if I have changed over these last years, looking back at the Christian who lived in Oslo he seems far away, yet on the other hand I would have a hard time pointing out a list of concrete changes to my person or personality. I guess I ask questions today I wouldn’t have asked 3 years ago, but then again that is maybe not so much a change as it new lessons learned being filtered through the lens that is me.

As for Barcelona as a city there are for sure things I will miss. The long summers, the beach close by, the vibrant feel of the city, the 3 course lunches and of course my friends here.

There are also some things I know I will not miss like the dusty air downtown, the crowded feel of the city during height of tourist season, the smell of urin on every fourth street corner and things like that. Leaving all language issues behind is also nice, although I guess it would have felt better if the language issues had been resolved by being fluent in Castilliano.

Anyway, moving to Cambridge in England will be a definite change of pace and style. In many ways I feel my move to Cambridge is a partway return to Oslo in the type of city it is. Green and verdant, big enough to have a interesting nightlife and cultural offerings, yet not the chaotic nature of a huge city like Barcelona or London.

In terms of the new company we have set up things are moving forward, hired a graphics designer to work on a logo for us the other day and I spent last week in London having meetings with accountants and lawyers making sure all the paperwork is in order.

Still looks to be about a months time before we announce ourselves properly, but things are going well and we are already looking at areas of expansion. Only worry now is if the palm tree Wim is inheriting from me will survive his work trip to Canada :)

Will we have been ramping our new business venture the guys haven’t been on the lazy side coding wise either. Wim and Tim has been fixing a lot of bugs and we are also close to having working Real streaming inside GStreamer now. It is still not perfect, but some Real format streams should work now if you are using current CVS of GStreamer.

Edward has been hacking on Pitivi, with moving to a new more visually enticing timeline widget. The original plan was to use the Jokosher one, and Edward even had that working on his laptop, but it didn’t really fit due to Pitivi’s different nature so Edward instead let it be more of an inspiration than a source of code. The final timeline looks nice, although you probably wouldn’t look at it and find it very similar to the Jokosher one.

Together with Brendan he has also been working on getting project save/load working so that you can save and load projects in pitivi. This means that when you work on an edit you can save milestones in case you want to go back later and of course save the work if you can’t finish it in one sitting.

Was very happy to read today that the air has gone out of the SCO balloon. Since 2003 SCO has been a thorn in the side for free software developers with the ongoing lawsuits and claims about Unix and Linux. With Judge Kimball not essentially gutting their case I think we have mostly seen the last of McBride and company. I think the outcome of this lawsuit will play a major role also in defining the rules of the game in terms of open source, in some sense showing that if a sleazy corporation want to try to get ahead of the game by bogus lawsuits the community now has enough resources and friends to shut them down.

In combination with the recent US supreme court ruling on software patents I think we will see a lot of changes in the coming years as the lock in model of software fail. I think the next big battleground might very well be media codecs where the US supreme courts ruling can level the playingfield and cause a lot of media codecs to become open source compatible as their patent protections fall away.

Asus Pro31s and Linux

As a followup to my blog post about the problems I had running Linux on my Asus laptop I thought I should mention that with the latest kernels for Fedora it works pretty well. The Wireless and DVD player for instance both run fine, and I am able to switch to console mode easily now without the screen going black. Suspend do not work 100% yet, but that is a common problem with a lot of laptops.

So after spending 8 days sick after returning from the UK I managed to get myself to a doctor yesterday. Got set up with a package of antibiotics which seems to be working pretty well. Still not 100% well, but at least I don’t feel like a bulldogs chew toy anymore either.

In terms of the new company things are moving forward at a brisk pace and I hope to be speaking with a local graphics designer I know this week, in order to have a nice logo and profile created for the company before we announce it.

Things are also moving rapidly forward on the moving front. Alia has been checking out various moving companies as she and Zaheer will share a moving truck with me, and I contacted a couple of storage companies today to start getting some information on pricing and availability. Know that my energy is starting to return thanks to the antibiotic I also hope to get moving on the UK room soon.

So I recently purchased an Asus PRO31S laptop and I figured I should report on how it plays with Linux in case other people out there are looking at the machine also. The specs are really nice using the new Intel Santa Rosa chipset, nvidia graphics, lightscribe capable DVD writer, Wireless card supporting up to 802.11n. It also sports a built in camera above the screen, built-in bluetooth and DVI out.

I am writing this entry on the laptop so obviously it do work, but I have to admit getting it set up was a much bigger challenge than I expected. The first problem was that no Linux distribution was able to properly detect and access the DVD drive. As you might guess this is slightly painful when trying to install linux as the DVD based installs fail as soon as the install for the first time tries to access the DVD drive. Managed to get latest Fedora installed in the end by using Network install. Once I had the core system installed I realized I needed the very latest proprietary nvidia driver to get X working at all, version 100.14.11. Problem is that the system seems unable to have the X display reset, so if I start the system with the graphical boot loader or try to go into a console I just get a black screen. So ctrl+alt+f1 etc., is not currently available and if I have the graphical boot enabled I will only get a black screen instead of the gdm login screen.

The Intel wireless cards works, well sorta. It seems to consider the signal strength very weak even if I am sitting next to the wireless router. With the original Fedora 7 kernel I needed to manually install the updated kernel driver from Intel, but with current kernel updates it seems to work fine out of the box apart from the signal strength issue. While I am not 100% sure at this point I also think the signal strength issue is what is making Skype etc., useless on the laptop.

The Asus also comes with its own annoying startup sound, you can turn it of in the bios, but it seems doing that causes the sound card to not initialize properly or something under linux, giving you zero volume sound.

Things which seems to work perfectly however for me on the laptop is the smartcard reader and the bluetooth support. The camera also seems to work fine with latest kernel updates.

Suspend partially works in the sense that I do seem able to suspend and then resume the system, but things like the wireless networking did not seem to want to resume again.

So the current status is that I have a useable laptop for my day to day needs, but there are still a lot of things that aren’t working fully. Hopefully the driver issues will sort themselves out over the next Months, but at this point in time it is not a laptop I would recommend for a great out-of-the-box linux experience.

After my last blog entry where I let it be known that a group of us left Fluendo I realized that I had forgotten to put up my new (old) contact information. So people who need to reach me/us can contact me on uraeus*at*gnome*org.

I also want to say thank you to all those who sent us emails and messages of support and best wishes, much appreciated.

So as of today Wim Taymans, Edward Hervey and myself are no longer working for Fluendo. The same goes for Tim Muller who has been working as a contractor for Fluendo for a long time now. The reasons for us deciding to leave are many, but essentially I guess the time had come when we felt our prospects outside Fluendo were better than the ones offered inside. Our exact plans are not set in stone yet, but one likely outcome is that we set up our own company doing various kind of software and services around GStreamer, more on that in the coming weeks.

We updated all the plugins in the webshop over the last few days with newer, faster, better versions. So if you have purchased our plugins just log into your account on shop.fluendo.com and ‘view’ your order. You will see a download link inside which will let you download the updated package. Especially the Windows Media packages contains a lot of improvements.

Big new release of Schrödinger

Just cut the 0.6.0 release of Schrodinger, our implementation of the Dirac video codec. This is a major milestone release as it should be fully bitstream compliant. This means that if you use Schrodinger to encode a Dirac file today you should be able to decode it with any compliant decoder in the future.
Of course you should wait for the 0.7.0 release at least before doing a major migration of your media collection as we might still have bugs causing us to not be 100% compliant. Anyway getting this release out is a big step forward for the project, and while there are still many improvements we want to see happen, it at least brings Schrodinger into the realm of being useful outside pure testing scenarios. Tim has also promised a new release of Thoggen soon with experimental Dirac support using Schrodinger.

Update: These days working at Collabora Multimedia the world leaders in GStreamer consulting.

I noticed on the semi official Playstation 3 blog that the upcoming 1.80 firmware will have DLNA support. This is great news as it means you will be able to share and exchange media between your Elisa system and your PS3. Supporting Intel ViiV and DLNA was something I pushed for in Elisa since day one. Thanks to the great work that has been going into Coherence ,the Python uPnP framework we are using, Elisa has very good support for these technologies already and we will of course make sure it will become even better as time goes by.

In regards to Elisa I am also very happy for the
just announced collaboration with the Ubuntu community to create a Ubuntu Media center edition based on Elisa. As I build my own mediacenter solution at home over the next few weeks I will probably try to get involved in that effort myself actually.