As everyone is aware of by now Sun is releasing Java under the GPL, which is great news. One thing did strike me as a little weird though, when visiting the page with video’s with testimonials from people like RMS and Mark Shuttleworth they use Flash video (which for me almost never plays in sync). Considering this is an announcement of GPL Java it would have been cool if they instead used Cortado which is a 100% Java GPL licensed solution using the Free Vorbis and Theora codecs. And as you can see from this demo page for our stream hosting service the quality of Cortado these days is pretty good and we are continuing to invest more resources into it to make it more powerful.

So get into the groove Sun and go 100% Java with your internet video, no need to use an expensive proprietary solution when you can get something just as good based on 100% GPL Java :)

Ubuntu Developers Summit
So Wim Taymans, Tim-Philipp Müller and myself will be attending the Ubuntu Developers Summit next with in Mountain View,California. We will be there to discuss issues and opportunities for improving multimedia support in Ubuntu and friends. We will try to attend as many of the multimedia related tracks as possible.

Elisa

Thought I share some of the latest newsbits on Elisa our media center solution. Philippe and Loic are hard at work with the reworking of Elisa internals, which hopefully will be mostly done by the end of next week. Once that is done we have a much stronger fundation for going forward and can go back into ‘feature add’ mode. Two features which we hope to get added in the coming month(s) is full uPnP support and DVB support.

There already is limited client uPnP support in current Elisa, but thanks to the work Frank Scholz is doing on creating a python uPnP framework called Coherence (sorry no URL yet) it should be much easier for us to take the upnp support to the next step to make Elisa a full server and control point for upnp/viiv services. One nice thing that this will enable is integration with Media Streamer which is a upnp enabled player/controller for the Nokia 770. My hope is that you would eventually be able to use your 770 as a media center control pad for your home with Elisa as the heart.

Starting 1st of November Fluendo will be dedicating a resource to implementing a full featured GStreamer backend for Phonon, the multimedia API for KDE4. The goal is to make the best backend for Phonon possible in order to demonstrate the qualities of GStreamer to the KDE community and hopefully lessen the chance of fragmentation in the free software multimedia space. This work is done in cooperation with a major industry player who shares our goal of providing the Linux and Unix communities with a unified multimedia API. I let them let announce their name themselves due to contractual reasons, but I do expect to see them talking publically about this at some point as it is quite direct follow-on to already announced efforts they are doing to bring more unity the free desktop under the auspices of the Portland project and the LSB.

As some of you know I have personally voiced reservations on Phonon in the past, and while I still think some of my concerns are valid, I hope that this effort can be a starting point for a more productive exchange of ideas. If we manage to make the GStreamer backend as good as we hope to then it would be a big step forward in resolving the worries some KDE developers have voiced about the readiness of GStreamer and maybe even encourage the development of a full set of Qt-style binding to GStreamer to suplement to the high level objects of Phonon.

Realized I hadn’t blogged in a while so I figured I should get back into the groove by highlighting some of the cool developments at Fluendo and around GStreamer.

So one day after returning the power supply of my Dell laptop stopped working. Due to being under warranty I was able to get a new one delivered from Dell, but it took me almost a full week to get the new one, which arrived on Friday. Turned out it was a DOA Power adapter I got…so today I figured I take now chances. I called Dell support, which I am still waiting to call me back to get them to send me yet another one, but I also ordered a new power supply from battery.co.uk based on a recomandation from Jaime. So far it looks good as they sent me a mail saying they shipped it within an hour of my order. Lets see which gets here first, the one from Battery or the one from Dell :)

Rhythmbox

There are lot of nice developments happening these days. After having been using Banshee for a while I have to say that Rhythmbox have won me back. The work that has been put into polishing RB over the last months have been incredible. There are so many little details I just love now with the current GUI, like the beautifuly fading in/out of album covers. I am also happy to see that all my emusic bought songs gets album cover art now in rb, something I never got before with any other player. The Play queue in sidebar option is also very nice, and the source list has been polished up and just looks sweet atm. Thanks! Also happy that the Rhythmbox team is now working on relicensing RB to the same licensing setup used for Totem enabling distro’s to both ship RB and also ship support for non-free formats like Windows Media and MPEG.

Every Wednesday we hold a wrestling tournament here at Fluendo in order to keep in shape and stay sharp. In the photo below Matthieu Garcia, our codec optimisation specialist shows of his headgear for the wrestling.

As it happens one of Fluendo’s two co-founders, Pascal Pegaz, has motorcycle racing as his big hobby. This weeked he invited everyone at Fluendo (and also a lot of other people) to attend the 24hour motorbike race at the track here in Barcelona. With a setup that included full access to the paddock and lots of food, drink and music to entertain us in addition to the race who where we to say no. It was a great race and our team looked poised to get a respectable position. Unfortunatly the bike broke down about 16 hours into the race. But we had a great time anyway and here is a collection of photos taken during bikerace, take care to notice the prominent placement of Fluendo logos all over the place :)

Update!!
Thought I should also include a link to the ubercool video overlay system Julien made for the race. Its all using GStreamer! Anyway start by checking out this screenshot which demonstrates the system. Basically what it does is taking the video feed from the on-bike camera and the data collected by bikes onboard computer. Then the graphics are generated for the speedomeeter etc., and also a photo of the driver added in this case is a picture of Fluendo co-founder Pascal Pegaz who was one of our three drivers for the endurance race. In the photo he is crusing at a respectable 270 km/h. This system we hope to use more for future races. Check out Julien’s gallery for more.

So I got my TDT box set up yesterday and taken a step into the world of terrestrial digital TV. After struggling a bit with the cabling (the TDT box primary output is Euro SCART, but all the stuff I wanted to connect to I am using S-VHS cabling for.) Discovered that my hi-fi amplifier could do RCA to S-VHS conversion in the end and luckily there is also a RCA video ouput and a coaxial SP/DIF output on the box.

Anyway this move took me from 20 channels where the image where unwatchable on 15 of them, to 30 channels all with good image and sound quality. I am a bit suprised that TDT doesn’t do surround sound though, or maybe its just my cheap ass TDT box not supporting it. On the other side when I went to get cables yesterday I did look at the other TDT boxes offered and was suprised that none of them seemed to offer better connectivity than my own box. I mean when you compete in what I would assume is a rather standarized market I would think one way to try to beat the competition is offering better connectivity options than your competitors. Yet none of the boxes had for instance optical sp/diff or s-vhs output for example. They seemed all to only offer the SCART, RCA, coaxial SPDIF and coxial audio left/right output. Of course even if I know have 30 channels that doesn’t mean I got 30 viewable channels, most of them offer little of interest. At least I have an antenna cable now capable of TDT which means I can be a tester when we get to implementing this stuff in Elisa.

Instanbul: Screenshots are so last year it seems, and everyone is now moving over to screencasts. Good news is that Zaheer has been working hard on making Istanbul the best screencast recording tool out there. With his latest changes Istanbul is capable of recording OpenGL based applications which in these days of XGL, AIGXL, Elisa, lowfat and so on being able to record OpenGL stuff is essential. So check out Zaheer’s latest blog post for details.

Also be aware that the latest versions of Cortado our Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis playing Java applet has a working seekbar now. If you check out the Elisa screencast you see that a seeker bar appears if you let the mouse pointer rest over the video image. With this you can host screencasts on your webpage and even allow people to seek in the online movies.

I guess I also should use the chance to pimp LugRadio live this year (and myself doing a talk there).