I came accross GMediaRender last night which is client for upnp based media servers, like the Intel Viiv systems for instance. We plan on integrating support for this functionality in our Elisa Media Center software so its nice to see others also looking into this area with GStreamer.

I also managed to put up some photos I took of our new office. Any free software people visiting Barcelona should be sure to pay us a visit at the World Trade Center.

Adding my blog to Technorati for the fun of it –
Technorati Profile

Back at the office today after spending the last 3 days at the 3GSM tradeshow. We helped one of our customers, SportAlert.com do a sucessful launch of their product, streaming sport events to mobile devices.
Also learned the hard way during the conference that I spend to much time sitting down in my job. The last half of every day at the conference was spent in pain with aching feet, neck and back.

A lot of interesting things on show at the conference. Was very happy for instance to see Nokia having 2 persons on the main booth dedicated to demonstrating the Nokia 770 and that these two persons always seemed to have a good crowd around them.

Was also nice to see the Lipsforum .org announcements about using GTK+ and GStreamer for mobile devices.

Also walking from booth to booth asking about people’s products it seem everyone doing some kind of software either had a linux port already or one was planned to start soon. Not that many years ago the answer would have been ‘linux? what is that?’

Next year maybe we do our own booth with Fluendo, but then again just walking around as we did this year also yielded very good results and a lot of interesting information.

New employees

So we have two new employees at the office now, both formally starting on Monday. Zaheer Merali is one of them, a well known long time contributor to GStreamer and also known as the creator of Istanbul. Also joining us is Matthieu Garcia (b0nk on IRC) who is an old friend of Edward (bilboed) and who will be doing codec optimisation work for us. A big welcome to both.

Media Center Solution

I also promised some more information about our media center solution in my previous blog entry. I have a couple of screenshots available for our early prototype which you can see here and here.
One of the core building blocks of the media center solution apart from GStreamer will be the Togra framework created by Jan (thaytan). We have also hired two people who will soon start at our Lyon office. I will announce their names in my next update on the media center solution, which we have baptized ‘Elisa’.

So thanks to Crispin
and the people commenting on his blog I at least figured out how
one creates new keyboard profiles for X11.

Step 1: Get the numerical code for the key using the ‘xev’ tool shipping with X

Step 2: Figure out the X11 code by looking up those numbers in /usr/share/X11/xkb/keycodes/xfree86

Step 3: Add a section to /usr/share/X11/xkb/symbols/inet with those codes linking them to relevant XFree86 codes. (make a backup copy first) For my laptop that ended up with:

// Laptop/notebook Dell Inspiron 8xxx
partial alphanumeric_keys
xkb_symbols "inspiron" {
    key <I22>   {       [ XF86AudioPlay, XF86AudioPause ] };
    key <I10>   {       [ XF86AudioPrev         ]       };
    key <I19>   {       [ XF86AudioNext         ]       };
    key <I24>   {       [ XF86AudioStop         ]       };
    key <I30>   {       [ XF86AudioRaiseVolume  ]       };
    key <I2E>   {       [ XF86AudioLowerVolume  ]       };
    key <I20>   {       [ XF86AudioMute         ]       };
};

Step 4: Then make a unified patch by doing:

diff -u inet inet.backup > inet.patch

Step 5: And finally submit
a bug into the freedesktop bugzilla

Ok, some time ago I linked to some photos of the Fluendo sponsored motorbike from my blog. Now we have a demo stream up with a race video showing it in action. If you look closely at the red motorbike you see the Fluendo flower logo and you also see in on the walls in the garage and so on. Fluendo is truly racing ahead :)

So
Newsforge has a story discussing our MP3 plugin.
The article do point out one item we in the GStreamer community have been discussing since long before Fluendo’s founding. The issue GPL, patents and non-GPL compatible code. Which is also the reason why after a lot of discussion and thinking the licensing advisory was written.

Anyway the article has a few misunderstandings, the first is the claim that any GPL application shipping with GStreamer would need the exception clause. This is not correct, only programs that would use the plugins need it. Which is why there is no need to add a clause to gnome-cd for instance.

One thing we often considered is adding some for of API to GStreamer which would allow applications to say something like ‘I don’t want to load a non-GPL compatible plugin’ and through that allow distributions to keep shipping GPL applications alongside non-free plugins(to be used by other apps). This would funnily enough be a DRM system meant to protect the integrity of the GPL. The problem with a simplistic model here is that a user is not violating the GPL by installing a non-GPL compatible plugin themselves, so you get the same problem as you get with a lot of other DRM systems, it would overreach. We have discussed other models of solving the issue by crosschecking betweeen vendor tags and licensing etc., but so far the issue has seemed to complicated and the uncertainty that a good solution can be found has kept anyone from implementing it. Personally I think this issue should be solved on the application licensing side, which it slowly is, and articles like the one on Newsforge do help make people aware of this issue.

Another misunderstanding in the article is that distributions would not be allowed to build the plugin themselves. This is wrong, our license do allow that. We have tried to style our distributor license towards being like a tapping license for Coca Cola. The MIT source code is our ‘secret recipie’ and by signing an agreement with us distributions are allowed to use the recipie together with our name and trademarks to produce a real ‘Fluendo GStreamer MP3 plugin’. Of course the difference with Coca Cola is that our recipie is really not that secret and others, like Sun are going to use it together with their own Thomson MP3 license to ship GStreamer mp3 support. That plugin would of course not be a ‘Fluendo GStreamer MP3 plugin’, but a ‘Sun GStreamer MP3 plugin’

But the article to make one good point and that is that distributions who wants to ship things like the Fluendo MP3 plugin (or any other non-GPL compatible plugin, like the Monkey’s Audio plugin for instance) would need to only ship those applications that have an added clause to their GPL license, like Totem. Or which uses a license that allows non-free plugins by default, like Banshee (MIT) or Jamboree (LGPL in CVS).

Jaime Hemmett is now working fulltime on for Fluendo, fixing and developing our websites and our stream hosting backoffice solutions. So our pages will be of better quality going forward now with someone actually working on making them good. Up to now its been me or Thomas fiddling with them as time permitted (which it seldom did). One thing Jaime fixed right away was the annoying frame setup we had making linking to anything but the front page of www.fluendo.com a pain.

She is also working on improving our webstore so its ready for business.

One little webhack I did allow myself today though was adding the Europe Plus WMA stream to our directory listing.
As some might guess this also means our WMA encoder plugin will go into our beta program soon and then appear in the webshop.

So the collaborative project between BBC and Fluendo is underway in the form of the Schrodinger project. We will develop a set of libraries to both decode and encode Dirac video and also make sure it can be embedded into the Ogg container format. We are really excited about this at Fluendo and I think it will be a great gift to the community once its finished as it brings a really high quality video codec to the community.

Media streaming hosting

Another cool thing which we are kicking of now is our stream hosting service which we are doing together with Cable and Wireless. It brings fast cheap Ogg streaming into the market using our Flumotion server, and we can even throw in support for non-free formats for those who need it. Radio Europa Plus is already using it, and we are discussing with multiple other radio and tv stations already. We are working hard on adding more features to our streaming services, including a very nice system for private and small businesses. I think this will ba a happy new year :)

Ok, so we did some major stuff at Fluendo before I ran off to go home to Norway for Christmas. The first thing, which I hope to send out some
announcements on today, is that we released a cost free MP3 plugin to the world. You can read our press release about it here and find more information on our MP3 information page, including source code information. The binary (for GStreamer 0.10) is available from our
webshop which we also officially opened now (and plan to add more plugins to as soon as they pass through our newly minted beta program). A big part of this is that we also offer a cost free distribution agreement for distributions, allowing any distribution which wants it to ship with working GStreamer mp3 support out of the box. Due to the patents involved the mp3 plugin will of course not technically be free software (even if we have made the source code available under the MIT license) so only Banshee and Totem currently can be shipped with it currently, although some other projects do have efforts underway to add an excemption clause like Totem’s, and also some of the newer projects like Pitivi use the LGPL to be compatible.

Fluendo jobs in France

Fluendo also have a French subsidiary now, in Lyon. In that regard we are hiring a couple of developers to work in Lyon with us on our multimediabox/media center software. You find information on the job
here at monster.fr. I encourage anyone who reads this to repost this job add to any french language mailing list and IRC channel where it would be relevant.

So we are finally ready to start a beta program for some of the plugins we developed (Windows Media for intance). Due to this we are accepting requests from interested parties to join our beta program. If you are interested mail me at christian at fluendo dot com, and tell me what distro you are using and also if you have some basic linux/unix skills (like being able to run gdb and get a backtrace.

Those accepted into and how participates in the beta’s will get a free copy of the final plugins.

So Europa Plus is now online streaming their Radio channels in mp3 and Ogg Vorbis using Flumotion and our soon to be launched Fluendo Streaming Platform (stream hosting service).

Go to their webpage and click on the ‘live’ button to get access to the streams.