Category Archives: GStreamer

Ubuntu Disapointment

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One thing I ranted about multiple times in my blog over the years is how Linux distributions have failed to provide their content in Ogg format. Especially when the content is targeted at Linux users it suprise me that they do not make sure to have the video available in the format that basically all linux users have support for out of the box. That said both Red Hat and Novell has actually taken this feedback to heart and more often than not they do provide Ogg videos these days (in addition to various other formats).

It saddens me then when I checked out the link in Jono Bacons latest blog entry. Where the Ubuntu MOTU videos seems only to be available in the proprietary Flash format. For a distribution which likes to drape itself so loudly in the colours of community and freedom this is a huge letdown. And while you can view these videos with things like swfdec you still need to have the patent encumbered codecs available through gst-ffmpeg to actually view the videos. Would it be so hard to also offer those videos as a Ogg Theora torrents for instance?

Update: Talked to Jono. Turns out they do plan on making Ogg’s available, but haven’t gotten around to it yet. While I kicked Ubuntu here, it wasn’t really about them specifically, but the fact that even though the tools have gotten quite good and widespread over the last few years in terms of creating Ogg’s the open source or free software community is still rather lackluster in its willingness to try to help push the free formats. Its kinda how I used PNG images on my website even before there was widespread PNG support, cause if my page got just one person (hi mom) to use a PNG supporting browser it was a step forward.

Jokosher fixes inbound

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As I mentioned in my blog entry about Sebastian Dröge joining Collabora he would among other things work on some low level GStreamer issues which has held Jokosher back. Thanks to Sebastian working on improving the GStreamer audioconvert and deinterlave elements things are now looking very good for Jokosher, a big thanks to Peteris Krisjanis of the Jokosher community for testing the fixes so quickly for us. I have now even challenged Jono and Stuart about recording a LUGRadio episode using Jokosher as that was in some sense the original reason for Jokosher being created so I feel it would be a good milestone on progress :)

Sebastian still has some work on the interleave element left before he will switch over to focusing on some improvements for Pitivi mostly improving our Matroska and MPEG support.

Personal life

Starting to settle pretty good into Cambridge life I think.  My ongoing golf lessons are starting to pay off and I can now go to the driving range and feel pretty happy at what I do there. Not to claim I am at a useful level yet, but at least some of the basics are starting to fall into place. I also finally got myself moving on starting up a second activity, in addition to the golf,  so I had my second riding lesson this morning.  I am so far enjoying the riding quite a lot, apart from the dorky looking helmet and the new boots giving me blisters. Still working on finding a good timeslot for the riding though, seems the horses do not enjoy an early morning as much as my golf instructor.

The Cambridge Beer Festival is currently underway and yesterday I got to try the cutely named Norwegian Blue. Not named after the country with the fjords as much as after a parrot in a Monty Python clip :)

We are heading back there this evening with Michael Meeks joining us for some further beer sampling, travelling from the distant planet of Newmarket. We tried getting Edward Hervey also to join us, as he is actually in London currently, valiantly helping one of our customers, but even the famous beer festival cheese selection was enough to lure him away from his task :)

Heading up to Norway tomorrow evening for a long weekend in conjunction with my cousins daughters confirmation. I tried to get her to take a valiant stance for atheism instead, but the lure of presents and a big party strangely enough won out :) Its also my mothers birthday early next week and while I normally do not travel up to Norway I felt it was the right thing to do this year considering my mothers recent brain surgery with the (small) stroke that caused.

Sebastian Dröge joins Collabora Multimedia

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Thought I should let the world now we have a new employee at Collabora Multimedia. I think most of you know him already as Sebastian Dröge is one of the biggest patch reviews and bug fixers in the GStreamer community already. While Sebastian will be helping out with some of our internal projects we also plan on letting Sebastian continue his great community work. In fact the first assignment we have given him is simply to try to help out with some hard bugs thats been troubling Jokosher for a long time. So a big welcome to Collabora Sebastian, and an especially big thanks for starting your new job by taking GStreamer once again out of the top 10 bugzilla list :)

More SoC Pitivi hacking

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So it turns out we got 2 Summer of Code projects working on improving the Pitivi non-linear video editor. Sarath Lakshman will be hacking on Pitivi this summer as part of the Fedora Summer of Code. This is in addition to the work that Brandon Lewis will be doing. So hopefully by the end of summer Pitivi will be useful for a lot more people.

Summer of Code Projects

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GStreamer

Seems the slot count for Summer of Code is now as close to set in stone as it will be so I guess its time to announce the four projects that got approved as part of the GStreamer SoC.

First our we got Thiago Sousa Santos who will be writing a mp4/qt/3gpp muxer for GStreamer. This will fill a big hole in our current lineup of muxers. This project will be mentored by Wim Taymans.

Then we got  Brandon Lewis working on Pitivi. He will among other things be adding still image and transitions support to Pitivi. This project is mentored by Edward Hervey.

The third project is Richard Ronald Spiers working on MSN support in Farsight2. This means that any Farsight2 using application will be able to communicate with MSN users. This project is mentored by Olivier Crête.

And last but not least is Roberto Fagá Jr who will be working on a video transcoder using GStreamer. Another critical project as it will help us keep our muxers and encoders well tested and working. This project will be mentored by Stefan Kost.

Dirac

The Dirac project ended up with two projects in this years Summer of code. Matthias Bolte will be working on OpenGL acceleration for Dirac and  Bart Wiegmans will be working on a Java implementation of Dirac. Both projects to be mentored by David Schleef.

GNOME

As every year a ton of GNOME projects got approved. Of special interest to the GStreamer community is the DVB Manager to be done by Sebastian Pölsterl, the Cheese OpenGL effects by Filippo Argiolas, Empathy bases IRC client by William Christopher Farrington, speech recording for tomboy notes by Gabriel Geraldo França Marcondes and Corvalan Cornejo Gabriel working on Empathy VoIP support.

Last day in the US

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Currently sitting at the X Developers Summit at the Googleplex waiting for some time to pass before getting on the airplane this evening. X Development isn’t exactly what interests me mostly, but there has been some movements in terms of thinking about multimedia support issues. David Schleef did a talk here yesterday where he talked about colour handling. For a lot of Linux users, especially in the content creation industry, the lack of good colourspace correction support is a big issue.

Earlier this week I was at the CE Linux Forum meeting doing a talk about GStreamer. Talk ended up taking quite a lot less time than what I had expected it would, but still got a lot of nice feedback on it afterwards.

Bought myself one of these noise reduction headsets while here, so I am looking forward to testing out how well they actually work on my flight back to the UK.

Only thing I wish now is that I could blog about the two little ‘secret’ GStreamer projects that Edward and David Schleef are working on :)

Visiting the United States of America

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Been in the US for about a week now together with Wim. Our first stop was the Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit in Austin, Texas. It was a nice conference and I got to talk to a lot of people in and around the linux desktop and embedded linux. Was happy to learn how many people, especially in the embedded sector, who where aware of Collabora and our expertise around GStreamer and Telepathy.

Once the collaboration summit was over Wim and I flew up to San Fransisco and attended a meeting at Mozilla Corporation discussing how to improve the story of embedding the Mozilla engine on embedded devices. With the improvements done for Firefox 3 the current Mozilla engine kicks ass in terms of speed and memory usage, the stats they showed for running Firefox on ARM where absolutely amazing. So if their plans for a reasonably stable embedding API comes together I can see great things for mozilla/firefox in the embedded space. At Collabora we have already been helping customers with both Webkit and Mozilla work so far and it will be interesting to see which of these two engines we will end up helping our business partners integrate on their devices the most going forward.

Currently attending LUGRadio Live USA, which is an attempt at moving the LUGRadio conference concept to the US. Working out pretty well so far, although troublesome US regulations have cut away the customary beer sale at the venue. David Schleef did a lightning talk here yesterday about Dirac and the room was packed full with people, so I was very happy to see the interest around Dirac. The early buzz is just amazing. David’s Dirac talk wasn’t the only GStreamer related talk at the conference, Aaron Bockover did a nice presentation about Banshee which is progressing really nicely. I need to grab latest SVN when I get back home to test out the new video support and the super fast song database. Later today there will be a Songbird talk which I am also looking forward too. With their recent switch to GStreamer across all platforms and Mike Smith starting work there on Monday, to be their resident GStreamer expert, I think Songbird is going to be absolutely rocking.

Wim will be travelling back to Europe this afternoon as he is needed onsite at a customer site, personally I will stay another 5 days here in the bay area as there are some more open source conferences being organized which I wanted to attend. For instance I hope to be able to stop by the X Developers summit before I leave to hear about the plans Keith Packard talked about in Austin in regards to XvMC for instance. Seems media playback is a growing concern for the X hackers in terms of their priorities.

Monday is final SOC proposal deadline

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Ok, so this is my final blog for this year suggesting that people sign up to do a Google Summer of Code projectwith GStreamer. Even with Google extending the deadline on Monday it the gates are closing. We got some good projects proposed for both GStreamer and Dirac (and there are some really nifty GNOME ones also), but more is always welcome.On Tuesday myself and the other SoC administrators for the various projects will start voting over the various Summer of Code proposals we have received, and hopefully yours will be among those getting the most votes.

So for the final time check out our page of instructions for how to create a GStreamer SoC proposal and if you don’t already know what you want to do as a project you can check out some of the ideas GStreamer developers have proposed.

OSSv4 and GStreamer

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Not long ago 4Front Technologies open sourced their OSSv4 system. OSSv4 is a much improved version of the old OSS sound system that used to be in the kernel. OSSv4 will also be the official new sound system for OpenSolaris. With OSSv4 being open source it became important to support it well in GStreamer and in GNOME. Due to this we at Collabora Multimedia have been working with 4Front to make sure everything works well. Tim-Philipp Muller has been working on some new OSSv4 elements for GStreamer for some time now with the goal being to make things like the GNOME mixer and so on works perfectly if you install OSSv4 on your linux or FreeBSD system. We are not there yet, but we are getting closer.

These plugins are currently in gst-plugins-bad, but once we get some wider testing of them we hope to move them to gst-plugins-good. A nice feature is that since the OSSv4 plugin doesn’t need OSSv4 installed to build the plugins will build on all linux systems. This means that they are very likely to be shipped as part of the GStreamer plugins coming with your distro and thus all you need to do to enable OSSv4 on your linux box is grab the OSSv4 package from 4Front.

Some things still need a little polish, so no screenshots at this time, but if you are using OSSv4 on your system please grab CVS gst-plugins-bad and report any issues you find to bugzilla.

GStreamer and Firefox = true?

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Was just pointed to Chris Double’s blog entry about his work integrating GStreamer with the HTML5 media elements. Really great stuff Chris! I hope the linux distributions pick up these patches as soon as possible as it would be really sweet to have Firefox’s media handling integrated with the rest of the system.

And thanks to the MacOSX and Windows the nice Windows and MacOSX support in GStreamer maybe this could become a cross platform solution for Firefox.