So I have been spending quite a few evenings and hours recently working with Frank Scholz on sorting out the compatability issues between Coherence and the Playstation 3. The playstation 3 being a DLNA device turned out to be not very keen on communicating with systems only doing the ‘upnp a/v’ specification. So I gave Frank ssh access to my home machine and he tested various changes to coherence while I watched how my PS3 reacted to those changes.

It took us quite some time, but in the end we managed to get things working very well. When we reviewed our progress so far we very pretty happy with our progress. I was able to play mp3 songs, view photos both stored locally on my laptop and from Flickr. And finally we also got MPEG2 video playing fine. We still need to do more testing though to make sure all supported formats play well, currently that should include AC3 audio, WMA audio and MPEG4 video at least.

The automatic transcoding also needs more effort to work. But all in all this looks quite good currently and while we tested with the coherence test server all these features (and more) should automatically work in Elisa.

Due to being asked about it I checked the number of subscribers today to gstreamer-devel mailing list. Turns out we have 723 people subscribed to the list at this point. I don’t know if that is a lot of not as I don’t admin that many other mailing lists, but it seems a respectable number for a development mailing list for a fairly low level library.

Found out the other day on the recently launch Ubuntu Media Center Team and their plans to use Elisa as their primary interface. This is great news indeed and I am going to follow this effort closely. With my recently purchased DVB-T card I very soon need
some media center hardware and software at home :)

All Sun blocks are not equal

Went to the beach on Sunday and applied the sun block I had bought the day before. My procedure for buying sun block is simple, a) it is a brand I have heard of before and b) it has a factor number between 5 and 10. This has always served me well before, but this time it didn’t work out exactly as expected. While the Hawaiian Tropic sun block did work in terms of not getting me sunburned it had a tiny side effect. It gave my body a metalic glimmer, due to containing lots of little pieces of gold glitter. So while some people might think ‘hey cool, I look like glitter spray Ken preparing for my date with glitter spray Barbie’, I instead felt like I looked like a Modern Talking wannabe. Especially since the sunblock I had put on my face made my lips look like I was using sparkling lipstick.

So to my fellow sun bathers, next time you buy sunblock I suggest taking a look at the bottle to make sure it doesn’t say something like ‘shimmering sheen’ as a subtitle. It turns out to be more than just an empty marketing term for sunblock. Of course if you are a fourteen year old girl or a drag queen feel free to ignore this warning :)

So Wim has been hacking on with the GStreamer RTP support and we have managed to play all our internal streams correctly now testing with the Darwin Quicktime Server, Axis RTP network camera and the RTP branch of Flumotion. There are still a few cosmetic things not working perfectly like getting Totem to display the name of the codecs being used, but all in all things are looking very sweet.

So if you want to help us out make it truly robust we ask that people grab latest CVS of GStreamer and the plugins modules and try to test out using Totem and playbin against local and internet RTP streams they have access too. GStreamer contains depayloaders for most MPEG/3GPP related payload types and Fluendo will soon add Windows Media RTP support to our codec package. The only major RTP (or rather RTP like) thing not supported yet is Real media and also Apple RTP of their older proprietary formats (Sorenson/QDM2). And of course we support Vorbis, Speex and Theora RTP streams :)

I have blogged before about our support for the most recent Apple streams like the Jobs keynote and here is a little screenshot of Totem viewing that stream.

Update:
I made a claim that sync was solved in current CVS and this turned out to be wrong and based on some miscommunication. Sync is still not fully done and it will still be a few weeks before it is so. According to Wim the only reason sync is better atm is purely coincidental. Testers are still very welcome though as it would allow us to sort out issues such as server compatability and so on.

Update 2:
After some lunchtime discussion it turned out my claim about sync was true afterall. Sync is now perfect for RTSP streams. What is missing is RTCP sync. :)

Also regarding the question of serving RTP there will be some rudimentary support in GStreamer once this work is done. Furthermore there are people from Axis working on enabling GStreamer as a RTP serving system so expect to see further updates on that front.

So Jan and I are participating at this years CELF Embedded Linux conference. It is my first CELF and it seems an interesting group of people from most of the major embedded system makers. The participation in this event from Asia is particularly good.

Lot of familiar faces from the GNOME community here too like Jeff Waugh, Matthew Allum, Robert McQueen, Carlos Guerreiro, Quim Gill, Robert Taylor and Marcel Holtmann.

Jan is doing a presentation/tutorial on GStreamer tomorrow and will also quickly demo the Fluendo DVD player as part of that talk.

Having a great time apart from the problems presented by the airline losing my luggage on the way over. Hopefully I will get it them today or I will have to start borrowing clothers from Jan; which is likely to make me have as tight fitting clothes as Steve Irwin used to be known for.

So I thought I should compose a list of all GStreamer related approved Summer of Code projects:

• GNU Project: Gnome/GStreamer Desktop sound integration for Java
• GNOME: GStreamer plugins and extensions for multimedia content creation applications
• GNOME: Signal processing block for GStreamer
• GNOME: PiTiVi, an Open Source Video Editor
• GNOME: Jokosher VoIP Integration
• GNOME: VoIP and video call client using Telepathy
• Mono: Banshee – Porting Banshee to Windows
• Freevo: DVB CAM support
• Freevo: Gstreamer Integration

A big thanks to both the students and organisations involved.

Special mentions

Not related to GStreamer, but I found two projects I think deserve special mention looking over the approved projects.

The first is a project for OpenOffice to create proper SVG import support, I really hope this one pans out well as proper SVG support in OpenOffice would be a big step forward :
Draw/Impress: SVG Import Filter

The second project I found I noticed for somewhat other reasons, in fact I would like announce the winner of this years ‘Biggest Optimist in the Universe and Beyond 2007 Award’ to this project:
Dirac encoder and decoder.

Considering how long we have spent on getting Schrodinger up to scratch I am amazed that anyone even manage to believe they can create both a decoder and an encoder for Dirac in 3 Months.

I guess most have seen the story about how EMI and Apple are going to offer big parts of EMI catalogue in AAC format without any kind of DRM protection. If this pans out well I think it could be the begining of the end for widespread use of DRM.

So we had a meeting here at the office last Friday with Robert McQueen, Phillipe Khalaf from Collabora and Stefan Kost from Nokia. The reason for this meeting was to sort out the final points on RTP support in GStreamer. The Collabora guys have approached the issue so far from the VoIP side of things while we at Fluendo have approached it from a RTSP /streaming point of view. The point in time now had come to make sure our efforts stayed complimentary as our work here at Fluendo started pushing into areas which up to this point had been solely the the domain of Collabora. A lot of beautiful diagrams and drawings where made with Wim Taymans and Phillipe being the major designers at the meeting. The result was an agreement on an overall design and also a fairly clear roadmap for how we get there. The first steps taken will be Wim working on adjusting the Farsight Jitterbuffer plugin, including moving it into GStreamer CVS, to also catering for streaming needs and also working on the new RTP session manager design. The plan is then that after a while Phillipe will take over the torch and make sure the updated components fit into the wider needs of Farsight and Telepathy. All in all a very good and productive meeting.

Apart from coming up with some great specs I also think we managed to feed Rob, Phillipe and Stefan with some great tapas and also pour into them a couple (aka a lot) of beers :)

So I mentioned some time ago that we have been working with the wild gang behind Songbird
to enable GStreamer on Windows and Mac. I already posted a shot of GStreamer running on Windows some time ago and today the time has come to show of a shot of GStreamer in action on the Mac.

One of the cool things we discovered was that we are able to provide smoother video seeking on the Mac than you get with the quicktime player.

Be aware that even if the application in the picture is a X11 application the video window is MacOSX native and the same with the sound output. A big thanks to Edward who has been fighthing with the ‘charms’ of MacOSX like crazy to make this happen :)

The new deadline for Google Summer of Code proposals is 26th of March. So I strongly recommend any interested students to get moving on sending in their GStreamer related SoC proposals to the Freevo project. You find their project suggestions list here.