A big thanks to Google for making GStreamer part of also this years Google Summer of Code. For those of you who might not know the Google Summer of Code it is basically a program that lets you do a summer internship with various leading open source projects and get paid for it (if you are a student).
So if you always wanted to get involved with the GStreamer project and become a multimedia wizard, this is a great way to do so. The process is quite simply, you write a proposal for what you want to do (some possible suggestions and info found here) and submit it to Google when the application period starts on the 26th of March. Before then you would do well to speak with us on IRC or email lists to discuss your project to maximise your chances of getting selected.
We have a special Google Summer of Code student information page with information on what the GStreamer project specifically expects of you and your proposal. So for those interested that should be a good starting point.
Hope to see many great applications this year on either GStreamer itself or GStreamer using projects. And remember, you don’t have to feel bound by our suggestion list, if you have a great idea for a project that involves GStreamer, then we are happy to mentor it, just be sure to talk to us as soon as possible so we can let you know if we think it is a suitable Summer of Code project.
So working up to MWC in Barcelona this week we just announced a great new effort by Collabora and Fluendo around the GStreamer project. The goal is to ease adoption of GStreamer by making sure that no matter what platform you are in, there are well tested and easy to install and use binaries of GStreamer available. This means that not matter if you are running Windows, MacOS X or Linux, you will have a GStreamer SDK available to use. Eventually we will also cover various embedded platforms with this SDK, making it easier than ever to use GStreamer to create great cross platform multimedia applications. You can find out more about this effort by checking out the press release which have all the relevant details.
So as I talked about in my last blog post we had a great GStreamer hackfest. A lot of things got done and quite a few applications got an initial port over to 0.11. For instance Edward Hervey ended up working on porting the Totem video player, or rather trying to come up with a more optimized design for the Clutter-gst as the basis port was already done.
Another cool effort was by Philippe Normand from Igalia who put a lot of effort into porting WebKit to use 0.11. His efforts where rewarded with success as you can see in this screenshot.
Jonathan Matthew had flown up all the way from Australia and made great progress in porting Rhythmbox over to the 0.11 API, a port which became hugely more useful after Wim Taymans and Tim-Phillip Muller fixed a bug that caused mp3 playback not to work :).
Peteris Krisjanis made huge strides in porting Jokosher to 0.11. Although like Jason DeRose from Novacut and myself on Transmageddon he did end up spending a lot of time on debugging issues related to gobject-introspection. The challenge for non-C applications like Jokosher, Novacut, Transmageddon and PiTiVi is a combination of the API having changed quite significantly due to the switch to gobject-introspection generated bindings, some general immaturity challenges with the gobject-introspection library and finally missing or wrong annotations in the GStreamer codebase. So once all these issues are sorted things should look a lot brighter for language bindings, but as we discovered there is a lot of heavy lifting to get there. For instance I thought I had Transmageddon running quite smoothly before I suddenly triggered this gobject-introspection bug.
There was a lot of activity around PiTiVi too, with Jean-François Fortin Tam, Thibault Saunier and Antigoni Papantoni working hard on porting PiTiVi to 0.11 and the GStreamer Editing Services library. And knowing Jean-François Fortin I am sure there will soon be a blog with a lot more details about that :).
Thomas Vander Stichele, who also wrote a nice blog entry about the event, was working with Andoni Morales Alastruey, both from Flumotion, on porting Flumotion to 0.11, but due to some of the plugins needed not having been ported yet most of their effort ended up being on porting the needed plugins in GStreamer and not so much application porting, but for those of you using plugins such as multifdsink, this effort will be of great value and Andoni also got started on porting some of the non-linux plugins, like the directsoundsink for Windows.
Josep Torra from Fluendo ended up working with Edward Hervey on hammering out the design for the clutter-gst sink at the conference, but he also found some time to do a port of his nice little tuner tool as you can see from the screenshot below.
Tuner tool for GStreamer 0.11
George Kiagiadakis kept hammering away at the qtGStreamer bindings, working both on a new release of the bindings for the GStreamer 0.10 series, but also some preparatory work for 0.11.
In addition to the application work, Wim Taymans, Tim-Phillip Müller and Sebastian Dröge from Collabora did a lot of core GStreamer clean ups and improvements in addition to providing a lot of assistance, bugfixing and advice for the people doing application porting. All critical items are now sorted in 0.11 although there are some nice to have’s still on the radar, and Wim plans on putting out some new releases next week, to kickstart the countdown to the first 1.0 release.
As for my own little pet project Transmageddon, it is quite far along now, with both manually configured re-encodes and profile re-encodes working. Still debugging remuxing though and I am also waiting for the deinterlacer to get ported to re-enable deinterlacing in the new version. For a screenshot take a look at the one I posted in my previous blogpost.
Things have been going really well here at the GStreamer Hackfest in Malaga. Thanks to the help of Ara and Yaiza from Nido Malaga, we have a great venue in downtown Malaga and they have also helped us greatly with sorting out food.
We have a great group of people here and are making great progress, and by tomorrow I hope we will have screenshots of quite a few applications running with GStreamer 0.11, for instance both Rhythmbox and Jokosher for instance is already screen shootable, if not fully functional GStreamer Hackfest Malaga 2012
Also making good progress on Transmageddon, even if the move to GObject Introspection bindings are making things a bit more complicated. Screenshot below of the progress so far.
Transmageddon at Hackfest in Malaga 2012
Also a big thanks to Fluendo who is sponsoring the lunches at the hackfest and Collabora who is sponsoring tonight’s dinner. Ensuring that no hacker is left hungry during this hackfest.
Tomorrow I will be heading off to attend the GStreamer Application Porting Hackfest in Malaga, Spain. I think we have managed to pull together an absolutely incredible group of people for this event and I have great hopes that by next weekend we will have squashed a ton of bugs in GStreamer 0.11/1.0 and also have initial ports of a long range of important applications and bindings. This is the first time in GStreamer history that we are trying to hold a hackfest focused on application developers, but hopefully it will be the first of many and that they can become a good way for the core GStreamer community and the application development community to interact and collaborate more closely.
Also want to say a special thanks to the community members attending the event on their own and also to the companies sending their employees to the hackfest; Collabora, Fluendo, Flumotion and Igalia and finally a special thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring some of the attendees.
Hopefully I will be able to post some screenshots of a fully functional GStreamer 1.0 Transmageddon next weekend
After updating GStreamer and doing a couple of small fixes I managed to make Transmageddon work with the GTK3 and the 0.11 branch of GStreamer. Obligatory screenshot below. As you might guess from looking at the screenshot there are still some issues that needs solving, but
I am happy that I managed to get this far.
Transmageddon running GTK3 and GStreamer 0.11/1.0
Hopefully it is a sign that the upcoming GStreamer hackfest in Malaga will be a great successful everyone who is participating.
I hope the remainder of the porting effort will be relatively simple as I would love to get back to working on real features instead of just updating old functionality to use a new backend to do the same. Having had a need for Transmageddon for a couple of work related tasks recently a couple of items, like batch job programming has moved up my priorities list.
We are trying to put together a hackfest to help developers using GStreamer to port their applications to GStreamer 1.0. The GStreamer Hackfest/Code Sprint 2012 will take place in Malaga, Spain, between 25th to 27th of January (3 full days). I would ask all developers out there interested in attending to add your name to the wiki as quickly as possible, just so we can estimate interest. If you are interested, but don’t know for sure if you can make it there, it would still be good if you added your name with maybe a comment mentioning that you need to verify before you are certain.
We will be offering some travel sponsorship, so even if you are short on cash we hope to have you attend, more details on the hackfest&codesprint wiki page.
For those wondering why we choose Malaga, well the reason is that Wim Taymans, the GStreamer 1.0 designer and lead developer lives there, and at a previous hackfest we tried to do in Oslo he ended up in Helsinki instead. So this time we are taking no risks, but instead we are taking the hackfest to him
So I did a bit of work last week to convert the Collabora website to HTML5. The actual porting was quite simple, mostly replacing the DOCTYPE tag to the new HTML5 one. Found a few other issues through the W3C validator, but nothing major. Today I took the next (small) step in the process by actual adding some real HTML5 content to the site. Actually I only sort of did. Instead of hosting the video locally and using the new video tag I ended up uploading it to youtube and embedding the WebM video in our page. The small video clip I added is demonstrating the HTML5 video editing demo we released recently. (For those of you who missed it I recommend the HTML5 video editing blog entry by Mateu Batle, which explains the whole thing in detail and also links to the code).
As a sidenote, to make this I actually relied on the GNOME 3 built in screen capture support, which I have to say worked like a charm Always felt screen casting to be a pain before, but this time it worked very well for me.
This time we are talking with Youness Alaoui who is one of the maintainers of Farstream, the audio and video conferencing framework built on top of GStreamer. We also cover another of Youness Alaoui projects, libnice, the NAT traversal library. So if you want to know what is happening with audio and video conferencing on Linux be sure to read the full interview with Youness Alaoui here.
Blog talking about Fedora, GNOME, GStreamer and related topics
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