GStreamer Hackfest in Malaga update

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

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

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.

Update: Yaiza took these photos from the hackfest

Interview with Arun Raghavan about PulseAudio

With all the talk generated by Arun Raghavans blog post comparing PulseAudio and Audioflinger I thought it would be good to follow up with an interview with Arun about the latest developments in PulseAudio and the way forward for the project. You can find the PulseAudio interview here. I also made a new page listing all the Collabora developer interviews done so far. Enjoy :)

GStreamer Hackfest in Malaga

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 :)

Transmageddon runs with GStreamer 0.11

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.

Screenshot of development Transmageddon

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.

GStreamer 1.0 Application porting hackfest/code sprint

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 :)

Are you in Malaga, Spain? Or know someone there?

I am desperately looking for someone familiar with Malaga, Spain, maybe a local LUG or similar. The reason is that we are interested in doing a GStreamer 1.0 application porting hackfest there in late January. So getting hold of someone with local knowledge who would be able to help us find a suitable venue would be great. Please get in touch with me on christian.schaller(at)gmail.com if you are in the area and willing to help or know someone would probably could help us.

HTML5, Video editing and the Collabora website

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).

The demo, while simple, is quite cool, showing off our HTML5 based touch screen interface all built on top of Webkit and the GStreamer Editing Services. The embedded video is to be found on the GStreamer Editing Services page.

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.

Farstream and libnice, an interview with Youness Alaoui

After the success of the GStreamer interview with Wim Taymans I thought we follow up with another great interview with a Collabora developer.

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.