As many of you might be aware, Google today announced the open source release of the WebM Project and VP8 codec. What you might not be aware of is that Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave have been working with the WebM team and due to this are able to announce the availability of a full set of GStreamer plugins for this new and exciting video format, the needed updates to support the WebM container format and finally we have been working with Xiph.org and Monty to announce the availability of a Ogg container format mapping for WebM, which we have also implemented support for in GStreamer. So by grabbing our WebM branches from GStreamer git you can today do the following things with all GStreamer applications:

• Encode video into the WebM VP8 video format
• Decode videos which are in the WebM video format
• Mux VP8 and Vorbis into the official WebM container format (based on Matroska)
• Demux WebM files with VP8 and Vorbis
• Stream VP8 video as part of Ogg http streams
• Mux and demux VP8 into Ogg container format

We also hope to be working with the WebM project community to offer RTP streaming of VP8 as soon as possible after this launch.

So a big thanks to the good people at Google for releasing WebM to the world and for working with us and other members of the open source community to enable WebM usage in the open source community from day one.

So for the actual code all patches will be committed to gst-plugins-good/base/bad and will be available in new pre-releases today

For those of you running latest releases and prefer to stick with that until the next full release then patches against latest releases will be available from these locations (web interface):
http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/slomo/gst-plugins-base.git
http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/slomo/gst-plugins-bad.git
http://git.collabora.co.uk/?p=user/slomo/gst-plugins-good.git

You can read more about the WebM release at the official WebM blog post.

You find the official joint press release of Collabora Multimedia and Entropy Wave here.

Update: Thought I should also link to Montys blog which gives the official Xiph.org view.

Currently staying at my friend David Schleefs place in San Francisco. Davids company Entropy Wave is about to launch some rather cool new hardware encoders rack boxes, which David showed of during the CE Linux showcase. The boxes will support both Theora and H264 encoding to enable the easy creation of HTML5 friendly content. People where also quite impressed by Davids DSP port of Theora for Texas Instruments OMAP3 which was sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation, there was also some interest by other chipset vendors to get David to also port it to their architectures which could be a great development in terms of Theora based HTML5 support on mobile and embedded devices.

I was here to attend the CE Linux and Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit conferences this week and its been interesting. Btw, thanks to Google for the Nexus One phone, will be interesting to get home and do a throughout comparison with my Nokia N900. One thing I already discovered doing some prelimenary testing is that the Nexus One doesn’t seem to support syncing contacts over bluetooth, so its a bit of a cumbersome process it seems to move my address book onto the Nexus One from the N900. Talking of Google, the most repeated rumour, from a lot of people at the conference all claiming inside sources at Google, is that Google is about to open source the VP8 codec, using it both for Google Talk video conferencing, for HTML5 in Android and Chrome, and for You Tube. Will be interesting to see if this happens though and under what terms in the end. And if it happens it will be equally interesting to see if the quality of the encoder is good. Heard some claims that the current VP8 encoder actually creates worse quality videos than the latest Theora encoder at the same bitrate, which would make Googles refusal to support Theora for HTML5 for Youtube a bit sad.

Got to talk to quite a bit of people using GStreamer on their products, and I based on those conversations I can easily foresee that we will be getting more contracts in the future, at Collabora Multimedia, which task is basically mainlining vendor patches for things like GStreamer and Pulse Audio from vendors who are using these libraries in their products. While most companies wanted to see their patches go upstream to avoid eternal pains of maintaining and re-applying their modifications, they seem to have trouble allocating staff needed to make it happen. So hiring specialists like us to do the needed patch clean-ups and get them ready to be merged is easier to fit into their timetables and budget. Tim Bird, the chairman of the CE Linux forum, actually mentioned in one of his talks that this was the method that a lot of their members have found to be most cost effective in terms of getting patches upstream to a lot of different projects, hiring core contributors to the project in question as consultants to take the patches to a stage where they can be merged.

Last night I attended a GNOME dinner hosted by Adam Dingle of Yorba.org fame, seems Yorba is making good progress on their projects, with Shotwell their photo manager, getting included in next version of Fedora. A big thanks to Adam for setting up this dinner, much appreciated.

The other thing that I am wondering about at this point is whether I will actually be able to fly back to the UK on Sunday. With the volcanic ash messing up everything I am starting to worry a bit. Seems BA though is re-routing their US flights to Glasgow and then providing buses to take people down to London. Not to excited about the prospect of a 6.5 hour bus ride though, but I guess considering the circumstances I shouldn’t complain. And if I do end up getting stuck here then there are not a lot of places in the world I would choose over San Francisco to be stuck, it is an really great city. However since getting stuck in San Francisco would also mean a delay in seeing the most wonderful woman in the world again, I am not in a good position to enjoy having my stay in San Francisco extended.

Anyway, no use in worrying about my flight until Sunday, in the meantime I am looking forward to Mike Smiths birthday party tomorrow, especially since Mike is taking the step of joining me in the 30+ old geezer club.

I thought I should let people know that they really should grab latest version of the Schrodinger encoder/decoder from diracvideo.org. If you saw David Schleefs blogpost about Dirac you would have seen him mentioning it is much faster.

Having tested with GStreamer I can confirm that it is the case, it is really fast now, and CPU usage which used to be the achilles heal of Dirac doesn’t seem to be an issue now. Be sure to also grab gst-plugins-base 0.10.28 too though, as it contains a critical fix for playing back Dirac in Ogg containers.

While GStreamer has been working on Windows for a long time and one can compile GStreamer using Visual Studio, the lack of pre-made binaries for Windows developers has been a bit of an issue. Various groups and people have tried providing windows binaries for a while, but most efforts have stalled after a short while. The GStreamer winbuilds project however seems quite solid however and have now been doing good windows packages for quite a while. If you have been looking for Windows builds for GStreamer this is a good place to start. They already have a list of users on Windows and the reason I became aware is that the jokosher guys are using it for their windows porting effort.