So there is only 18 days left before GStreamer Conference 2010 opens its doors in Cambridge, UK. So be sure to mark the 26th of October in your calendar. Preparations are going smoothly with final items being sorted at the venue and programs getting printed. Registrations are also going well with around 120 people signed up to attend so far. If you plan on coming but having registered yet be sure to do so quickly, because there is likely to be a last minute rush of registrations and you don’t want to risk not being able to register and attend because the venue capacity was reached.

Also be sure to check out the list of presentations which is packed full of presentations by the GStreamer community best and brightest and leading technology companies.

Also check out the agenda for the CE Linux Europe Conference, which has established itself as the leading European conference for discussing the use of linux in embedded devices. Since it happens in the same venue as the GStreamer conference, on the 27th and 28th, you can very easily combine the two.

So as I blogged about before, Collabora Multimedia has been doing a project with NLnet to improve echo cancellation support under Linux and Pulse Audio. There were and still are a lot of challenges to get it right, but we wanted to try to lay the groundwork for a system wide solution, which is why we decided to try to implement it within Pulse Audio.

For those wondering what echo cancellation actually means, it is a way to resolve the issue that if you record sound from your laptop microphone and at the same time output sound from your speakers, you easily end up with the sound looping, creating an irritating echo effect, which makes doing voice calls on a machine painful and sometimes impossible. Echo cancellation systems basically try to analyse the data coming out of the speakers so that it can filter it out and ignore it when it comes back through the microphone.

The final result is that we have created a virtual device pair which adds echo cancellation, these virtual devices are automatically used by your application if it announces itself as a ‘phone’ application to Pulse Audio. Our Empathy messaging and video conferencing client does this for instance. The bulk of our work is now done and for many use cases things should just work as soon as the output of our effort gets merged into Pulse Audio and packaged by the distributions. There are some open questions left, but we hope that by making this work available and trying to work with people within the ALSA community we will be able to resolve the remaining issues over time. Anyway, let me just give you the small report Wim Taymans wrote to summarize the work and what has been done:

Pulse Audio filter infrastructure

Currently the echo-cancel module is built upon the virtual source and sink examples, which is currently considered to be the Pulse Audio filter infrastructure.

We briefly looked into the ideas for a different generic filter infrastructure for Pulse Audio. Lennart Poetterings first attempts to implement such an infrastructure were put on hold because of the large complexity wrt to latency and rewinds. Because echo-cancellation is not purely a filter (it needs input from both sink and source) we decided to build the echo-cancel module as a virtual source and sink instead.

Echo cancelling for PulseAudio

So the preparations for this year GStreamer Conference 2010 is progressing at a healthy pace. Today I put the list of speakers and abstracts online, which combined with the conference timetable should let you plan the event pretty well.

I recommend everyone to look over the list of speakers and abstracts, because I am sure there will be things there everyone will find interesting.

I would also like to remind everyone that we got some great talks happening as part of CE Linux as well like Benjamin Gaignard of ST Ericsson talking about Android and GStreamer, Stefan Kost of Nokia talking about Meego and GStreamer and finally Arun Raghavan from Collabora Multimedia speaking about Pulse Audio. So make sure not to miss the CE Linux days.

You find registration information on the main conference website and be sure to register early as space is limited, so if you wait to long you might not be able to register at all.

So the registration system for the GStreamer Conference 2010 is now open together with the registration for CE Linux Conference Europe 2010.

You find the registration for both conferences here so I hope to see as many of you as possible registered. I think we have a great program and some really interesting talks!

The full Collabora Multimedia crew is in The Hague this week for GUADEC and our annual get together. It is the first time all 12 of us are together and its nice to spend some time face to face to get to know each other beyond IRC.

Currently doing a little hackfest at our hotel, pushing forward some cool stuff like echo cancellation, PiTiVi and more.

The preparations for the GStreamer 2010 conference is moving ahead at full speed. Today I was able to put the speakers list and program online showing out strong lineup of presenters and topics.

The actual GStreamer conference website is here for those of you who missed it the first time.

So be sure to mark 26th of October in your calendar so you can attend. There are some great GStreamer related talks that will happen as part of the CE Linux conference too, but I will wait until that program has been announced before letting you know more about those :)

With summer and conference season starting we just got a new batch of Collabora Multimedia t-shirts delivered to the office. This time people got to choose their own colours and thus we ended up with a more colourful set of shirts!

Was happy to see this OpenOffice and GStreamer blog entry today about how OpenOffice has chosen GStreamer to power the multimedia support in OpenOffice going forward. While users of OpenOffice on Linux have been able to enjoy GStreamer support for quite some time thanks to the efforts of Novell, it is still good to see that the upstream project is also coming around to officially supporting this. Currently only enabled by default for Unix/Linux systems I hope we will see it used on Windows and on MacOS X eventually. A big welcome to the OpenOffice community into the GStreamer community :)