Thought I should give people an update on the ongoing MXF work that is happening in GStreamer. Sebastian Droge is working hard on making sure we have full support for MXF a job not made any easier by the fact that MXF is a very complex container format aimed at a wide range of use cases. We bought the full DVD of specifications from SMPTE recently for Sebastian in order to ensure he had all the documentation needed to get it right.

Thanks to many helpful people in the community we now also have a healthy collection of test files for MXF which should enable us to make sure our demuxer interoperates with all the major MXF creation tools out there. The MXF demuxer has come quite far, it has still some way left to go, so while you might be able to play back a few files already, it is to early to ask the community to jump in and try to hammer the demuxer with all their files.

Once the demuxer is in the state we want it the plan is to continue onto write a muxer for MXF, a job which should be a little easier as we can start with a minimal part of MXF and extend it over time as long as our initial part is big enough to create valid MXF files. People interested in following development should of course check out gst-plugins-bad from CVS.

MPEG TS update

On the topic of container formats I have been testing our MPEG TS muxer based on a patch provided by community contributor Vanista. The goal of the testing is making sure the MPEG TS muxer is able to generate files that the Playstation 3 is able to play back perfectly. The Playstation 3 is quite strict about what it supports, so the files you create need to perfectly match the specific profile the PS3 has support for. But once we get this sorted GStreamer should actually become one of the best tools available for creating these files as it seems even on windows people are forced to use a lot of random tools to get a working MPEG TS file with AC3 and H264 inside. My goal is to be able to store the few US DVD’s I have compressed like this on my PS3, as I no longer have a multizone DVD player at home (just using my PS3 these days to play DVD’s). Remuxing the original AC3 audio and compressing the video with H264 seems like the best combination possible for me in terms of balancing storage space use versus sound and image quality. People interested in that effort can follow this bug entry (yes I know its a little suboptimal to keep a discussion going on a closed bug

So published the second multimedia interview today, this time with someone I think most readers of this blog already know quite well, Bastien Nocera. You find the full interview here on gnomedesktop in where we discuss recent Totem developments and the support for infra red devices and bluetooth under linux. Hope people enjoy this and the previous Jokosher interview, feel free to post a comment with suggestions for who I should interview next

I came across this video interview with George Wright of the BBC today where he answers some of the questions posted about the Totem BBC plugin. I recommend people viewing it as George explains a lot about the technologies and thinking involved and of course if you want to be truly l33t you should watch the Dirac version

So it is time to announce that Alessandro Decina has joined our video editing team here at Collabora Multimedia. He will be working with Edward Hervey and Brandon Lewis on moving Pitivi and its related technologies quickly forward. Alessandro has been contributing to GStreamer for quite some time and will be joining Edward and Wim working out of our Barcelona office. Welcome to the team Alessandro!

On the topic of Pitivi related news, Sebastian Dröge has commited his MXF demuxer to gst-plugins-bad. It is still at an early stage with a lot of files still not working, but some of the simpler MXF files out there already works. Sebastian will continue working on improving the demuxer to support all the files in our now extensive collection of MXF test files (we still need Final Cut Pro generated files if anyone got some). Once the demuxer works reliable and with the features we want the next step is a MXF muxer.

I search for GStreamer and related topics on news.google.com from time to time to see what kind of press coverage and interest there is. Usually it is interesting articles like this one about Songbird 1.0 and GStreamer, but sometimes I also come across some really silly stuff.

Today I found this press release which apart from mentioning linux and GStreamer is an incomprehensible collection of attempted buzzwords and random product names. I guess if one knew all the products and technologies from this company intimately already, one would have an idea what they are talking about. For the rest of us its just utter gibberish.

One of the first things I ever did after getting involved with the open source community was conduct various interviews for the now long gone linuxpower.org website. I continued doing that for quite a while after I got involved with GNOME and GStreamer, but it has now been quite a few years since I last did an interview. Been planing to restart my effort many a time, but never seemed to get around to it. But some weeks ago I decided to kick myself into action again.

So I present you with an interview with none other than Laszlo Pandy the maintainer of the Jokosher audio editor. So head on over to gnomedesktop.org (which I felt could use a little injection of activity) and hear about the current status and future plans for Jokosher and the state of linux multimedia.

If people like the interview I will follow-up with more multimedia related interviews in the weeks and months to come.

Sebastian Dröge is finishing up a major piece of work these days in terms of adding support for the MXF container format in GStreamer and Pitivi.
This is a complex format and we found that there is not a lot of easily findable sample content out there on the interweb. So we request that those of you out there with applications which can generate MXF files, like Avid and Final Cut Pro, please provide us with short samples along with a description of which codecs are inside and which application generated the file. Attach any such files you are able to generate to reports in GStreamer bugzilla.

We are happy to announce the latest team member joining us here at Collabora Multimedia. Jorn Baayen, well known for his work on projects such as Rhythmbox, Muine and most recently GUPnP. Jorn will be working on a range of things for us, but first and foremost he will be our UPnP and DLNA expert. We figured that getting Jorn on board with be a great way to make sure that the world still had access to a company offering consulting services around GUPnP after Opened Hand got bought by Intel.

So welcome aboard Jorn, we are very happy to have you on our team!

As most I have participated in a lot of competitions and lotteries over the years. Only time I previously won something was when I got a digital calculator wristwatch from the Disney Book Club when I was 12 years old.
Well this time I actually won something I think is rather cool. Thanks to a competition hosted by the cool people at Bit Tech in collaboration with Ubisoft I just won this cool PS3:

The conspiracy theorists among you might think I only won this because I work with Wim Taymans and this is a way for Ubisoft to show their gratitude for Puffys Saga, the game Wim wrote which essentially secured Ubisofts success

But no that is not the case, this was pure luck. Only thing that suprised me though is that after spending so much time and money on making this price they didn’t bother throwing in a copy of the actual Farcry 2 game, but I guess that is where they hope to recoup their cost

Update: Seems I was a bit quick about the game. Got a package from Ubisoft in the post with not only Farcry2, but 3 other Ubisoft PS3 games too. Thanks!

In case people missed it there was an article on our Pitivi effort by Nathan Willis posted on Friday at linux.com. The article mentions our current plans in terms of accelerating the development of Pitivi.

On the topic of Pitivi, Brandon Lewis posted a blog entry recently describing and showing a screenshot of his work on improving audio handling in Pitivi.