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:

My new 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.

For those who might have missed it George Wright of the BBC blogged on Thursday about the Totem BBC plugin we are doing with them and Canonical and which I blogged about earlier. As George pointed out this plugin is not the iPlayer in terms of content, but I still hope a lot of you will end up using it. The more popular it is the more mindshare it will have, including within the BBC, and thus easier it will be to get further content added.

The content distribution system is also fully open sourced, so it should be possible for any broadcaster who is interested to use it for their content.

For those of you who wants to test this plugin, who are not using Ubuntu’s test packages, the patch for Totem is available in this bugzilla entry. As the totem progress and we work towards merging the latest versions will be posted to there.

Pitivi video editor

For those of you interested in the latest news on Pitivi I recomend you track Brandon’s blog. He posted yesterday a big update on his latest work to drill the Pitivi UI into shap. Keywords for this entry is cleander default layout, detachable components and a property editor.

I am currently at the Google Summer of Code mentors summit together with representatives for a many of the open source projects involved in the Google Summer of code. Had some interesting discussions so far, for instance we had a informal gathering of multimedia developers yesterday which reviewed the bugzilla entry for automatic support for interlaced media in GStreamer. Thanks to having a lot of people present like David Schleef, Mike Smith, Edward Hervey, Timothy Terriberry allowed us to map out all important interlacing variations and review the design proposal done by Jan Schmidt.

With the new deinterlace2 plugin fixed up by Sebastian Dröge it will be nice to be able to autoplug that plugin into our pipelines when we get this design completely implemented.

Another nice think discovered here is the Gerrit code review tool which they released alongside Android. It intergrates closely with Git and thus would be something that would be very nice to get running on freedesktop alongside the GStreamer CVS to Git migration.

So as I mentioned in a preceding blog entry, we at Collabora Multimedia are looking at increasing the pace of development for Pitivi. The first step we took in that regard was hiring Brandon Lewis. We are now ready to take the second step and are now looking for good candidates to join our team. So if some of the bullets points below fits your profile and you would be interested in taking open source video editing to the next level, please send me your CV.

• Solid C or C++ development skills
• GStreamer experience
• Video editing experience
• Python development experience
• Video codec development experience

We are not expecting someone to have all of these points down, and we are looking just as much for people who got any kind of experience with non-linear video editors as people with specific GStreamer skills. So for instance if you worked on any of the many open source video editing projects out there you could be our perfect candidate, even if this editor was not using GStreamer. As long as you are a generally proficient developer, it is more important for us that you know what chroma keying is than what a GstSegment is.

So if you are interested in joining one of the coolest companies in the world and especially if you wouldn’t mind coming to work in one of our offices in either Montreal Canada, Cambridge United Kingdom or Barcelona Spain, please send me your CV and short intro at christian-schaller-at-collabora-co-uk.

Saw a story on OpenOffice 3 today which reminded me of a question I been asking myself recently. What does the free desktop need to grow in market share?

Up to this point I guess I my thinking about the free desktop (grouping GNOME, KDE, XFCE etc. as one) and its growth has mostly been about seeing it as a dam filling up. The mass migrations from Windows would be trickling in slowly until at some point we have added enough features and polish to the free desktop for the dam to break. Kinda like how linux in the server space lived many years without a lot of adoption outside academia and or specific fields before suddenly becoming an ‘overnight’ success.

But at this point I am not so sure anymore. I mean is what holding us back from rapid gains in marketshare really just better MS Word import in OpenOffice? Or better support for exchange servers in Evolution? Or better drawing tools in Inkscape and Gimp? Or better support for muxing Quicktime files in GStreamer? Or improved ways of embedding a blingy clock widget into the desktop background? Or just adding an application that can do XYZ? Or is it the lack of a good driver for hardware ZYX? Sure these questions are part of the answer, but I can’ t help but wonder if they are a smaller part than I have given them credit for so far.

I have sometimes seen the lack of games being mentioned, but the Windows game market is suffering terribly these days, caught between piracy and console dominance. So if people care about games I think they probably got themselves a Wii, PS3 or Xbox360 to satisfy that need. So I can’t see lack of game support as being the tipping point either.

Not that there isn’t progress made. There are good migration stories out there from the major Linux vendors and PC makers like Dell do seem to try to offer better sales support for Linux desktop systems. But I can’t help but feel that we might be missing something in terms of understanding what needs to happen for the market share to grow more rapidly. And if we don’t diagnose the issue we will not be able to resolve it.

One request we get often here at Collabora Multimedia is from people using GStreamer in the embedded and mobile sector and are looking for ways to stream over RTSP with GStreamer, often in combination with various kinds of transcoding and proxying functions. Due to this we have launched a new project, the GStreamer RTSP server. This server is written by GStreamer maintainer Wim Taymans and is tightly based on the RTP infrastructure in GStreamer that he has been working on for quite some time now.

It is a server written in C which can stream any GStreamer supported file over RTSP using any of the wide range of RTP formats supported by GStreamer. It also allows you to take any RTSP or HTTP stream and proxy it onwards over RTSP. The screenshot below is of totem playing a RTSP stream of the Max Payne trailer from Apple’s website. The stream offered by Apple is a normal Quicktime http stream, but our RTSP server repackages it and retransmits it over RTSP on my local network on the fly.

The code is currently only available through a git repository which you can grab using this command:
git clone git://git.collabora.co.uk/git/gst-rtsp-server.git gst-rtsp-server

The reason there is no formal release yet is due to early stage the software is in, while it works it is not very user friendly yet, with media paths having to be edited and compiled in with the server for instance. But for those looking for a RTSP server solution using GStreamer, which is suitable for putting onto embedded and mobile devices, then it might be enough to get you started and of course we at Collabora are available to offer assistance for those who want it. One hope we have is that this code will help people doing DLNA servers support the mobile profile of that specification for instance.

We also plan on moving the code into GStreamer’s code repository once that is migrated to git from CVS.

For a long while we had discussions here at Collabora Multimedia about how to push Pitivi forward at a more rapid pace. While Edward has been working on it as time allows, we came to the conclusion that if the Linux desktop was going to have a nice and easy to use video editor any time soon, we needed to do something to increase the pace of development significantly. We have several efforts under way to achieve this and I will announce the first one today:

We just hired Brandon Lewis for the sole purpose of doing Pitivi development. Brandon has been working on Pitivi for a long time now, having gotten involved during last years Google Summer of Code. He brings a lot of python development skills to the table and will let Edward focus his currently limited Pitivi hacking time (we hope to change this too soon :) on Pitivi related improvements in GStreamer and Gnonlin.

Brandon job will be making sure all the features available gets exposed in the user interface and that the user interface is intuitive and easy to use.

So Brandon, welcome to the team and lets make Pitivi rock!

As I mentioned in my previous blog post here at Collabora Multimedia we have been working with Canonical and the BBC to create a plugin for Totem which plays BBC content. This work is progressing well and with the recent patches we made for Totem to sort out python threading issues are looking really good. I really recommend that people running the latest Ubuntu test releases grab this for some testing. I attached a screenshot of Totem playing a Dirac stream from the BBC showing Big Buck bunny.

Big Buck Bunny

Update:: I noticed a lot of people commenting on the user interface. We are aware that the current user interface is far from perfect and a lot of the requested features are planed. So far we have focused on getting the base technology working smoothly which I think you will agree is the most important first step. A nice looking user interface is of little value if the application locks up :)