Due to being asked about it I checked the number of subscribers today to gstreamer-devel mailing list. Turns out we have 723 people subscribed to the list at this point. I don’t know if that is a lot of not as I don’t admin that many other mailing lists, but it seems a respectable number for a development mailing list for a fairly low level library.
GStreamer, Jokosher and Tribal Trouble
New queue element for GStreamer
One of the things which reduce the user experience of GStreamer today is that the current element used for buffering is not very nice. Meaning that if you have bandwith problems with streaming audio or video it will be very noticeable and give you a less than nice experience. Wim just made sure we took a big step forward in that
regard today with the new ‘queue2’ element commited to CVS. While it doesn’t take us all the way there it do improve upon the current situation a lot. This work combined with Wim’s recent code magic to improve RTSP support should take us a big step forward towards being a very good library for doing network streaming clients.
That the RTP work has been highly anticipated seems obvious based on the huge number of questions about RTP support we get onto gstreamer-devel mailing list. The same goes for the windows support which seems to have a lot of people testing it out. If only we could get more people onto testing our MacOSX support also to make sure it gets rock solid. Hopefully when we get a new release of gst-plugins-good out with both the MacOSX and Windows support included it will get us more users also on the Mac platform.
Jokosher
Getting a new piece of software stable and widely usable is hard and one quickly realize that working on the developers machines is not the same as working for everyone else. Which is was nice to see this blog entry by Niels Kjøller Hansen where he talks about latest version of Jokosher working for him. Still a lot of work remaining for Michael, Laszla, Jono and the rest of the crew before Jokosher has reached its full potential. I guess there are two major items on the todo going forward as I see it which need being taken care of, one being support for more advanced multichannel soundcards for recording, the second being making sure all the needed GStreamer plugins are in gst-plugins-good so distributions can package them easily. Today a few of the needed Jokosher plugins are in CVS of plugins-bad which of course makes it harder for people to get everything they want/need.
Tribal Trouble
I have blogged before about the game Tribal Trouble which is available for Linux. I was happy to see that they decided to
release their sales statistics recently. The most interesting point is probably that Linux sales accounted for as much as 11% of their total sales. I think that is a high enough number to make doing a linux port interestinng, especially for smaller game publishers.
The nice guys at Oddlabs also released the terrain generation engine they made for Tribal Trouble under the GPL.
I also came accross this recent Ryan “icculus” Gordon interview on linuxgames.com. If Linux ever becomes a mainstream games platform I think Ryan personally probably deserves something like 75% of the credit.
Facebook and metadata
Just discovered the photo tagging feature of facebook. It lets you click on various people/objects in your photo and facebook then tries to give you a square box centered around the object to clicked on, in other words they have some basic shape recognition stuff built in. What you usually do is mark the people who are in the picture, and if they are your friends on facebook they will be told that a new photo with themselves are online. Also the image will be added to the link with photos of the person in question on their facebook profile page. You can also tag other people’s photos, but they will have to approve your tagging before it becomes public.
While simple I found it pretty nifty actually. We will hopefully be enganging in a huge EU funded project at Fluendo starting in January. If that project goes through it would be nice to see if we can add a feature like that for video’s as part of that project as collaborative editing and metadata handling is a big part of the project. Of course the technical challenges are much bigger in the context of video so it might not make the cut as it wasn’t concretely planned for in the current proposal. But no matter what the project will be a huge boost for the Pitivi project and the features we offer in Pitivi.
Ubuntu Media Center
Found out the other day on the recently launch Ubuntu Media Center Team and their plans to use Elisa as their primary interface. This is great news indeed and I am going to follow this effort closely. With my recently purchased DVB-T card I very soon need
some media center hardware and software at home 
All Sun blocks are not equal
Went to the beach on Sunday and applied the sun block I had bought the day before. My procedure for buying sun block is simple, a) it is a brand I have heard of before and b) it has a factor number between 5 and 10. This has always served me well before, but this time it didn’t work out exactly as expected. While the Hawaiian Tropic sun block did work in terms of not getting me sunburned it had a tiny side effect. It gave my body a metalic glimmer, due to containing lots of little pieces of gold glitter. So while some people might think ‘hey cool, I look like glitter spray Ken preparing for my date with glitter spray Barbie’, I instead felt like I looked like a Modern Talking wannabe. Especially since the sunblock I had put on my face made my lips look like I was using sparkling lipstick.
So to my fellow sun bathers, next time you buy sunblock I suggest taking a look at the bottle to make sure it doesn’t say something like ‘shimmering sheen’ as a subtitle. It turns out to be more than just an empty marketing term for sunblock. Of course if you are a fourteen year old girl or a drag queen feel free to ignore this warning
Ladytron concert
Ladytron had a concert at Razzmatazz this Friday/Saturday. Turned out to be a less than great experience. The first flaw in my plan was that what I thought was the start time of the concert actually was the opening hour of Razzmatazz. So when I arrived at 2300 expecting to get in, I was told the doors would only only at 0100…so I ended walking around the block a couple of times before getting in. When I finally got into Razzmatazz, I found the concert wouldn’t start until about 0230. Fine and good, I got myself a beer and being early I managed to place myself close to the stage which I thought would be a good thing. Turned out I was wrong, the sound mixing was just horrible, I could barely hear the lyrics and the synth and guitar’s where on such high volume the sound got distortet every second minute. Ugh 
When will venues like this one learn that ‘more sound’ is not the equivalent of ‘good sound’.
Nice review of Elisa
For those who missed it there is a nice review of Elisa over at linux.com today. Especially if you are not very familiar with Elisa it gives a nice overview of the current situation. Also in regard to the much asked question about DVB and PVR support, Elisa superhacker Philippe Normand made the critical mistake of promising me to add support for it as soon as he had a DVB card for his home machine. Well…all I can say is that the card is on the way
Jokosher
Michael Sheldon posted a nice screenshot in his latest blog entry about having started on his Google SoC project to add VoIP support to Jokosher. The screenshot
is showing a very good example of how our powerful multimedia architecture is starting to let us easily tie different kinds of applications together in order to provide some really nifty combinations.
Fluendo webshop
I put the Windows Media encoder plugins into the beta program yesterday and expect to put the AAC decoder in today. Hopefully they will be ready for the shop soon along with some updates to the other existing codecs. Also need to check in with Tim the current status of Codeina once he returns from UDS in Seville. Would be great to be able to use Codeina for this set of updates as the webshop software doesn’t exactly make it easy, to put it mildly.
Codeina Screenshot
Planet GStreamer
Last but not least I added Robert McQueen’s blog to Planet GStreamer today. So this means you will be able to follow the latest Collabora, Farsight and Telepathy news also on Planet GStreamer, or at least follow such news when Robert does his once per millenia blog posts
Succumbed to latest trend
So after having shunned this social network sites after having had a short run in with Orkut a few years ago I just caved in and signed up for Facebook. I try to defend it to myself by saying its part of what being an early adopter type of persona is all about. Who knows, maybe I get crazy enough soon to install Mugshot even
Offtopic – Vacation report
Wim and I just returned from going on a 4 day mini-vacation together. Having been struck by divine inspiration we had decided to do a long weekend in Saint Tropez. Since going was a relativly impulsive decision we set of from Barcelona on Friday after work without any bookings or plans. Or a clear idea about what do to in Saint Tropez either.
It rained heavily most of the evening and night, but we kept on going in the firm belief that Saturday would provide us with better weather. We ended up getting a room at a very cheap hotel about an hour out of Saint Tropez. The hotel had a ‘room vending machine’ instead of a reception so we just typed in that we wanted a room with two beds for one night and put in our credit card, and voila, 45 Euros later we had a receipt with the pin code allowing us to get into the room. Nice setup.
Next morning we drove into Saint Tropez proper and luckily it turned out we where not the only ones there driving a non luxury car. We quickly found some crazy expensive parking and started strolling around town, trying to get some sense of the town and figuring out what our lodging options where. After walking around for a few hours, asking at a few hotels, looking at the old city fortress and getting hit on the head by a gate pole we where settled in at a hotel very close to the central square of Saint Tropez. At that point we had come to the end of our ‘planning’ so we ended just walking around for a bit before implicitly deciding to dedicate the day to food and drink. We started the evening at a Irish pub along the harbour and discovered that it truly was possible to price the Guinness more expensivly than in Barcelona. Yet, being on vacation we did not let such a minor setback put a dampner on our thirst. Wim even took the chance to start flirting with one of the bar’s little ladies, but I will not detail that affair here :). After getting of to a solid start at the Irish pub we started looking around for a place to get some food, and relativly quickly found a place advertising cote boeuf, the famous french meat. And true enough, a hundred euros later we left the resturant well content after consuming a gigantic peace of very good and well prepared meat each. We then went back to the harbour to hang out with the jetset crowd and enjoy more drinks. We had a lot of fun and as it turns out Wim do not mind going uninvited onto huge luxury yatchs once he has about one bottle of Amaretto inside.
Although the hotel had alloted him a bed, Wim decided to spend most of the night on the floor of the room and was a tad slow on the communication side the next morning. Anyway we eventually made our way down to one of the town beaches for the mandatory vacation tanning session. As the day lazed on we consumed a small lunch and one of the local beach bars, and as it turned out the cute girl running the tiny clothing botique also modelled her own clothes so we had some entertainment during the meal. As the afternoon aproached some angry looking cloudes chased us back to the city center and a little shopping.
We ended up doing dinner at a small italian resturant in Saint Tropez before heading of to the VIP Room which was supposedly the happening place of the town. Having been denied access the day before due to being slightly intoxicated we where dead set on restoring our honour. After going there and being told the nightclub would open in about 30 minutes a few times and then going back to the harbour for some drinks and the club in the end looking totally dead (maybe not that strange for a Sunday night) we decided it wasn’t worth the time in the end, so instead we took an relativly early night in order to be ready for what we had decided would be the next step of our journey the next day.
Waking up we packed our stuff, jumped in the car and headed of to the tiny enclave of Monaco. By coincidence we found the Westminster hotel which is located 800m outside the border of Monaco (you don’t realize how small Monaco is until you tried walking around :).
The hotel was fantastic and the pricing very affordable, especially considering you have a stunning view of the sea from most of the rooms, including a lot of communal areas to sit around and enjoy the sun and even a nice terrace for the room. We walked into the old town in the evening to take a look around and get some food. The little town around the castle is very nice and pleasant and packed with resturants it turned out. After a nice meal we walked over to the famous casino and beating statistics I manage to take the 100 Euro I decided to spend and turn it into 400 Euro before leaving the Casino. Was a nice way to subsidize the vacation. Ended up taking it quite easy on Monday evening as we needed to do the short trip back to Barcelona the next day, but all in all it was a very fun trip.
Civil disobediance and what works or not
Read David Trowbridge‘s blog entry about the recent blogging campaign posting one of the AACS keys with interest. As someone who has to deal with software patents and DRM systems on an almost daily basis as part of my job I would have to say I disagree on his conclusion that such efforts have no value and should just be considered worthless online ‘whining’.
There was a similar thing happening with CSS back in the day, where people posted the DeCSS source code everywhere and put it on t-shirts etc. While it might not have caused the whole DRM eco-system to fail it did play a part in the content industry starting to question the value of DRM systems. If we get a similar story now with AACS it could be the decisive blow that ‘educates’ the content industry on the futility of pursuing DRM systems.
The fact that we have had DeCSS out there now for many years has also been a useful tool for countering many of the arguments made by for instance the DVD CCA, regarding why DRM systems are needed. In the DVD CCA FAQ there is a question about why CSS is necesarry. They are saying that without CSS the content industry would be hesistant to release their content. Well DeCSS has been out for a long while now and there is a long list of DVD rippers out there using it, available for all major operating systems, yet that fact doesn’t seem to have put a dampener on the willingness of the movie studios to release more DVD’s…..
So David might feel that the ‘Civil disobedience’ in regards to AACS is worthless, yet I say that discrediting the major DRM systems out there actually do serve a purpose in terms of educating people about the futility of such systems, and also demonstrates that the assumption that without effective DRM systems sales will collapse is a false one.
And being someone who has to deal with people doing hardware, software and content in this area I can tell you that the ‘educational effect’ of more and more DRM systems getting broken is slowly changing the mindset and level of understanding of the industry.
So while I as part of my work have to deal with the laws and regulations as they are today and have to work within the constraints they set that doesn’t mean I don’t respect the efforts of those being able to operate in less restrained ways than we can as a company. The world is a complex place and a working democracy is much more than just voting and mailing your local politician.
Are you a big baby and are you also going to GUADEC?
Well then you are in luck. Edward just pointed me to the budget airline bmibaby (pronounced ‘be my baby’) which offer budget fligths directly to Birmingham which will save you quite a bit of both time and money compared to flying into a London airport (cost me a total of 70€ in train tickets the last time going back and forth to Wolverhampton/Birmingham). If you are flying to London I do recommend Stanstead over Luton though, unless you are comfy with the UK public transport system as the train from Stanstead goes directly to Birmingham, while you need to switch twice when going from Luton by train.
Call for community RTP testers
So Wim has been hacking on with the GStreamer RTP support and we have managed to play all our internal streams correctly now testing with the Darwin Quicktime Server, Axis RTP network camera and the RTP branch of Flumotion. There are still a few cosmetic things not working perfectly like getting Totem to display the name of the codecs being used, but all in all things are looking very sweet.
So if you want to help us out make it truly robust we ask that people grab latest CVS of GStreamer and the plugins modules and try to test out using Totem and playbin against local and internet RTP streams they have access too. GStreamer contains depayloaders for most MPEG/3GPP related payload types and Fluendo will soon add Windows Media RTP support to our codec package. The only major RTP (or rather RTP like) thing not supported yet is Real media and also Apple RTP of their older proprietary formats (Sorenson/QDM2). And of course we support Vorbis, Speex and Theora RTP streams
I have blogged before about our support for the most recent Apple streams like the Jobs keynote and here is a little screenshot of Totem viewing that stream.
Update:
I made a claim that sync was solved in current CVS and this turned out to be wrong and based on some miscommunication. Sync is still not fully done and it will still be a few weeks before it is so. According to Wim the only reason sync is better atm is purely coincidental. Testers are still very welcome though as it would allow us to sort out issues such as server compatability and so on.
Update 2:
After some lunchtime discussion it turned out my claim about sync was true afterall. Sync is now perfect for RTSP streams. What is missing is RTCP sync.
Also regarding the question of serving RTP there will be some rudimentary support in GStreamer once this work is done. Furthermore there are people from Axis working on enabling GStreamer as a RTP serving system so expect to see further updates on that front.
