Happy to see that TrollTech released their set of Phonon backends today, including the one for GStreamer. With the recently added Windows and Mac output plugins and codec wrappers one could even use the GStreamer backend even on Mac and Windows :)
Anyway welcome to the fast growing world of GStreamer :)
Seems the Collabora Winter collection is in. This winter we sport a fashionable blue or black fleece jacket with a discreet yet eye pleasing Collabora logo on it. In the picture below you see Collabora’s very own Daf showing of the new jacket on our office catwalk.
For anyone wondering about the superb image quality be aware that this was achieved using the professional camera bundled with my mobile phone.
Wim finally closed bug 320984 today. This is the Chained Ogg bug which has been open in GStreamer bugzilla since 2005. So with the CVS version of playbin2 we can finally handle these files properly in GStreamer. While the amount of chained ogg files out there is limited there are at least a few internet radio’s using them for their streams.
With the recent work being done here at Collabora by Pierre-Luc Beaudoin enabling the HTML5 elements in GTK Webkit using GStreamer, it is good to know that even these ‘corner case’ Ogg files can now be properly supported. Will of course still be some Months before this feature has made is way from our development repository to being packaged by your favourite distribution, but at least know it is on its way :)
Slashdot linked this weekend to a Nokia position paper on the use of Ogg in the HTML5 proposal for the media elements. For those of us who have followed the HTML5 discussion for some time there is little new in the position paper, he is simply regurgitating the same arguments that Apple Safari people came up with.
Let me start by saying that I know that Nokia is a big organisation and that the opinions expressed by Stephan Wenger in the linked position paper do not reflect the opinion of everyone at Nokia. So unlike the Slashdot crowd I am not putting this position paper at the feet of everyone at Nokia. I would point out that Stephan Wenger’s job at Nokia seems to consist of traveling the world attending MPEG meetings eating canap’es, so there is probably a lot of self interest in that position paper also :)
That said I do feel it correct to address some of the concerns/claims made in that document and by some Slashdot commenters.
To start with the Slashdot headline, the definition of proprietary in this context I guess could be open to debate, I have myself referred to technologies as proprietary if they are mostly a one group/company effort myself, even if the code is available. If that description would fit Ogg, Vorbis and Theora is another matter, but I will for the sake of argument allow that the what makes something proprietary in the context of software is open to some discussion.
What I felt was the biggest red herring in the paper was actually the musing about DRM. There is nothing stopping you from DRM protecting Ogg,Vorbis and Theora content and thus his arguments about the need for DRM support seemed rather misplaced. Sure you can not play back a DRM protected file on a system only supporting the normal playback but that is true for any format. You can not play back a Windows Media DRM’ed file on a non-DRM supporting Windows Media stack either. Same for playing back a Fairplay protected AAC file on a system with no Fairplay support. And unless he wanted to also standardize on a specific DRM system in HTML5 it doesn’t matter what format you use cause if people use different DRM systems you don’t get better interoperability anyway. An OMA DRM protected AAC file do not work with a Fairplay enabled AAC playback system and vica versa.
He also spent a some time nagging about what are the currently popular formats on the net and what terms they are commonly available under. The cutest argument however was how he managed to try to say that if the W3C accepted a royalty bearing set of codecs for this specification it could at the same time try to push for more royalty free stuff through MPEG and ITU-T…..yes….sounds brilliant……no better way to convince organizations creating royalty bearing standards that they need to do royalty free standards than to start paying money to use their standards…..errrrr NOT.
His section on Alternative ways forward is also quite hilarious. Proposal 1. Leave it up to the market forces. Dude, standardizing on Vorbis/Theora is part of creating market forces. And for the claim that the market had quickly chosen something at earlier points in other non-related markets was also quite hilarious. If he instead had looked at the Web of today there is a big mix of stuff being used like Windows Media, Quicktime, Flash Video, DivX, Real Media and more. And its been like that for a long time. The only way the HTML5 media tags have any hope of causing consolidation is of course to propose specific codecs for HTML5. If not there will be zero motivation for anyone to move away from their current Windows Media or Quicktime or Flash or whatever solution.
His second option was to adopt some ancient standards which where sure to be out of patent. One would have hoped a position paper from a world leading organisation like Nokia would be held at a higher professional standard than being based on a random authors ‘author’s personal experience‘ to quote the article. That said Theora as it is could be better and it is in the process of getting a lot better due to Monty’s ongoing work.
His last proposal is of course the oldest most true and tested way of trying to derail an effort: propose to set up a committee to investigate the issue…
Hopefully the next time Nokia want to write a position paper on something they will choose someone to write it who wants to be part of the solution and not the problem.
I ended up doing a full reinstall of my Fedora 8 install yesterday. It finally gave me a chance to play with PulseAudio. I guess I have for a long time belonged to the group of people skeptical about the value of a soundserver in a local setting. But working with people like Wim and having them tell me my skepticism is misplaced and that PulseAudio seems to be doing it right I haven’t voiced my skepticism to loudly.
And while there still is some work needed on the UI side (something I saw Lennart point out himself in a wiki post) I have to say the functionality provided by Pulse is nice. Those who have followed the latest iterations of GNOME would have noticed that the audio support has been evolving at a steady pace for quite a few releases. These things have focused on playing with the GStreamer gconf elements which allows your sound output to be configured through various GConf keys. This does work, but it do not lend itself to a high degree of granularity and we still have some way before it provided the user experience we wanted in terms of devices that come and go like USB and Bluetooth headsets. PulseAudio seems a more natural fit for these scenarios and I have to say it was a fun experience today switching audio back and forth between my USB headset and the laptop speakers using the PulseAudio mixer.
As said some UI improvements is still needed before this is perfect, for instance it took me a little time to figure out how to do it before eventually discovered that right clicking was my friend :). But I have to say the feeling I got is that this is the way forward and that the foundation is very solid.
And of course thanks to the PulseAudio GStreamer plugin Lennart wrote all my GStreamer apps work wonderfully in this new PulseAudio world :).
GStreamer on MacOS X and Windows
Speaking of GStreamer, Julien commited two plugins recently to gst-plugins-bad I think are quite exciting. The two plugins in questions are a Quicktime codec loader for MacOSX and a DirectShow codec loader for Windows. The Quicktime loader, which I believe is the first working one available in any open source project, gives GStreamer access to native codecs when running on MacOSX. This means that when you run a GStreamer application under MacOSX you don’t need to install GStreamer specific codecs for codecs provided by MacOSX by default.
The DirectShow codec loader is very similar to what people have been using under linux for a long time to load Windows codec .dll files using Wine, but once again its goal is to enable access to native codecs when running GStreamer under Windows.
The MacOS X plugin was written by Edward Hervey, while we were still at Fluendo, and the Windows plugin was written by Sebastian Moutte, Juliens brother. The two plugins where done as the result of an agreement with Songbird so a big thanks goes to them. In fact the Songbird team just recently released their 0.3 release of the Songbird player so if you haven’t already you should give it a try.
So anyone reading this who runs and/or develops with GStreamer on either Windows or MacOSX platforms please test the plugins and help ensure they can be moved over to gst-plugins-good in the not to distant future.
Life in England
Beginning to feel settled in here in Cambridge now with most practical stuff taken care of. Sharing and office with Rob and Daf here at Collabora has been a very nice experience so far. Cambridge is also a really interesting town with a lot of things happening. For instance on Wednesday I attended the founding meeting of Games Eden, a business networking organization for people in the East England area involved with various aspects of computer game industry. The meeting was attended by for instance the guys from Ninja Theory who are behind the PS3 game Heavenly Sword, David Braben the man behind the legendary game Elite and who runs his own game development studio here in Cambridge was there, Andy Serkis was there, who was the person giving life to the characters of Golem in Lord of the Rings and King Kong in the movie by the same name. Andy was partly there due to his involvement in the creation of Heavenly Sword, but he also had some very interesting business ideas which would ensure his future involvement in the game industry going forward.
Things going very well business wise at Collabora, seems there is not a week going by without a new company popping onto the scene using GStreamer, often in conjunction with Telepathy. And more often than not they are also interested in our help with getting their products and projects moving forward. Ended up with a lot of onsite assignments recently which has had especially Edward probably spending more time away than at home. :). I also have to say that I am quite impressed with how Robert and Philippe manages to keep so well coordinated across time zones and continents. It think it would have been very easy to end up with two very separate units with the team almost spread 50/50 between Europe and Canada, but they somehow manage to make it seem easy to keep the two parts of the company humming like one integrated machine. Part of it is of course applying open source social mechanics to organization of the company, but even with that as a background it is a big challenge and Rob and Philippe without a doubt got a natural affinity for the challenge.
Been reading some of the comments to the recent GNOME Foundation press release about OOXML involvement. Reading things like the comments on osnews and linux.com leaves me in a state of disbelief.
When you have people like Michael Meeks and Jody Goldberg, who have been working on free software office software for a longer time than most others in the community has even been using free software, it is sad to see people trying to claim they know more about the respective qualities of the ODF and OOXML standards than they do. The claims of being corporate shills sounds even more hollow considering these people have been working on free software office software for much longer than they have been paid to do so. Having known especially Michael for many years and had many a beer with him I it saddens me when people in the community doubt his word. Michael care about free software, but whats maybe more important in this context is that he cares about technical excellence.
And thus he is not willing to claim that the ODF spreadsheet specification is better than the OOXML one when he, based on his eight years worth of hacking experience doing spreadheet software in the context of Gnumeric and OpenOffice, knows it not to be the case.
The question worth asking here is if the community has come to a point where we no longer care about quality and technical perfection in what we do, instead we are going to join the proprietary software vendors in a game of FUD and mud slinging. When I started out with free software it felt as the ethos of the community was that we are not a community of people blinded by pride or arrogance instead we happily adopt and evolve the best of what is out there. If that means adapting to standards and formats originally developed by Microsoft then so be it.
Michael has been tirelessly been promoting OpenOffice for quite a few years now, even working on it and promoting it at a time when most GNOME developers felt it was a bloated and unmaintainable piece of software and most the code comments where in German. Through his and his team’s effort OpenOffice has gone from being something screaming Windows 3.11 when looking at it to something that actually looks like it belongs on my GNOME desktop. And there is no longer a half hour wait for it to start up.
I use OpenOffice.org every day doing my job today. Back in the day when I was at Oracle I couldn’t do that. Not because Oracle refused me to do so, but simply because most of Oracle’s documents where in MS Office format and at that time the OpenOffice filters where not good enough to do the job, so I had to dual boot into Windows in order to write reports for customers, fill in expense reports and so on.
Even in my current job, doing linux consultancy work around free software technologies like GStreamer, Telepathy and Webkit I would not be able to use OpenOffice if it wasn’t for the excellent MS Office compatibility. The vast majority of documents and proposals I receive from our customers are in those formats. I haven’t gotten any OOXML documents yet, but it is only a matter of time and when it start to happen I would gradually be forced back to my old dual booting ways unless OpenOffice supports OOXML in a good way.
So Jody if you are reading this, please don’t listen to the detractors and instead keep up doing such great work. I for one would be sad if I have to install windows on my laptop again because you stopped pushing OOXML in the right direction.
At various recent conferences I have been asked if I think there is any hope for free software video codecs. Outside the core linux community the amount of people who even know that Theora exists is still quite small. That said and while it still is a big canvas to bleach, I do think open source video codecs have a mainstream future. At least most Linux companies are providing Theora copies of their promotional videos now, which it wasn’t that long ago they didn’t. We are still a bit raw on the tools side though, and while Pitivi is making good strides forward, its still isn’t ready for production use. One great piece of news on the Theora side of things is that Red Hat has Monty working on improving Theora further to improve video quality and get the magic 1.0 release of libtheora out. Check out this write up by Monty to get the details.
Dirac is also making strong strides forward and version 0.9.0 of libschrodinger, which got released today, will feel like a great leap forward for the causal tester. Most noticeable is that David Schleef tweaked the default parameters of the encoder to produce even nice looking images when transcoding high definition clips. This means that even if the tons of parameters you can set on the encoder is ancient Greek for you you can still play with it and create good looking video’s.
David also spent a lot of time for this release allowing you to set a specific bitrate for the encoded file, a feature a know a lot of users have wanted. That said the bitrate specification for Dirac is still not finished so any files produced with this version are not likely to keep working as development continues. But at least you can play with it now and get an idea of what Dirac will be able to do in the near future.
And of course on the horizon we do have the mp3 and mpeg2 patents ticking down towards expiration within the next 2-3 years, making these extremely common codecs free.
So Wim and I spent this weekend in Linz representing Collabora at the 9th Realtime linux Conference and the European CE Linux conference. Had a great time there, meeting a lot of interesting people. Not as many GNOME people as last one, but some familiar GNOME people like Dodji from Opened Hand and Marcel Holtman of Bluetooth hacking fame. Of course meeting Marcel at a conference is not particularly hard as he seems to be invited to attend them all :)
Had quite a few meetings with various of the embedded companies there and I think we walked away with a few solid business leads. Wim and I also probably walked away a few kilos heavier after gobbling gigantic ice creams at an Austrian ice cream cafe almost every day.
I am back in Cambridge now, while Wim will be heading up to Dublin to stay with Jan and Jaime for some days. Wim also hopes to brainstorm playbin2 with Jan while there to see if we can get some progress on that.
Back at the office I am admiring the PS3 Devkit Sony has sent us, the thing is quite big, but not as big as I feared. Tim will be starting hacking on it in the very near future to see what we can do. This means of course a partial return to the gaming industry for Wim, so maybe we will end up making a PS3 sequel to Wim’s game Puffy’s Saga ;).
Part of doing business today is of course attending various conferences in order to network and discuss current plans. Not all conferences are equally fun of course, so I am very happy that Tim, being our point man in Bristol, will be taking care of attending PonyCon 2007 on our behalf. So for those of you attending and who see Tim walking around the conference halls, please feel free to tap him for a discussion. Also if you want Tim to fix a particular GStreamer bug for you he really wants the 2003 Rainbow Haired Unicorn Christmas Special Edition Pony :)
Go Bristol!
Update: Tim asked me to let people know that only Ponies of Mint/Near Mint grade is of interest. The person who tried to peddle a Fair grade Pony will never be spoken to again.
Some time ago I put up a page detailing my pains in getting an image from Inkscape to OpenOffice. Well due to once again having an SVG I needed to import into Openoffice I decided to try again. And this time the SVG import filter from Bernhard Haumacher worked for me. Still some irritation behavioral issues in OpenOffice as I outline in the update on the page, but the import did work.
Hopefully with the relicensing effort of the Sun JDK this import filter will get bundled by the linux distros in the future in order to improve open source interoperability.