GNOME

Fun little odd game from Oddlabs

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So from time to time I head over to LinuxGames.com to see the latest news and keep track of how linux as a gaming platform is evolving. Gamers have been one of those early adopter segments I have been hoping we would be able to lure to the linux platform at some point, but of course currently its mostly about wondering if the egg or the chicken will be the start of Linux as a competitive gaming platform.

Last week I found the game
Tribal Trouble from Oddlabs.com. A small danish gaming company. Its a 3d real time strategy game available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The multiplatform support enabled due to the game being written in Java. It was an enlightening experience for me for a variety of reasons, one being that it is possible to write a 3D game like this in Java and get good performance out of it. It is not the first game I recently seen in Java and I do get the impression that there are quite a few of these Java based games out there which thus have a very low threshold for supporting Linux. Puzzle Pirates is another one of these new generation of games written in Java. With Sun’s recent decision to GPL their implementation of Java I think we have a great opportunity to integrate Java closely in the desktop to enable easy playing of games like these. Sun’s great work on integrating look and feel wise with GTK+ is of course another great boon. One thing I did find in the Oddlabs development blog was a mention that their paying customers was 47% Mac, 9% Linux and 44% Windows. Come on everyone, there has to be more people out there using linux interested enough in getting fun little games onto our favourite platform. Lets at least try to match the market for Mac software. Personally I have already bought the game and spent quite a few hours playing it :)

GNOME

Tried eating an OLPC laptop?

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So we have one of those cute little green OLPC laptops here at the Fluendo office. What suddenly struck me today is how much it looks like a children’s toy, which is appropriate considering who it is targeted at.
But I am sure things like Fischer Price toys go through a lot of child safety testing to make sure they for instance are not poisonous. So the question is have anyone tried eating parts of their OLPC to make sure we don’t risk killing any kids somewhere with it? Or do I need it pick an office volunteer to try eating some OLPC to make sure its truly safe for the worlds children?

General

Interviewed on The Linux Link Tech Show

Ok, so I was interviewed about our recent plugin show on the The Linux Link Tech Show. So if you are interested in hearing what Dan and Patrick managed to lure out of me then go to their page and download Episode 176. Topics include our new codecs, free codecs, DRM and other things we do at Fluendo. The sound, especially on my part being recorded with my on my cell phone and the output of that transcoded at least once if not twice. But hopefully I am interpretable :)

GStreamer

Embedded Linux Conference in Brazil?

Thought I should plug the great work done to organize the Bossa conference in Brazil in March. Bossa will bring together a lot of people from the embedded and mobile linux development community including GStreamer and Fluendo’s own Wim Taymans. Other participants includes Robert McQueen and Philippe Khalaf talking about Farsight and Telepathy, Marcel Holtmann on Bluez/Bluetooth, Chris Hofmann on Minimo and many more.

So be sure to sign up if you have interest in this field. For people outside South America maybe combinding Bossa with some days of vacation would be the perfect opportunity/excuse for visiting Brazil :)

GStreamer

GStreamer on the server side

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At Fluendo we have been using GStreamer as the engine for the Flumotion streaming service for quite a while now. But it is nice to see that other companies using GStreamer on the server is starting to make their mark too. Seeing
this article on news.com about Snocap making a deal to allow artists to sell music through MySpace reminded me that I know Snocap is also using GStreamer for their system. I don’t have any details, but the fact that all their job adds mention the need/advantage of having GStreamer experience is clear sign :). For those that don’t know Snocap its the latest venture of Shawn Fanning, the creator of Napster.

Anyway, anyone reading this using GStreamer to power their websites or services I would love it if you posted a comment on it. Always nice to hear how people use GStreamer to solve practical challenges.

GNOME

LightScribe for Linux

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Some time ago I bought a USB DVD burner that supported this feature called lightscribe. Essentially it means you can buy DVD or CDROM’s with a special covering and then you can use the player laser to burn text and or images onto the disc. Looks kinda cool. As I expected back then the feature was not supported under Linux. But today I noticed that they actually released and SDK for linux which means CD burning applications or even graphics applications like the Gimp could potentially support it.

The SDK is available under a standard restrictive proprietary license though so don’t expect the functionality to be included with your average distro anytime soon unless some of the DVD burning software developers allows bundling with this non-free library in the license. There is a simple application available from their site, but unfortunatly it seemed unable to detect my drive so I couldn’t test if the lightscribe functionality actually do work.

There are of course two ways to look at this. Either one think that they supporting Linux is cool and help validate the platform for desktop use, even though their support is not free software. Or one considers the support worthless since it is not free software. Personally I do hope that this non-free library doesn’t stop people from trying to create opensource support for lightscribe burners, but in the meantime I do take their closed source support as a positive sign that the linux desktop is gaining in importance.

GStreamer

Help us test Decodebin2

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So if you have the latest release of GStreamer plugins-base installed (0.10.11) you also have the next generation decodebin available. Decodebin2 is our much improved autoplugger which automatically connects pipelines in your playback appications. Currently it is not enabled as the default one so we need the community to give it a run to make sure it is robust enough for us to switch to. The easiest way to test it is to set the USE_DECODEBIN2=1 environment variable before running Totem or Rhythmbox or any other ‘playbin’ using GStreamer application. That will automatically switch you over. Any bugs you find while testing this which do not happen when using the old decodebin would be most appreciated reported to bugzilla.

General

Shop FAQ

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So I thought I answer a few of the questions that have popped up accross the web after the shop launch and yesterdays blog entry.

  • Are the EULA’s available online?

    • Yes, they are available under the terms link just before you finalize your order to go to the payment system. I realize a lot of people want to be able to read over the EULA before getting that far so I will put them up somewhere more easily reachable today.

  • What happens when new codecs are added?

    • Often the bundles will grow and people who bought the bundle as it is will be able to download the new bigger bundle for free. However there will also be new bundles made as things progress.

  • What about encoders?

    • We will soon start to offer some encoders too. Our windows media audio encoder is already in the beta program and the windows media video encoder is in final stages of development before hitting the beta program. To begin with these will be just separate download or maybe part of an windows media encoding bundle. As more encoders gets created we probably will offer bigger encoding bundles to, similar to the playback ones.

  • What about supporting other media frameworks/applications?

    • This will not happen. We are still a small company and the cost of supporting even more frameworks in a good way is daunting.

  • Why is only a subset of the plugins available on Linux PPC and Solaris?

    • Because we don’t have them ported yet. To be honest the popularity of the Windows media plugins on Linux PPC and Solaris will determine if we ever do port them in fact. Unless the plugin available for these platforms sell well enough to validate the cost of porting more codecs there will be no further codecs supported on these platforms. That said we are not going to pass judgement on either platform very quickly. For Linux PPC we will let PS3 be out on the market a while before start making assumptions about the viability of that market and for Solaris we will let Sun ship something else than just development versions of Solaris bundled with GStreamer 0.10.

  • Will you ever support Real Media, Quicktime, Flash Video etc.

    • The answer is Yes, to some degree, and maybe. We have a working Real Media decoder plugin, but we will not be able to release that before we have a full Real Media networking stack to use it with, but this is being worked on and shouldn’t be to far away. As for Quicktime we will be able to support AAC and H264 which seems to be the most used Quicktime codecs today and the Quicktime container format is just a tweaked version of the MPEG4 ISO format. So we will be able to offer something that plays most Quicktime trailers, but we might not be able to call it Quicktime support though due to trademark issues and of course not supporting Apple specific codecs such as Sorenson. As for Flash video or VP6 as its also called. Well we are trying to work something out there, but its still quite up in the air what will happen.

    General

    Shop open for business!

    29 Comments

    Ok, so as promised the shop.fluendo.com is now live with all our codecs!. You guys have no idea all the practical issues delaying this, the last that hit us today being the credit card system suddenly refusing payments in dollars so we had to switch the shop over to Euro.

    Anyway the press release is out and hopefully we get some good coverage. This release should also be a response to Eric Raymonds request
    for someone to save him from the lack of codecs    .

    As you will see if you go to the shop we support Windows Media codecs on Linux x86_32, Linux x86_64, Linux PPC, Solaris Intel and Solaris SPARC, just as we do with our MP3 plugin. Depending on interest other platforms could follow.

    For Linux x86_32 and Linux x86_64 we also have MPEG2, AC3 and MPEG4 Part available. AAC is underway.

    People will also notice that we rebate heavily if you buy the codecs in bundles, this is because we really prefer to stear people away from the single codecs purchases as they cost us as much as a bundle per transaction, which means more money to the bank and less to us :)

    The codecs are distributed inside tarballs together with instructions. We realize this is not as painless an install as one could wish for. But doing packages for a million and one distro’s was not a plausible solution either. That said we are working on a codec installer/updater which will automatically download and install any codec bought in the shop. It will also upgrade those codecs as updates becomes available. The idea is that a purchase of the codecs gives you a year of updates, after which you can buy an discounted update to continue getting updated codecs and bundles.

    So I hope people like the shop and also for anyone reading this wanting a site license, we do offer that, but that will be handled outside the shop. The shop is targeted at people looking for 20 or less licenses.

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