Offtopic – Vacation report

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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

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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?

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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

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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.

Silverlight for Linux

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Noticed that Miguel speculating about a Linux version of Silverlight. Personally I hope
we do not see such a announcement. Everytime Microsoft has promised Unix support its been done to rob their cross platform competitor of the argument and in the end not delivering. I remember Windows Media Player being announced for Unix back in the day when Microsoft where in the process of trying to kill off Real networks as a competitor in the streaming media space. In the end all they ever produced was a broken alpha release for Solaris and in the end they never released a final version for either Solaris or any other promised platform. Another example of such a sabotage targeted ‘port’ was Internet explorer for Unix, which Microsoft made as part of their effort to take down Netscape, which never came further than some hackish versions for Solaris and HP-UX before getting canceled.

Do we really want to see Microsoft try the same technique again? Sadly enough I doubt the mainstream press is observant enough to call Microsoft on their game even if its the Nth time they do it.

New job opening in the Elisa team

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So our Elisa team is growing fast and we are looking to hire one more person. We are primarily looking for someone with good linux and python experience, but knowledge of
OpenGL, DirectFB and GObject is also of interest. We are looking for someone with a European work permit who are interested in re-locating to Barcelona, Spain. As someone who have been living here for a while I can say that it is a wonderful city to live in, with good food and drink, beautiful architecture, great beaches and a fun gang of crazy hackers to work with.

If you are interested in joining our wild and wacky team please send an email with your resume to Lionel Martin, who you can reach at lionel[at]fluendo_dot_com. Non-french speakers are especially encouraged to apply :)

At the CE Linux Forum

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So Jan and I are participating at this years CELF Embedded Linux conference. It is my first CELF and it seems an interesting group of people from most of the major embedded system makers. The participation in this event from Asia is particularly good.

Lot of familiar faces from the GNOME community here too like Jeff Waugh, Matthew Allum, Robert McQueen, Carlos Guerreiro, Quim Gill, Robert Taylor and Marcel Holtmann.

Jan is doing a presentation/tutorial on GStreamer tomorrow and will also quickly demo the Fluendo DVD player as part of that talk.

Having a great time apart from the problems presented by the airline losing my luggage on the way over. Hopefully I will get it them today or I will have to start borrowing clothers from Jan; which is likely to make me have as tight fitting clothes as Steve Irwin used to be known for.

Animated gnome’s

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Came accross some old drawings made by Larry Ewing (the guy who created Tux) where he had tried making a GNOME mascot it seems. I hadn’t seen them before, but they are actually quite cute.

There are more sketches and animation variations available at:
Larry’s GNOME directory.

GStreamer projects in the years Google Summer of Code

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So I thought I should compose a list of all GStreamer related approved Summer of Code projects:

A big thanks to both the students and organisations involved.

Special mentions

Not related to GStreamer, but I found two projects I think deserve special mention looking over the approved projects.

The first is a project for OpenOffice to create proper SVG import support, I really hope this one pans out well as proper SVG support in OpenOffice would be a big step forward :
Draw/Impress: SVG Import Filter

The second project I found I noticed for somewhat other reasons, in fact I would like announce the winner of this years ‘Biggest Optimist in the Universe and Beyond 2007 Award’ to this project:
Dirac encoder and decoder.

Considering how long we have spent on getting Schrodinger up to scratch I am amazed that anyone even manage to believe they can create both a decoder and an encoder for Dirac in 3 Months.