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.

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

• GNU Project: Gnome/GStreamer Desktop sound integration for Java
• GNOME: GStreamer plugins and extensions for multimedia content creation applications
• GNOME: Signal processing block for GStreamer
• GNOME: PiTiVi, an Open Source Video Editor
• GNOME: Jokosher VoIP Integration
• GNOME: VoIP and video call client using Telepathy
• Mono: Banshee – Porting Banshee to Windows
• Freevo: DVB CAM support
• Freevo: Gstreamer Integration

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.

I guess most have seen the story about how EMI and Apple are going to offer big parts of EMI catalogue in AAC format without any kind of DRM protection. If this pans out well I think it could be the begining of the end for widespread use of DRM.

So we had a meeting here at the office last Friday with Robert McQueen, Phillipe Khalaf from Collabora and Stefan Kost from Nokia. The reason for this meeting was to sort out the final points on RTP support in GStreamer. The Collabora guys have approached the issue so far from the VoIP side of things while we at Fluendo have approached it from a RTSP /streaming point of view. The point in time now had come to make sure our efforts stayed complimentary as our work here at Fluendo started pushing into areas which up to this point had been solely the the domain of Collabora. A lot of beautiful diagrams and drawings where made with Wim Taymans and Phillipe being the major designers at the meeting. The result was an agreement on an overall design and also a fairly clear roadmap for how we get there. The first steps taken will be Wim working on adjusting the Farsight Jitterbuffer plugin, including moving it into GStreamer CVS, to also catering for streaming needs and also working on the new RTP session manager design. The plan is then that after a while Phillipe will take over the torch and make sure the updated components fit into the wider needs of Farsight and Telepathy. All in all a very good and productive meeting.

Apart from coming up with some great specs I also think we managed to feed Rob, Phillipe and Stefan with some great tapas and also pour into them a couple (aka a lot) of beers :)

So I mentioned some time ago that we have been working with the wild gang behind Songbird
to enable GStreamer on Windows and Mac. I already posted a shot of GStreamer running on Windows some time ago and today the time has come to show of a shot of GStreamer in action on the Mac.

One of the cool things we discovered was that we are able to provide smoother video seeking on the Mac than you get with the quicktime player.

Be aware that even if the application in the picture is a X11 application the video window is MacOSX native and the same with the sound output. A big thanks to Edward who has been fighthing with the ‘charms’ of MacOSX like crazy to make this happen :)

The new deadline for Google Summer of Code proposals is 26th of March. So I strongly recommend any interested students to get moving on sending in their GStreamer related SoC proposals to the Freevo project. You find their project suggestions list here.

Dirk Meyer of the Freevo mediacenter project gst-devel today pointing to
the Freevo summer of code projects page. As you can see they have a lot of GStreamer related things as they are moving a lot of their infrastructure over to GStreamer these days. So I strongly encourage interested students to sign up for Freevo projects.

Aaron Bockover pointed on his blog to some interesting Banshee projects which also involve GStreamer, like making a GStreamer using Windows port of Banshee work perfectly. You find these projects here.

Also a general note to mentoring organisations who have students submit interesting GStreamer related proposals, please be aware that there are many people in the GStreamer community willing to mentor/co-mentor such projects. So if you need mentors with strong GStreamer knowledge for your projects please let us know.