Dann Washko did a little podcast/audio review of Jokosher as part of the series of podcasts they do at Twatech.org. The cool part is that he records the little podcast with Jokosher. Some bugs and issues where found (partly as this was pre 0.2 Jokosher), but it is great to see and hear the excitment and use people are putting Jokosher too. Of course Dann by doing this made sure his bugs and experiences is getting top attention from the Jokosher devs now 
TestingGst-editor
So I decided to take a look at the new Gst-Editor that was developed as part of the Google Summer of Code. Took me a little time to locate the homepage of goocanvas and the homepage of pygoocanvas which the new editor depends on, but after a little googling I had it all put together. Even built packages of both for FC6. Here is a little screenshot of the new editor in action:
The application looks nice but it is a bit more like a proof of concept than a truly useful application at this point. As the screenshot shows it can create and run 1-to-1 pipelines only currently, which makes using it to prototype and test pipelines for applications like Jokosher or Pitivi impossible. As you see from the screenshot I tried to make a pipeline for transcoding a file to Ogg/Vorbis/Dirac, but I was unable to hook the audio part of the pipeline inn as the decodebin and oggmuxer only accepted one connection. But hopefully we can get the project moving forward again and make it a truly useful development tool. An a big plus point was that unlike the old editor for 0.8 it didn’t crash for me when testing it
The struggle of Pitivi
One of the applications we have under development here is Pitivi. For outside developers it could seem as if Pitivi has been standing still for a while. This is both very true and very false. Edward who is the lead developer on Pitivi have had little time to put into enabling more features in the GUI and polishing up the look and feel of the GUI lately. On the other hand improving Pitivi is only half about working on ‘pitivi’, the other part of the equation is fixing bugs in GStreamer itself and gnonlin. Both of these libraries have seen a lot of bugfixes over the last few months and Jokosher is a living testament to their effect.
Pitivi being both audio and video is more complex, but also for Pitivi these fixes have made the application more stable and producing less error messages. Doing some QA work over the last few days I found that AVI (Divx) and MOV (Quicktime) files both transcoded dependably to Ogg Theora.
More work is needed to make MPEG and Windows Media transcode as dependable, but this shouldn’t be to hard to rectify. Once we got the input formats working dependably for Pitivi I guess it would be time to go through the output formats. I haven’t tested yet, but there has been quite a lot of work done to enable and fix more muxers in recent months so maybe some combinations already work fine.
Edwards next target for Pitivi is enabling cutting in the GUI. That means that we at least allow cutting and gluing of video clips which should be a step toward providing useful functionality beyong transcoding.
Of course a lot more could be enabled quickly in the GUI if more python hackers came onboard to help out. If you are getting into Python and is interested in helping out, please stop by #pitivi on irc.freenode.net
No Jackson for The Hobbit :(
Seems like I spoke to early about the upcoming film based on the Hobbit. Peter Jackson has according to that article been told he will not be involved with the new films by New Line Cinema. Why do I feel this bodes badly for the quality of the upcoming movies…
Latest developments – Schrodinger, Flumotion, Elisa and Trick Modes
For those who want to use Schrodinger to build plugins or support Dirac encoding/decoding in their own applications or libraries which don’t use GStreamer David have now commited the changes to SVN which makes libschrodinger install the needed header files for development. We are still not promising a fully stable API, but we don’t expect any radical changes either so it should be a good time to start playing with it.
On the topic of free formats. Wim wrote a full set of GStreamer RTP plugins for Vorbis and Theora recently and now Sebastian, who is the latest addition to our Flumotion team, is working on integrating RTP streaming into the open source Flumotion. When this is done we will have a end-to-end Vorbis/Theora RTP streaming solution going from Flumotion to Totem.
Philippe checked in initial trick modes support to Elisa the other day. That means that when you play back you can speed up/slow down the playback speed of videos, using your remote or using the keyboard arrow keys.
Forward trick modes (fast forward, slow forward) works on all formats automatically, but reverse playback only works on formats where support for it is specifically added to the decoder. Wim is working on getting reverse playback going for Ogg Vorbis/Theora files currently so there is at least one open working example of it available.
Getting an end-to-end RTP streaming solution using Vorbis/Theora and full Ogg Theora/Vorbis trick modes going will be a good milestone for us as one of our initial goals at Fluendo was making sure that free formats where competitive on features with non-free ones. Its been a rough road getting there as enabling these for open formats have tendsed to be harder in many cases compared to the non-free ones, both due to the distinct nature of the Ogg container format and also the need to define specifications first in many cases (like our sponsorship of getting the Vorbis and Theora RTP specifications written), but seeing things come together now feels really rewarding.
Btw, I did a new micro release of the MPEG Transport stream muxing library today with a tiny fix to the .pc file. If you installed libtsmux into something else than /usr/lib you would have discovered by now that the GStreamer MPEG TS muxing plugin didn’t build. This updated version of libtsmux fixes that. Get it from the Schrodinger download page
Also a big congratulations to the Jokosher team on their 0.2 release. Keep on rocking guys!
Patently troublesome
Saw another article today where Balmer talks about the Novell/Microsoft deal. Once again he demonstrates in my opinion how extremely broken the whole patent system around software is and how companies are trying to abuse that brokenness.
While I have little love for organisations like MPEG LA at least they clearly define what they license out. If you take a license for MPEG4 for instance you will get a full list of patent numbers and nations which they apply to. If one would like to challenge or work around those patents one would at least be able to figure out what one are up against.
In the Microsoft case they are not licensing something concrete for a specific amount of money. Instead they are basically saying ‘we have a thicket of patents and we think a unquantified subset of them applies to you, pay a fee or you risk a lawsuit’. So if you want to do a risk assesment or try to work around these patents your only option is to dig through the global (primarily US) patent office databases for anything concerning Microsoft or companies bought by Microsoft and try to figure out if any of those patents apply to anything you do or have. The cost of such a move is probably prohibitive. Of course if you do find some patents which could apply to something you do, then the question of wether they should have been granted in the first place comes up. You then have the option to spend lots of money on trying to find prior art to invalidate the patent(s) in question. But the problem here is that most companies who do patent blackmail tend to make sure that their licensing fees are lower than the expected cost of getting their patents invalidated, so you are stuck in a lose/lose situation. You can give in to their crocked ways and license their patents no matter how bogus, or you can try to fight them and end up spending even more money. One could dream of a situation where the cost of any patent prior art research and litigation should be covered by the US patent office, as they are the ones who are primarily to blame for the current mess.
Not sure this situation can be fully remedied without the US doing a full rehaul of their patent system, but maybe a stopgap measure would be a law that forbids the claim of patents against a competitor without being specific about which patent and which application implementing it at least. That would put much more of cost on the would be attacker instead of the defendant.
Two movies based on the Hobbit
I have been waiting for a long time for some concrete news about when a movie based on the Hobbit would be made. As most know the movie is stuck in negotiations between two studios who have the rights for production and distribution respectivly. Seems people are expecting those hurdles to be passable now, as they have gone as far as making plans for not one, but two movies made based on Tolkiens ‘The Hobbit’, according to this article in Variety . Looks like Peter Jackson will be back and judging by this interview with Howard Shore the composer behind the music in the LOTR movies, is likely to be back to. Cool stuff! Thanks to TheOneRing.net for the links.
New release of Elisa
While I was away at UDS in Mountainview the Elisa team did a new release of our Elisa mediacenter solution. At the same time the website got a facelift making it look a little closer to the new default theme for Elisa. As mentioned this release do not add a big amount of new features compared to the previous one as it has mostly been about remodeling the internals of Elisa to enable us to take it where we want to. We are now however again going to be moving forward with feature additions and usability improvements. On the top of my personal wishlist is trickmodes and stronger upnp support. Coming up with some clever UI ideas for how we handle music collections and huge video collections is another important todo.
We need more people!
Things are moving fast here at Fluendo and we are continously looking to add more developers to our staff. The Elisa team is looking for a new member and I am looking for someone interested in working on various solutions around our codecs, especially some installation and upgrade tools to integrate with our webshop solution. Something a little more advanced that loki_setup/loki_update, yet less ambitious than Red Carpet or RHN. Longer term this person would probably be involved in other projects here too, like the DVD/BlueRay player and general codec development. If you are interested in any of these two and Barcelona sounds like a tempting place to live please mail me (christian-at-fluendo-.-com) for more information.
The Curse of a Semi-Free Press
Scanning through a scandinavian newspaper I saw a story about an Iranian acctress called Zahra Amir Ebrahimi who risks multiple years in prison and getting publically whipped after an old camcorder recording of her and a former boyfriend appeared on the internet. Her former boyfriend had according to the article managed to flee to the emirates.
Stories from Iran about young girls, often minors, getting jailed, hanged or physically maimed by the Iranian court system due to both voluntary and forced sexual acts are not a rare occurence in scandinavian media.
What struck me this time though is the fact that all these reports come from Iran, and only Iran. While it could mean that these kind of acts by the government only happens in Iran I do find it a bit unplausible. For instance I would be very suprised if wahabist Saudi Arabia doesn’t have as harsh rules against ‘immorality’ for example.
So I started wondering if the reason why these things do get reported out of Iran is because compared to for instance Saudi Arabia, Iran might actually have freer press and political opposition?
One trait of modern democracy is that the public focus tend to be led by current news stories. News stories are being done as a combination of what is available and what the readers are interested in. So in one sense the countries getting the harshest treatment in international media is the ones who are not totalitarian enough to have destroyed all internal opposition as opposed to those who successfully silences all independent reporting and internal criticism.
So while I in no way defend the acts of the Iranian regime on these issues, it do strike me that maybe they get painted as the worst offender in the region not because they are the worst, but because they actually are the best, in the sense that they at least allow some political discourse and reporting on the subjects. Of course being ‘the best’ in this case is still not very good, but it do put the ‘axis of evil’ in a funny light.
Thanks to Sun for GPL Java
As everyone is aware of by now Sun is releasing Java under the GPL, which is great news. One thing did strike me as a little weird though,
when visiting the page with video’s with testimonials from people like RMS and Mark Shuttleworth they use Flash video (which for me almost never plays in sync). Considering this is an announcement of GPL Java it would have been cool if they instead used Cortado which is a 100% Java GPL licensed solution using the Free Vorbis and Theora codecs. And as you can see from this demo page for our stream hosting service the quality of Cortado these days is pretty good and we are continuing to invest more resources into it to make it more powerful.
So get into the groove Sun and go 100% Java with your internet video, no need to use an expensive proprietary solution when you can get something just as good based on 100% GPL Java
