One year of GStreamer 0.10

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Andy Wingo reminded me that the 5th of December last year we did the first release of GStreamer 0.10. So Tuesday was actually our 1 year aniversary of GStreamer 0.10. We felt it was a major milestone for GStreamer, turning a corner in stability and usefullness. That said the move wasn’t completely without its detractors as the 0.10 branch did have some regressions compared to the 0.8 one. Now one year later I think its safe to say that GStreamer 0.10 has been a gigantic success. The number of developers contributing or using GStreamer have mushroomed and the status of the GStreamer project is much improved. There are still a few feature regressions left in GStreamer 0.10 compared to 0.8, DVD playback being the most noted example, but I think that is overshadowed by the improved capabilities of the framework and the much improved stability provided by the new framework.

The fact that we don’t try to ‘jury-rig’ new feature in place, but instead take the time to do them properly seems to win us more friends than having ‘all’ features available in a flaky manner.

Not everything is perfect though, we know for instance that some of our demuxers are still not perfect and applications like Pitivi and Jokosher breaking new ground are hitting new bugs. But the good thing is that unlike the 0.8 experience, with 0.10 we feel that when we fix bugs they stay fixed, instead of playing bugzilla whack-a-mole like we did with 0.8. For every day we see bugs getting fixed or new plugins getting made, all bringing us closer to give the community the media experience they deserve.

So congratulations to the rest of the GStreamer community with 1 year of GStreamer 0.10 rocking hard!

The return of a GStreamer Legend

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Edward got his first major patch for Pitivi yesterday. Cool thing was that it was from an old GStreamer hero who we hadn’t heard from in a long while, namely Richard Boulton. Richard is one of the few people who I think pre-dates my own involvement in regards to GStreamer apart from Wim and Erik. Welcome back Richard :)

What Richard provided for Pitivi was the save/load Project feature which is critical going forward where Pitivi is reaching a level of usability that makes saving and tweaking projects become a real priority. Cool stuff.

Novell bashing at Groklaw

Have to say I agree with Jono on the latest Novell bashing story on Groklaw. It feels more like an attempt at smearing than anything else. As anyone who have followed OpenOffice for the last years would have known, Ximian and later Novell always maintained a large set of changes for OpenOffice due to the process of getting them approved and merged upstream being long and painful. A lot of nice stuff like the GTK+ support and a much improved icon set created by TigerT and Jimmac is the heritage of this effort. Michael Meeks has probably pulled in more people to help out with OpenOffice than anyone else in addition to the incredible work he personally have done on OpenOffice. This is just a few of the contributions done by first Ximian and later Novell to OpenOffice.org. Starting to accuse them now of forking is just childish.

PJ, it is fair to critisize the Novell & MS deal, but please try to keep things at a intelligent level, more postings like that one and you lose all the cred you built up over the last few years.

Gluetastic Pitivi

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Anyone following GNOME CVS activity over the last days would have noticed the heavy Pitivi hacking activity. As of yesterday evening Pitivi properly supports ‘gluing’ together multiple videoclips and outputing them as one file. This includes re-scaling the videoclips into one shared size if they are of multiple sizes. The current battle plan is to enable new features in Pitivi even when we know they trigger bugs in various GStreamer elements. Then later on when the GStreamer bugs gets fixed we will hopefully have an active user community which will scream murder (file bugs) when plugins break Pitivi functionality. Next step in enabling the new GUI ideas is to enable basic transitions and some simple cutting (not necesarily in that order). After that we should have a basic but useful tool for people to start using. What the exact priorities will be after this is not set in stone, but will depend on user feedback and of course the priorities of new contributors coming onboard. A big thanks to Edward for his relentless effort in getting Pitivi ready for mass consumption!

Details on Texas Instruments and GStreamer

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So I blogged about Texas Instruments work around GStreamer yesterday. Today I found this article about GStreamer and Texas Instruments on EETimes.com. Lots of lovely quotes in the article like:

Since GStreamer is a very popular and well-known framework, which has become a standard in digital video development, the ability to access the capabilities of the DSP from within this environment saves programmers from the need to learn the proprietary DSP programming language.

Yes, you heard it here first, GStreamer has become a standard for digital video development.

Decodebin2 has landed

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Ok the wait is over, the new Decodebin element has landed in GStreamer. It will be part of the new GStreamer core and base release next week. It will not be used by default for this version though, instead you have to set the USE_DECODEBIN2=true Environment variable to have playbin use it instead of the old decodebin. Once it gotten some testing during this release it will be the default in the release afterwards.

So what new features do this bring? Well for the end user nothing will change overnight, but for developers it opens the path to fixing things like Chained Ogg playback, DVD handling and non-raw media output (for instance outputing AC3 to your S/PDIF port). A big thanks to Edward for fixing this.

Jack and GStreamer

Paul Davies of JACK Audio fame popped up on GStreamer-devel list last week asking about GStreamer JACK support. The discussion on both the mailing list and on IRC has since been about when to pull and when to push :). Anyway Wim decided to do take a stab at a JACK sink for GStreamer and its scheduled to hit CVS tonight.Update: It hit bugzilla today :)

Pitivi UI mockups

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Mentioned some time ago that Edward and Christoph had worked out some mockups about how the ‘simple’ view in Pitivi should work and look. As many of you might beware of we are aiming for a two view model in Pitivi, with a simple view which should allow anyone to do some basic editing and an advanced view meant for the more technical user who wants more detailed controlled of the timeline.

Edward Hervey blogged about these mockups last week after they are not cleaned up and commented. Be sure to check them out, we don’t know exactly when we will get to implement them all, but they do show the direction we are heading with Pitivi.

Jokosher roadmap

Another must read blog is Stuart Langridge, hacker extraordinaire on Jokosher and Jackfield. He had a recent blog entry discussing the outcome of the Jokosher 1.0 planing meeting with links and information on what the Jokosher community priorities are going forward. Be sure to check it out.

Ogg Trick modes!

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Ok, so Wim went on a hacking spree this Sunday and implemented trick-modes with Theora video. This means you can now grab gst-plugins-base CVS and playback Theora in reverse using it. Elisa has some support for this already in subversion, but the best test application is the ‘seek’ example application under tests/examples/seek in gst-plugins-base. Been having some fun playing some of the Ogg Theora movies I have in fast-forward mode, slow motion mode, slow motion reverse and fast rewind mode by modifying the ‘rate’ value in ‘seek’. Vorbis sound is also speeding up/slowing down and playing the sound in reverse perfectly. I tried recording a screencast of it using Istanbul, but my machine is not even close to being fast enoungh to both do the trick mode playback and recording to Ogg at the same time :). A big thanks to Wim. Really looking forward to demonstrating this at future conferences and meetings.

With the support now implemented in a set of open source decoders and demuxers hopefully more people in the community will be able to help out with trick mode enabling the rest of our supported formats. Up to this point only the Fluendo Windows Media plugins supported trick modes, but that doesn’t really help anyone outside Fluendo understand how trick modes are supposed to work in GStreamer, with these changes the secret sauce is available for anyone to study alongside the already public
design document :)

Update on the Texas Instruments OpenMax plugins

Texas Instruments sent in the first version of their OpenMax optimized
GStreamer plugins. Their plugins use the open source OpenMax implementation Bellagio/Omxil which was created by Semiconductor Technologies. ST plans on releasing a set of
GStreamer plugins of their own also as far as I know.

DVD and GStreamer

For a long time now things have been moving slowly in terms of
improving the state of DVD support with GStreamer. Tim Müller
has been working on improving it bit-by-bit over time, but being
only one person and having a lot of other tasks on his plate the
progress have been slow. Well know it seems some help has arrived
in the form of Jason Gerard DeRose who sent in information about his
new dvdread element to the mailing list last Friday and at the same time expressing interest in working also on working on the DVD navigation problemspace. Jason’s original reason for working on
the dvdread element was for his KungFu DVD ripper, but with the DVD stuff fresh in his head is willing to put time into improving also the playback side of things. A big thanks to Jason!

Proprietary 3D drivers

After Mark Shuttleworths invitation for Suse devs to switch to Ubuntu, which today he clarified, a lot of discussion has happened. A frequent topic that has come up in that discussion is the planed use of binary drivers for default in future Ubuntu releases for ATI and NVidia graphics cards. Well the binary graphics driver issue old news I say, I thought about that over 9 months ago ;)

NVidia/Fedora Quake crash

I would like to thank those who provided some feedback on my crash problem. It turned out to be a known bug in the latest released drivers and upgrading to the latest beta solved it. Thanks to the AC who pointed me in this direction.

No Quake3 in my FC6 world

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Been running FC6 for a little while now and I am happy with it for the most part. Only irritating regression is that Quake3 don’t want to run anymore, it actually pulls down the whole X server when I try to run it. This is using the non-free Nvidia driver package from livna.org.

The xorg.0.log file doens’t give me much to work with, at least nothing that Google gives me anything on.

Backtrace:
0: /usr/bin/Xorg(xf86SigHandler+0x81) [0x80d4cc1]
1: [0x414420]
2: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.so(_nv001255X+0x38) [0x2ee5dc]
3: [0xa0fb8c0]

Fatal server error:
Caught signal 11.  Server aborting

Anyone seen and fixed this on their own system? I am using the quake3 version from Fedora Extras.

Cool Jokosher review/podcast

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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

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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:

gst editor image

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 :)