New release of Elisa

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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

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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

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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 :)

Dirac and MPEG TS

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Ok, so I finally managed to push the long promised release of Dirac of the door thanks to the hard work for David Schleef. Not only that I was able to release our new MPEG Transport Stream muxer today including a written specification for how that is done, in order to allow other projects to implement it in a compatible way.

The new version of the decoder includes a heavily updated encoder and decoder compared to our previous code drop. This release encodes files that are very close to the latest Dirac specification in terms of conformance. The decoder should also be able to handle the files generated by the Dirac library from BBC.

You find the released files for both projects on the Schrodinger SourceForge project page.

The documentation for mapping Dirac into both Ogg and MPEG TS have now been added to the new Schrodinger documentation page.

And last but not least a GStreamer plugin using the new MPEG TS muxing library can be downloaded from the Fluendo file repository, the same repository holding our MPEG demuxer plugin which able to deal with the produced MPEG transport file which holds Dirac. Direct download from here

Questions, feedback patches etc. should go to the schrodinger-devel mailing list.

UDS Mountainview

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So Wim, Tim and myself are back from attending the Ubuntu Developers Summit in Mountainview, California. It was a great conference and it was good to see how the Ubuntu community works up close. While I did attend an earlier UDS in Mataro outside Barcelona for a few days this one was a very different experience as multimedia was at the top of the agenda.

The specification for easy codec installation will hopefully help move things forward in userfriendliness quite a bit. Tim wrote the GStreamer
part of with input and help from Wim during the conference. The whole spec is not really tied to Ubuntu so our hope is that the various distro’s will hook their own systems into it just like Ubuntu plans to. My thinking at this point is that we will also hook our commerical plugin offerings from Fluendo into this setup.

Another specification which got a lot of discussion was the audio jumble one where
basically PulseAudio was basically chosen as the way forward. The plans in this area coincides well with the plans of other distro’s as well for example the work and plans of Monty for Red Hat/Fedora. A topic that came up a bit both in the meetings and also in private conversations aftwards was about the relation between pulse audio and GStreamer and the ‘border’ between the two. In regards to the first the answer is pretty straight forward, GStreamer is no sound server and thanks to Lennart we have a good Pulse Audio GStreamer output plugin. When it comes to the ‘border’ I think the broad lines are drawn already, but the finer details will have to be measured out over time. My general answer when asked about it was that I thought Lennart wanted PulseAudio to do more than what we in the GStreamer camp would have it do, but since he was the one doing the coding on Pulseaudio and not us, it wasn’t our place to critisize his choices.

There where also some nice coding done during the conference. Wim implemented full RTP support for both Vorbis and Theora in GStreamer during the conference, meaning that we took a big step forward in being able to provide a free RTP based streaming solution. The next step in the process is to merge in the RTP branch into Flumotion head and get that working with the new RTP modules.

Wim also did a lot of work on Ogg trick modes during the conference and was able to play a vorbis file backwards before we left. Still some more work needed before this works perfectly and also for Theora, but having it supported in a free codec feels good as it has only been implemented in our commercial windows media codecs so far.

As Jono mentioned in his blog there was also quite a lot of buzz around Jokosher at UDS. The effort that has been put into helping out the Jokosher team with resolving bugs in GStreamer and Gnonlin I think is reaping great rewards through the great steps forward that Jokosher is taking. The work on Gnonlin will also yield great returns for Pitivi as most of the issues fixed would have popped up in Pitivi too. The plans for network instruments that where discussed in conjuction with the work done on telepathy was another highlight and something I think could be a real killer feature for both Jokosher and Telepathy.

There where of course many other important topics that was discussed and planned for during the summit. For my own part I found the great work done on improving Bluetooth support to be quite exiting. This was also an example of how Nokia’s increased involvement due to the Maemo and 770 projects continues to be a positive addition to the community and also shows how Nokia strives to be great community memembers be reaching out to the wider Linux/GNOME bluetooth community, like Marcel Holtmann who was present at the conference. The work that Marcel Holtmann is doing in this field is nothing short of amazing and will be a big step up from the current meager offerings of the gnome-bluetooth manager.

The conference also provided a opportunity to hang out with David Schleef again. We managed to squeeze in an evening in San Fransisco, seeing David’s abode, going out for some Japanese food and drinking some local brews and a nice bar called the Toronado. We have a new release of Schroedinger ready so I just need to update the webpage and send out a release announcement. Will get the MPEG Transport Stream muxer out at the same time.

Returned to Barcelona on Saturday, didn’t get much done for the remainder of the weekend apart from sleeping and catching up on the two episodes for Battlestar Galactica that I missed while away :)

Microsoft and Novell

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Like most my initial reaction to the Microsoft/Novell deal was to wonder what it actually meant, and if could cause increased risk to the rest of the community. After reading various comments I have instead started to wonder if this deal is worth the paper isn’t written on in terms of the patent deals. Novell and Microsoft have tried to work around the GPL by signing a covenant not to sue over software patents instead of ‘licensing’ the patents in question. But if Microsoft use this deal indirectly as an excuse to sue Red Hat or Canonical I think Novell might find itself in hot water with GPL copyright holders, who probably will start taking them to court for violating section 7 of the GPL. So maybe Novell’s customer got peace of mind from MS patent lawsuits, but on the other hand I don’t think they feel the risk having their rights under the GPL nullified will be any less stress causing.

On ther other hand I would think Microsoft sees this risk and knows that taking down both Red Hat and Novell in one swoop would land them in deep water with anti-trust authorities again, so in essence this deal might mean nada.

On the other hand Novell might have handed Microsoft the best FUD tool since the SCO case. Time will tell.

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Ubuntu Developers Summit
So Wim Taymans, Tim-Philipp Müller and myself will be attending the Ubuntu Developers Summit next with in Mountain View,California. We will be there to discuss issues and opportunities for improving
multimedia support in Ubuntu and friends. We will try to attend as many of the multimedia related tracks as possible.

Elisa

Grabbed the subversion branch of Elisa yesterday in order to try to help out with cleaning up the licensing before release. The new default theme is looking really sweet and the ability of the new backend ‘pigment’ to run on any backend we want to will be a great advancement. Anyway before we release I need to go over both Elisa and Pigment and verify that all the files have a copyright header and that it is the correct ones :)

Cedega by NVidia
Discovered today that Nvidia are offering a download of Cedega
through the demo downloads site NZone. Hope its a sign that linux is becoming a gaming platform that commercial vendors have started to notice.

A Scanner Darkly
Saw the movie ‘A Scanner Darkly yesterday at the cinema. Well the animation effect was fun for the first 15 minutes, after that the fact that the movie was just extremely boring started to kick in. Considered leaving the cinema at mutiple times before it was done playing.

Elisa and Dirac news

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Thought I share some of the latest newsbits on Elisa our media center solution. Philippe and Loic are hard at work with the reworking of Elisa internals, which hopefully will be mostly done by the end of next week. Once that is done we have a much stronger fundation for going forward and can go back into ‘feature add’ mode. Two features which we hope to get added in the coming month(s) is full uPnP support and DVB support.

There already is limited client uPnP support in current Elisa, but thanks to the work Frank Scholz is doing on creating a python uPnP framework called Coherence (sorry no URL yet) it should be much easier for us to take the upnp support to the next step to make Elisa a full server and control point for upnp/viiv services. One nice thing that this will enable is integration with Media Streamer which is a upnp enabled player/controller for the Nokia 770. My hope is that you would eventually be able to use your 770 as a media center control pad for your home with Elisa as the heart.

In regards to DVB most of the GStreamer related work is done now and in GStreamer CVS. What we know need is some way to scan whats available through DVB and then hook everything up with a GUI in Elisa.
I hope to be able to throw out my DVB decoder box at home and replace it by a system with a DVB card and running Elisa before new years.

Another cool Elisa newsitem is the Flickr plugin that Michael Sheldon did. As Elisa matures I hope we have a huge number of such plugins available enabling people to easily pick and choose the plugins they want to create the media center system of their dreams.

Dirac stuff

David Schleef is doing some great work currently on Schroedinger. With latest CVS of Schroedinger and liboil I am able to transcode files to Dirac in Ogg using this pipeline:

gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location=320-256kbits-NVIDIA-MadModMike.wmv ! fluasfdemux ! fluwmvdec ! ffmpegcolorspace ! schroenc ! oggmux ! filesink location=dirac-in-ogg.ogg

And play it back again with gst-launch and playbin. Still eating a lot of CPU which David is trying to figure out how we can reduce even if the arithmetic decoding seems like a though nut to optimize. Getting some strange error in Totem, but we will hopefully be able to resolve that soon.

I am also able to create MPEG Transport Stream files with Dirac inside using our Transport Stream muxer that we developed with BBC R&D. We are working on some critical deadlines currently making time a lacking resource, but hopefully things will cool down a bit next week and we can take the time to move it into the public SVN and make a proper release for the public.

GStreamer and Phonon

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Starting 1st of November Fluendo will be dedicating a resource to implementing a full featured GStreamer backend for Phonon, the multimedia API for KDE4.
The goal is to make the best backend for Phonon possible in order to demonstrate the qualities of GStreamer to the KDE community and hopefully lessen the chance of fragmentation in the free software multimedia space. This work is done in cooperation with a major industry player who shares our goal of providing the Linux and Unix communities with a unified multimedia API. I let them let announce their name themselves due to contractual reasons, but I do expect to see them talking publically about this at some point as it is quite direct follow-on to already announced efforts they are doing to bring more unity the free desktop under the auspices of the Portland project and the LSB.

As some of you know I have personally voiced reservations on Phonon in the past, and while I still think some of my concerns are valid, I hope that this effort can be a starting point for a more productive exchange of ideas. If we manage to make the GStreamer backend as good as we hope to then it would be a big step forward in resolving the worries some KDE developers have voiced about the readiness of GStreamer and maybe even encourage the development of a full set of Qt-style binding to GStreamer to suplement to the high level objects of Phonon.

I also hope is that this work will be a big step towards making users life much easier, as it will allow distributions to ship GStreamer plugins that enable proprietary codecs, and know that no matter if the user uses a GNOME/GTK or KDE/QT application the user will get access to these formats (at least as soon the licensing of applications are sorted out ;).

Time to give Solaris another try?

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We have decided to try to support as many of our plugins as possible on the Solaris platform in addition to GNU/Linux. Due to this I installed Solaris Express under vmware on my machine this week. I have to say that Sun is making great strides forward with Solaris as a developers workstation. Coming at this from someone who has been using Red Hat/Fedora for a long while, this Nevada build was the first Solaris install I could actually see myself using for more than Solaris specific testing. And I mentioned this before, GNOME seems snappier when running under Solaris for some reason, even when running it inside wmvare.