So one day after returning the power supply of my Dell laptop stopped working. Due to being under warranty I was able to get a new one delivered from Dell, but it took me almost a full week to get the new one, which arrived on Friday. Turned out it was a DOA Power adapter I got…so today I figured I take now chances. I called Dell support, which I am still waiting to call me back to get them to send me yet another one, but I also ordered a new power supply from battery.co.uk based on a recomandation from Jaime. So far it looks good as they sent me a mail saying they shipped it within an hour of my order. Lets see which gets here first, the one from Battery or the one from Dell :)
End of vacation
So I have been away for two weeks on vacation. While I figured I needed it I don’t think I realized how much I actually needed it :) Spent most of my time in Norway offline, partly by choice. Just spending two weeks relaxing either at home or hiking through the Oslo forest or hanging out with friends. I also grew myself a little beard while on vacation, and I think I will try to keep it around for a while :)
Since my experiment with bringing Norwegian Rakfisk worked our quite will after Christmas I decided to bring along another item of Norwegian food this time. So hopefully later this week I will be able to invite people to a delicous meal based on whale meat.
Nice developments
Rhythmbox
There are lot of nice developments happening these days. After having been using Banshee for a while I have to say that Rhythmbox have won me back. The work that has been put into polishing RB over the last months have been incredible. There are so many little details I just love now with the current GUI, like the beautifuly fading in/out of album covers. I am also happy to see that all my emusic bought songs gets album cover art now in rb, something I never got before with any other player. The Play queue in sidebar option is also very nice, and the source list has been polished up and just looks sweet atm. Thanks!
Also happy that the Rhythmbox team is now working on relicensing RB to the same licensing setup used for Totem enabling distro’s to both ship RB and also ship support for non-free formats like Windows Media and MPEG.
Totem
Totem has also gotten a lot of love recently, especially the Mozilla/Firefox/Epiphany etc. plugin. It now registers itself with four plugins in order to handle as many as possible of those weird detection scripts used out there, with one plugin pretending to be Windows Media player, one pretending to be Real Player, one pretending to be Quicktime player and finally one being just Totem :). Also been a lot of work on the playlist handling fixing a bug where in some cases Totem handed GStreamer a playlist instead of the actual media uri. A big thanks to Bastien and Christian Perch for this work. We did find a few new bugs due to it in some GStreamer plugins, but hopefully we get on top of those quickly enough.
Fluendo Windows Media plugins
The Fluendo windows Media plugins continues to see a lot of work and polish. One thing we are working on getting working perfectly currently is allowing you to transcode only one of the streams in a file. For instance the pipeline below would convert the WMA audio into MP3 while keeping the WMV video as it is. The advantage of being able to do this is that the video quality doesn’t get further degraded as video isn’t decoded and encoded again, its just demux and remuxed back in with the transcoded audio.
gst-launch filesrc location=leavestech_gp_0516_700.wmv ! fluasfdemux name=demux .stream_2 ! queue max-size-time=0 max-size-buffers=0 ! progressreport name=v ! fluasfmux name=mux ! filesink location=leavestech_as_mp3.wmv demux.stream_1 ! queue max-size-time=0 max-size-buffers=0 ! fluwmadec ! audioconvert ! progressreport name=audio ! lame ! mux. -v
Vacation time
Heading up to Norway on Sunday for a two week vacation. It is actually the longest non-stop vacation I ever had (not counting my between jobs trip around the world). Looking forward to relaxing and spending time with my family. Only thing that frustrates me before leaving is that I managed to forget to go to the Spanish tax office today to pick up my certificate showing I am a Spanish resident and tax payer now. Well I guess at this point two more weeks doesn’t matter that much anyway.
HP and the GPL3
There is an article on news.com talking about objections from Hewlett Packard to the patent provisions of the GPL3. First of all I hope Hewlett Packard don’t get to much traction on their change suggestion, as their change suggestion looks to me like they make the patent protection provisions of the GPL3 even weaker than those of the GPL2. I think that the GPL is powerful enough at this point to be used as a way to weaken the software patent regime. Bad bad HP.
Dell
On the topic of PC makers, my laptop harddisk broke down yesterday. Luckily we have a on-site support contract with Dell so a technician will be here tomorrow morning to fix it. A bit frustrated that they couldn’t come today, but I guess we are not paying the kind of money to have that kind of availability. By the luck of the gods
I did do a full home area backup Tuesday. So today I am using our spare laptop running from a ubuntu live CD. I will miss my data though, but I guess I can manage until tomorrow.
Linux Desktop and Games
Noticed a discussion on Slashdot on the state of Linux for games, spawned by a (not so good) article on Cedega.
One of the main arguments brought up which is probably true is that the PC gaming market is dying/declining, due to the increased popularity of consoles. It rhymes well with my own experience as those of my friends who do game a lot have basically switched from PC gaming to Playstation/Xbox gaming over the last two/three years. If you as a game company is moving your focus from PC’s to consoles anyway I guess looking at adding more ‘PC platforms’ to your supported list is quite far down the todo list.
That said there are still some major titles coming out with primarly the PC platform in mind and I don’t accept all the arguments made for why these don’t have a native linux port.
One argument I noticed cropping up was that of easy of porting between XBox and PC platform while the Linux/OpenGL/SDL/OpenAL port was harder. I doubt this is the real problem. For example I did expect more Linux games to come out when the Playstation 2 came out and used GCC and OpenGL due to ease of porting, but no such ports seemed to happen. Today MacOS X uses OpenGL and OpenAL on a Unix core with gcc, yet few of titles released for Apple also get a GNU/Linux port. So I think the Linux ports gets axed before the difficulty of porting question even arises.
Another question is if there are enough linux users out there to warrant a port, or at least enough linux users interesting in playing games to warrant a port. That is a hard question to answer. Loki Games did go under as many have pointed out, but in the aftermath its hard to say if it was mismanagement or lack of sales killing that company. Claims have been made in both directions. I would also hope that we have managed to grow the overall size of the linux userbase since the days of Loki which might have changed the dynamics if Loki where doing business today. There are other linux porting houses like Linux Games Publishing and Runesoft around and they seem to be surviving, even if they mostly do smaller titles. Transgaming looks like they are doing a healthy business currently, somewhat on the back of the enduring popularity of World Of Warcraft no doubt. So there definetly is a sustainable market for games and games related products on GNU/Linux. Based on some comments I saw from a Epic or Id person a couple of months ago I guess it is more of the ‘we don’t lose money on doing linux ports’ category though as opposed to ‘doing linux ports gives us a nice bundle of extra cash’. We need to get to the second of these two before the major game houses start paying attention I think.
Linux gaming is hampered still by shitty drivers for 3D, yet I am unsure about how direct impact this have on the lack of game ports. At the level the decision is taken at a company about wether to support Linux or not I don’t think there would be awareness of the state of Linux 3D drivers. NVidia’s proprietary drivers are probably the only ones out there that provides the quality and performance you want for playing newer titles. Intel’s drivers are good, but Intel is currently aiming at the low-end graphics market which kills them for a lot of the current games I think. ATI as many have pointed out provide really shitty Linux drivers. I don’t understand fully why they get away with it. I mean according to the grapevine the reason these drivers exist is due to the animation companies wanting them for their renderfarms. Well if that is true I don’t understand how said companies accept drivers which such horrid performance, being about 50% the speed of the same driver for Windows. Losing 50% performance on your renderfarm due to bad drivers would cause a lot of angry customers I would assume?
Anyway for someone contemplating a port, there might be some awareness that 3D accelleration under Linux has some kind of problems, even if the don’t know the details, which wouldn’t be helping their value estimation of the linux market of course. That said it seems to me people in the community are activly trying to buy NVidia or Intel using hardware these days, so hopefully the general image of bad 3D support will lessen over time due to that. It also has to be said in defence of ATI that it do seem like they are trying to improve their drivers currently. The release of AIGXL and XGL seems to have made them decide to put some more resources onto their drivers. Time will tell.
In regards to the general market size, I saw this
article today which is Red Hat talking about Xen. More importantly to this entry though is that it also reports both Novell and Red Hat seeing rapidly growing interest in deploying GNU/Linux destops. As a digression I wonder how important the major GNU/Linux and Solaris vendors having standarized on GNOME is for this surge in interest. The Windows games market where built on the back of home office PC’s, so maybe that can/will be our path too.
Elisa Press release finally out
So finally managed to put out the Elisa press release. It had been a good while since we last sent out a press release so it was good to get it out and hopefully get in the habitt of doing them more often.
Loic also put up some new pages on the Elisa Wiki describing the split-out of the Toolkit from the application. Very nice overview of what features are in the toolkit, how it works and where we are seeing it go forward. Also based on a discussion I had with Matthew Allum we added OpenGL ES as an explicit target for Elisa.
In other cool news so did Stuart ‘Young Whippersnapper’ Langridge put up a webpage for Jackfield. Jackfield for those you missed Stuart’s talk during GUADEC is a engine for running MacOSX Dashboard applets under GNOME. Be sure to check it out and send Stuart patches to make your favourite Dashboard applet work.
LugRadio live
So I am back after spending the weekend in England attending LugRadio live. Had a great time there, Jono and Stuart for insance are two likeable young lads, but it is a good thing they have older more experienced people like Ade and Matthew to help them.
The conference was a blast, with beer and interesting talks both flowing freely from the early hours of the day.
From a GStreamer perspective it was a great conference with talks on GStreamer projects such as
GStreamer itself,
Pitivi,
Diva,
Lowfat and
Farsight.
Michael Meeks also talked a little about GStreamer in his OpenOffice talk and explained that they are now working on adding GStreamer support to OpenOffice in order to do embedding of audio and video in OpenOffice documents etc., very cool stuff.
The generic GStreamer talk was my own and went ok apart from my demo section getting butchered by power supply issues. For some reason I had trouble getting reliable power out of the UK socket I was using (with my European power plug) so my power went away halfway into demo’ing Elisa. My screen setup was a bit stupid as I had to look at the projected bigs creen myself to see my slides which hampered the ‘look at the audience’ part of doing a talk.
Got to talk to a lot of interesting people, like the internets
Ted Haeger the host of Novell Open Audio who came away from the conference a beard richer.
Also got to discuss a little with Paul Cooper about next years GUADEC which will be in Birmingham. I have some ideas on an addition to draw in a wider audience and grow the community which we will look into the plausability of pulling off.
Due to EasyJet having cancelled our Sunday night flight, me and Edward stayed on until Monday. Luckily Matthew Allum and a very pregnant Sid was kind enough to let me stay at their place for the night. Their two dogs aka the Pugs where a little freaky looking in my view, but they more than made up for it by being very friendly and fun.
Slept very well on their sofa after two days in Wolverhampton sleeping in a sauna-like hotelroom while fighting a constant battle for space. Spent a easygoing Monday with Matthew, following up on some work items and discussing the state of the world with Matthew. Also we did a very nice lunch in the nearby township. Always enjoy talking with Matthew a lot, I think we are on the same page on most issues.
In the afternoon I went off to the airport to hook up with Edward again who had stayed the night at his brothers place. Think we where both rather tired after a great weekend, but we managed to get ourselves onto our airplane for the return to the city by the sea.
A big thanks to Ade, Jono, Matthew and Stuart and the LRL volunteers for organizing a great LugRadio live. Sure to be back next year! P.S. Make sure the Guinness is colder next year :)
The thing is, you see, that the strongest man in the world is the man who stands alone, Henrik Ibsen
Fluendo wrestling day
Every Wednesday we hold a wrestling tournament here at Fluendo in order to keep in shape and stay sharp. In the photo below Matthieu Garcia, our codec optimisation specialist shows of his headgear for the wrestling. 
OpenGL to be sold?
I saw this article/blog on businessreview online which features an interview with the SGI CEO. One of the things he says is that OpenGL might be sold as part of SGI’s restructuring. Considering how we are putting all our eggs in the OpenGL basket currently, with projects such as XGL, AIGLX and Glitz I hope this gets picked up by a friendly entity, especially if there are some patents still attached to OpenGL.
Motorbike racing in Barcelona
As it happens one of Fluendo’s two co-founders, Pascal Pegaz, has motorcycle racing as his big hobby. This weeked he invited everyone at Fluendo (and also a lot of other people) to attend the 24hour motorbike race at the track here in Barcelona. With a setup that included full access to the paddock and lots of food, drink and music to entertain us in addition to the race who where we to say no. It was a great race and our team looked poised to get a respectable position. Unfortunatly the bike broke down about 16 hours into the race. But we had a great time anyway and here is a collection of photos taken during bikerace,
take care to notice the prominent placement of Fluendo logos all over the place :)
Update!!
Thought I should also include a link to the ubercool video overlay system Julien made for the race. Its all using GStreamer! Anyway start by checking out this screenshot which demonstrates the system. Basically what it does is taking the video feed from the on-bike camera and the data collected by bikes onboard computer. Then the graphics are generated for the speedomeeter etc., and also a photo of the driver added in this case is a picture of Fluendo co-founder Pascal Pegaz who was one of our three drivers for the endurance race. In the photo he is crusing at a respectable 270 km/h. This system we hope to use more for future races. Check out Julien’s gallery for more.