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.
Being digital
So I got my TDT box set up yesterday and taken a step into the world of terrestrial digital TV. After struggling a bit with the cabling (the TDT box primary output is Euro SCART, but all the stuff I wanted to connect to I am using S-VHS cabling for.) Discovered that my hi-fi amplifier could do RCA to S-VHS conversion in the end and luckily there is also a RCA video ouput and a coaxial SP/DIF output on the box.
Anyway this move took me from 20 channels where the image where unwatchable on 15 of them, to 30 channels all with good image and sound quality. I am a bit suprised that TDT doesn’t do surround sound though, or maybe its just my cheap ass TDT box not supporting it. On the other side when I went to get cables yesterday I did look at the other TDT boxes offered and was suprised that none of them seemed to offer better connectivity than my own box. I mean when you compete in what I would assume is a rather standarized market I would think one way to try to beat the competition is offering better connectivity options than your competitors. Yet none of the boxes had for instance optical sp/diff or s-vhs output for example. They seemed all to only offer the SCART, RCA, coaxial SPDIF and coxial audio left/right output. Of course even if I know have 30 channels that doesn’t mean I got 30 viewable channels, most of them offer little of interest. At least I have an antenna cable now capable of TDT which means I can be a tester when we get to implementing this stuff in Elisa.
Instanbul:
Screenshots are so last year it seems, and everyone is now moving over to screencasts. Good news is that Zaheer has been working hard on making Istanbul the best screencast recording tool out there. With his latest changes Istanbul is capable of recording OpenGL based applications which in these days of XGL, AIGXL, Elisa, lowfat and so on being able to record OpenGL stuff is essential. So check out
Zaheer’s latest blog post for details.
Also be aware that the latest versions of Cortado our Ogg Theora/Ogg Vorbis playing Java applet has a working seekbar now. If you check out the Elisa screencast you see that a seeker bar appears if you let the mouse pointer rest over the video image. With this you can host screencasts on your webpage and even allow people to seek in the online movies.
I guess I also should use the chance to pimp LugRadio live this year (and myself doing a talk there).
First release of Elisa!
Ok, so after a successful launch during GUADEC this year we now have the first alpha release of Elisa ready. Elisa is for those who don’t know it already our mediacenter solution for GNU/Linux systems (it actually works on MS Windows too as demonstrated during GUADEC). Currently it only contains some basic playback functionality and there is precious little developer documentation. But long term it will be a full PVR/DVB enabled solution with full suport for UPNP/DLNA systems. We will also document out plugin format and write tutorials on how to make Elisa themes. Hopefully many people in the community will find Elisa usefull and interesting. So jump over to the Elisa website and grab the first version for testing or to look at our selection of screenshots and screencasts. The screencasts are both available as downloads or viewable on the site through the Cortado java applet. People interested should join the mailing list or visit us in the #elisa channel on irc.freenode.com.
The Pain of Directories
As we are preparing for the first alpha release of elisa the question of file locations came up. In a media center solution you have IMHO halfway lost if you have to expose disk directory layout through the userinterface. Cause since the primary tool for using the GUI is a remote navigating directories and choosing files based on it is simply painful. In the set-top box situation this is not to big a problem as we can enforce certain defaults. But since we also want people to be able to run Elisa on their normal server/desktop systems we need to also consider how these are laid out.
There has been some long discussions about this in the GNOME community about defining special ~/Music and ~/Movie directories for instance that all applications default to. If this was the case we could just have Elisa default to parsing those directories too. Unfortunatly the progress on this has stalled due to what I guess is a combination of issues, one is how to handle localizations (on disk or in GUI) and if the especially the first who does the work to make it happen.
For Elisa we will set specific directories for this first alpha release that can be changed in the elisa.conf file. What the long term solution will be will depend on what happens elsewhere in the community. I just hope we don’t need to have a file manager/chooser module in Elisa long term. At least not one many people would need to use.
Want out of the box Vorbis support on the 770?
I know many of you have requested Vorbis support on the 770. Well the way we can make that happen is to demonstrate that there is a real interest in this. Nokia gathers statistics on what people report in their bugzilla and this is a big part of setting priorities going forward. So if you want Ogg Vorbis to be supported on the 770 device then please go to Maemo bugzilla and file a bug report requesting they add Vorbis support. I am going to do this myself this week, so please do so yourself and also tell anyone you know to do so too. If you don’t then you lose the right to complain about lack of Ogg Vorbis support on the 770.
Leaving Norway is almost impossible
It seems leaving Norway is one of the hardest things one could do. The Norwegian government have basically decided that Norway isn’t just a country, its a concentration camp. So even after living for almost two full years in Barcelona the Norwegian government refuse to accept that I have moved and demand that I tax to Norway for instance. Will be interesting to see how long it takes before the Norwegian government comes to accept that I actually have moved.
GUADEC over for this year
So GUADEC is over and I am back again at the office. It was a great week and I guess the 7 day GUADEC worked out fine, although I felt people where maybe a little battleworn on Friday. I know I was.
A lot of cool stuff happened this year. For instance the LugRadio guys where able to record short daily LugRadio episodes from the conference using Jokosher. So be sure to grab the recorded episodes from their archives session. Nokia represented by Makoto Sugano also thought Jokosher was cool and donated a 770 device to the project to help get Jokosher remote going.
The Fluendo party was a great success even if we had a painful time figuring out how to start the slideshow looping in Open Present. To those wondering let me just say that the word ‘loop’ never occurs in any dialog related to it and that there is a non-intuitive timer value that has to be filled in :)
Edward did a great job organizing a GStreamer and gst-python hackfest at GUADEC. It ended up a quite large group with people interested in and working on Pitivi, Jokosher and last but not least Elisa our media center software which we announced at GUADEC.
The response to Elisa was absolutly fantastic and I hope we will be able to get an active community around it. Philippe and Loic will of course be continuing to hack on it to make it a killer solution.
GUADEC next year will be in Birmingham in the United Kingdom. I hope to be involved a bit with the organisation of that as I have some ideas on some cool and interesting tracks and speakers. Anyway I guess I can discuss such things with many of the local people involved when Edward and me head up to Wolverhampton for LugRadio live next month.
With so many companies involved in GNOME these days logowear is an important way to make your mark. Trying to keep the cooperative aspect strong I decided to help the Opened Hand guys out by wearing a t-shirt that surely points people to OpenedHand :). I am also wearing on of the fashionable Fluendo caps in that photo.
For people wondering about the video archive of the talks done at GUADEC you will find it at http://stream.fluendo.com/archive/guadec/2006/ eventually. Nothing there now, but it is being worked on.
Women’s Summer Outreach Program
Not often I use my blog to say I was wrong about something, but this time I feel its warranted. I have to admit feeling that the Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006 program, started to try to get more Women involved with Free Software, was destined to fail. To me it seemed like an effort to fish in an empty sea. Well as it turned out I was horribly wrong. There turned out to be a lot of submissions and seven projects are now approved. A big thanks to Chris Ball and Hanna Wallach for organizing this.
GStreamer, gst-python hackfest
Edward Hervey is organizing a gst-python centric hackfest here at GUADEC tomorrow at 12.00 in Carpa. (Originally scheduled for Friday).
Projects such as Pitivi the non-linear editor, Jokosher audio mixer/recorder, Elisa media center and the Flumotion streaming server will be there. So if you are interested in getting involved with any of these projects make sure to be there. Also if you have questions about writing GStreamer applications in Python in general experts like Edward, Jono Bacon, Stuart Langridge, Phillipe Normand and Loic will on call.
Important GUADEC updates
A couple of important updates for GUADEC atendees. The first message is that the France vs Spain world cup football match will be streamed at the Maemo party tonight, so no need to panick for the football fan among us.
The second announcement is that the bus service to the GNOME Village has improved with more departures and also an extra stop. Get the details on the GUADEC news site.
Be aware that now that things have cooled down a little the GUADEC news page will be more frequently updated with updated news.