Took my own suggestion from yesterdays blog and did some work on the Pitivi non-linear editor today. So for any aspiring hackers out there be aware that the task of adding a window manager decoration appicon is now done :). I also took the chance to do a little work on the website, by improving the description text there and adding a favicon to the page based on the great menu icon done by Andreas Nilsson. I also filed some bugs on issues I discovered. My goal is that the next version of Pitivi is stable enough that when people ask for an easy way to create Theora files we can point them to Pitivi. No more gst-launch pipelines or ffmpeg2theora.
The death of a bug
After a long and steady period of bugfixing on GStreamer 0.10 we know have so few bugs that we are out of the GNOME Bugzilla Top 15 buggiest projects list. With Tim being on second place in the top bug closers ranking. One of the reasons we managed to push our bug count down so quickly is because a lot of the bug reports we got over the last months have not only pointed out the problem, but also included patches which of course makes things much easier. So a big thanks to both new and old GStreamer contributors.
The Farsight and Telepathy RTP work for GStreamer seems to be taking shape too these days. Philippe’s blog entry about getting Google Talk working with the Telepathy, Farsight and GStreamer stack was very encouraging. Combined with the work being done to enable RTSP in playbin I think we are going to have a very complete RTP story with GStreamer within the next 3-4 months, with both working conferencing applications and working RTSP streaming support in applications. Will of course be some time before we support ‘all’ protocols and formats, but the most common ones should be covered.
In regards to format support in GStreamer there has been some requests for a 0.10 version of the Windows dll loader, pitfdll. There has been a ready and working version in Sourceforge CVS for quite a while now, and which is just blocking on Ronald getting around to making a new release. For those wanting/needing it please grab the CVS snapshot and give it a spin.
Pitivi
Pitivi is really looking sweet these days. It is now ported to GStreamer 0.10 and the stability and performance increases compared to the GStreamer 0.8 version are just incredible. Currently it lets you transcode for instance Quicktime movie trailers to Ogg’s and also glue different videos together into one clip. More advanced editor features being worked on, but the core of Pitivi is now up and running well. Of course a lot of polish here and there is needed, in order to support both more input and output files properly, make the GUI look nicer etc. This means it is a great time for people interested to get involved in the Pitivi project. Being done in Python it should be easy for new people to grok the codebase and there are lot of little things that new people could have a go at to get started, ranging from writing a patch to add a window manager icon to Pitivi, improve the logic for thumbnailing to decrease the chance of getting a black thumbnail, enabling more output formats (anyone interested in helping with getting Matroska ouput working?) and so on. Since a lot of the work going forward is just enabling features available from GStreamer and gnonlin you should be able to add a major feature to Pitivi with just a few hours of work and testing. So grab the latest Pitivi version, join the Pitivi mailing list and either send in your first patch or ask Edward (bilboed) for suggestions for things to get you started hacking pitivi. If just a couple more people get involved Pitivi should be a killer application for GNOME 2.16.
More on cheap GUADEC flights
Noticed that Sterling Airways have restarted their direct flights between Oslo and Barcelona now. This means that people coming here for GUADEC should check out both Sterling and SAS for their tickets. SAS have been quite cheap recently actually so I am not sure if the new Sterling tickets are big savers, but it never hurts checking.
A long weekend in Norway
So I went back to Norway for the weekend. My main reason for going was to cheer up my mother who had been sick and undergone as lot of testing lately as the doctors feared for a while that she had gotten cancer. While back I also used to the chance to connect with some of my friends in Norway again.
I re-discovered is that doing stuff in Norway do cost a shitload of money. One night I went out with Kjartan Maraas and Owen Frasier-Green. We ate pizza, had a few beers and played snooker for a few hours. In the end the evening cost me almost 200 Euro, and that was for just me alone. Considering that my airplane ticket to Norway cost me almost 200 Euro sort of sets things in perspective 
Anyway I think the trip back to Norway worked out well. That I felt like I returned after a two month vacation when stepping into the Fluendo office today probably means I had an eventful four days in Norway
Battlestar Galactica
So Edward managed to get me hooked onto Battlestar Galactica. I have seen the whole series and for season two I even checked out a couple of the podcasts done by the writer behind the show, Ron Moore.
Listening to those podcasts was kinda interesting as it gave me a impression of a person who cares about his show in ways very similar to how we care about our projects like GNOME and GStreamer. The similarities in feelings towards ones labour of love is of course one of those things which are in many ways obvious when you think about it, but having it confirmed by listening to such a podcast does make it more ‘real’. Another interesting parallel is the often difficult to manage relation with the community of strong feeling users. ‘Battlestar Galactica was great until you did X’ or ‘Battlestar Galactica would be great if only you did Y’, has a great similarity to ‘GNOME was great until you did X’ or ‘GNOME would be great if only you did Y’.
Anyway to make some specific comments on the Battlestar Galactica. I think one of the reason I like it is because they do fairly clever storylines and characters. Ron Moore and the others behind the show are smart people and it shows. That said, even if I think Season 2 is better than most other current television made it do feel a little less good than the first season. The reasons for this is probably complicated, but Ron has pointed out in his commentaries that some of the episodes turned out less well due to time contraints. As they increased the number of episodes per season the time pressure increased leading to more glitches in the storytelling. For instance one thing they did better in season one than in season two (especially second half of season two) is keep some final truths from you. For instance take the ghostly ‘number 6’ that follows Gaius around. For a long time they held us from being able to conclude on wether she is ‘real’ or a figment of Gaius’s imagination. As long as she was only telling him about the past or about things a genius might have been able to deduce himself you where kept guessing. Some of the things that has happened during this season doesn’t rhyme very easily with that uncertainty but has instead ‘cemented’ her a bit as an actual entity. The same with Laura’s religious prophercy fulfillment where I feel they wanted it to be unclear for the viewer if there really is a supernatural prophercy at work or if it is just a person that belivies in the prophercies making them true by acting them out. There was items in this season pulling strongly towards the first option. Of course Laura being cured from her terminal disease did make things a bit murky again to the show makers defence.
Of course it is possible to ‘correct’ these items by adding things to story patching over the glitches in the storytelling making the ‘other’ option in both cases seem much less likely, but my general feeling is that the ‘stress’ of the higher episode count has simply given them to little time to think out each scene well enough to keep the option for multiple interpretations there. So while the Ron and Co. are smart, even smart people need time to think to come up with clever stuff.
Anyway, I still think its a fun show and will be tuning in for Season 3 in the fall.
Going to GUADEC? Want to go cheap?
Found this nice site today which lists all the low cost airlines going to Barcelona and which cities they connect to. A perfect guide for finding cheap tickets to go to Barcelona. GUADEC is starting on the 24th of June so its time to start making arrangements!
Also a good time to get moving on submitting your abstract if you want to do a talk or a presentation at this GUADEC.
Be sure to get here as this GUADEC looks to promise more GNOME and more beer than any GUADEC before it
New mobile phone
So I got my old phone stolen last week by pickpocket. My old phone was among the most expensive the operator was offering when I got it about 2 years ago. It had every feature you could dream of like Java support, bluetooth, tri-band, video and audio streaming, built in Radio, camera, support for email, slot for memory cards, mp3 playback support, themeable screen and more. Problem was I never ever used any of those features. So my new phone is the cheapest flip-top they had and it has no extra features at all. In fact it is even missing features I thought wasn’t considered a ‘feature’ anymore, like support for sending and receiving address book entries. So now I am doing on the painful job of trying to recreate my list of phone numbers as all my phone numbers got lost with the previous phone.
Paying people to post on Slashdot?
Was scanning through the slashdot comments on the RIM/NTP
settlement. Scanning through the comments I noticed that the people trying to defend the NTP patent litigation where strangely repetetive in the arguments. Like bringing up the same points in the same order in various posts. Hard to prove, but the postings seemed to alike to purely coincidental. So the question is if companies and groups trying to preserve the current patent regime (and probably other groupings) are now paying PR people to advocate their views on Slashdot and similar forums? Or maybe my own feelings on the subject made me see a conspirancy where there was none. Time to put on the tin foil hat :).
But I think the free/open source software community have become enough of a financial and political force for such things to start occuring, no matter if they actually did happen in this case.
Python everywhere
It is incredible to see how many great projects out there are using Python with GStreamer these days. There is of course Flumotion our streaming server, then there is Pitivi our non-linear video editor. Then there is Jokosher the sound multrack editor. And there is the FU Player music player. The Istanbul screen recorder, Togra the 3D multimedia framework. The Quod Libet the music library manager and finally Serpentine
the audio cd recorder. Probably some I don’t know about also, please add a comment if you know any other projects. I think it is a pretty nice collection of applications. Hopefully with this many Python applications around it makes it easier for new developers too as they have more to look at and more projects to borrow code from.
Vorbis and Theora RTP
Quite some time ago Fluendo funded an effort to get RTP specifications written for Vorbis and Theora. It has taken longer than we hoped at the outset, but things are coming together now. A big thanks to Luca Barbato who have been working on our behalf over the last 4-5 months on getting things sorted out.
The Vorbis RTP specification is now
available in a close to final version which has prelimenary IETF approval. The Theora
specification is a close behind, currently awaiting the initial stamp of approval from IETF.
Having these specifications ready I hope we will see a lot of projects implement them now and free formats start taking further steps forward into the world of VoIP, video conferencing and mobile streaming.
Python and Jokosher
So Jono has been harassing me and Edward for documentation for the GStreamer python bindings. Well it seems Gian Mario Tagliaretti came to our rescue. He just set up the pygstdocs site with his documentation for the GStreamer python bindings. Thanks to Gian for his hard work.
Seems Jokosher (formerly known as Jono Edit) is really picking up steam. As mentioned in an earlier blog it is an effort to create something like Cubase for Linux using GStreamer and PyGTK+. Mike, Jason and Jono are kicking ass and taking names currently. Nice screenshots here and here.
MPEG2 Transport Streams, Annodex and more
So Wim has completed his work on the Fluendo MPEG2 demuxer adding support for MPEG2 Transport Stream. So if you have been looking for a way to play transport stream files with GStreamer be sure to grab latest svn.
Mike merged the Annodex patches for GStreamer made by Alessandro Decina. This means that the cool Annodex technology that Conrad Parker demoed as last years GUADEC is finally in GStreamer. A little more work is needed on playbin before it works in Totem etc., but the first major step has been taken.
Luca Ognibene fixed one of my last great annoyances in GStreamer 0.10, a bug which caused Totem to screw up with many MPEG2 files when using mpeg2dec for decoding. Tim has also been working more on the GPL DVD support porting the dvdnav and dvdsubdec plugins. Nice to see so many things come together.
Solaris and vmware
Been strugling quite a bit with Solaris 10 and vmware server. The basics work really well, in the sense that Solaris installs without a hitch. The problem is that I can’t seem to get network support working from within Solaris. I am using the bridged networking, but I simply can’t get it to actually work. Reading howto’s it seems networking is supposed to ‘just work’, but it hasn’t so far for me. Another thing to dig into as time allow
