Making free formats competitive

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We have some technically good solutions available now in terms of Vorbis, Theora an Dirac. The codecs produce good quality audio and video and is slowly but surely seeing increased uptake. Yet the uptake could be even speedier, but there are some things that needs to be done:

a) RTP support – we are already working on that through the Xiph RTP project. Essential for our codecs to be used in VOIP and multicast scenarios.
b) Profiles – define profiles for various usage like its done for MPEG. For many vendors having standarised profiles, like mobile and main, is essential before they will consider using our codecs.
c) Surround sound – Vorbis can theoretically do multichannel audio, but not very efficiently. Work should probably be done to create a vorbis variation which can compete more head on with AC3 and DTS. Any community members interested in working on this?
d) Content sites – in an email exchange with someone working in the content industry about formats I suggested using Ogg for distributing trailers. The person I talked with agreed (although it wasn’t his decision to make), but said that the main reason they didn’t distribute trailers in Ogg format was simply because none of the major trailer sites requested it. Maybe something that Google could help out with?
e) Tools – I mentioned this before and it is still an core issue, we need more and better tools available for creating/handling content. This is an area where I see a lot of movement, both with the work we are doing here at Fluendo with our work GStreamer, Flumotion and Pitivi, but also from other members of the community with efforts such as DIVA and Thoggen.

Fluendo joins the GNOME Foundation

So together with Imendio and OpenedHand we announced joining the GNOME Foundation today. We have discussed it a lot back and forth for some time, but in the end the fact that GNOME is using GStreamer made us decide it was in our interest to join. A big thanks to David Neary for his relentless work to make this happen.

Community hiring

From time to time and think about the community and the effect the increasing level on hiring have on it. Mostly in a purely practical context. It is clear to me that the ever increasing rate at which people in the GNOME and GStreamer communities are getting hired is a long term win, but can cause a lot of short term problems. Especially in the case when people get hired to work on something else than they have been doing up to the point of getting hired. Let me take one example. Two people I would love to be able to hire to Fluendo at some point are Dom Lachowicz and Caleb Moore. The reason for this is that I know they are both top of the line hackers based on my experience with them in regards to librsvg which they co-maintain. Hiring them to work for Fluendo would of course mean they would be working on projects directly related to our business, which at least at this point do not include much SVG. Also from experience I know that when people do start working fulltime on free software they tend to work less on it in their free time. Partly because they tend to do long hours, partly cause the hacking on free software itch gets fully satisfied as part of the workday. So while having Caleb and Dom work for Fluendo would be a net win for free software in general, as they would work on free software projects of immediate importance to Fluendo, it would be a net loss for librsvg, which would find itself without any active maintainers suddenly.

Over time someone else would probably come along and take over the project, but it could mean a long period of time where an important project for the community goes without any new development or bugfixes.

One example where something like this did happen, was Rhythmbox, where Walters got hired by Red Hat. After that he simply didn’t have that much time and energy to hack on Rhythmbox anymore, although the total ammount of time he spent on free software development probably increased greatly, but most of it went into projects of more immediate importance to Red Hat.

Anyway, so whats my point apart from pointing out the obvious. Not sure actually :) The issue I have been pondering is if there is any way we can make transition periods like these shorter and smoother somehow. Hiring is good for projects like GNOME and GStreamer overall and good for the people getting job of course, but they do increase the turnover rate quite a lot on the individual project level which do and can cause some pain.

Return to the land of the free(zing)

So I am going back to Norway for a week on vacation and to celebrate my oldest sisters 30th birthday. Looking forward to it although I was told it was about 5 degrees Celsius in Oslo atm.

Traveling log – San Fransisco

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So I travelled to San Fransico with Julien and Pascal last week to have some customer meetings. It was the first time I travelled to the states on business class, and it was a rather pleasant experience compared to coach. So how was it you say?

Well coming onboard I found that my seat was in that little second floor room they have on the Boeing 747 planes. The seat is one of those where you can lay it down horizontally to have something where close to a bed, and there is a wall you can put up between you and the seat next to yours, so you almost have your own little cubicle. The rest is what you expect, you sit around chatting with the rest of the social elite, exchanging fun stories about horrible experiences with the proletariat, ie. the people traveling on coach.

The best part though was the sing-along we did. The tune was theme song from Annie, ‘It the hard-knock life’ but the lyrics was improved. Here is a small sample for you:

[PASSENGERS]
It’s a bourgeois life for us!
It’s a bourgeois life for us!

[CREW]
‘Steada working,

[PASSENGERS]
We get pampered!

[CREW]
‘Steada water,

[PASSENGERS]
We get Champagne!

[ALL]
It’s a bourgeois life!
Got to many servants to speak of, so,
It’s a bourgeois row we how!

And so it went on, it was a beautiful experience.

In San Francisco our customer meetings went very well and I also got to hang out a couple of evenings with the legendary David Schleef. San Fransico seems like a very nice city and I would love to someday spent more time there, all my visits so far have always been for just a few days with a heavy program. David celebrated his birthday while we where there, so Julien treated us to a nice meal at a local french resturant.

The USB soundcard story

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So as I have blogged about at an earlier point in time I have a Sound Blaster Audigy NX2 USB soundcard which I bought for the specific purpose of being able to play movies on my laptop with surround sound.

Even though I did google about it beforehand I managed to fool myself into believing this card was actually fully supported under Linux, which it isn’t. The S/PDIF output is not supported at all in fact, due to missing documentation from Creative Labs. Which is really sad, Creative Labs where among the first of the major hardware vendors to hire someone to work on linux support, and if they now don’t even provide proper hardware docs anymore then that is a sad development. Do anyone know if they still have a linux driver developer on their payroll? Anyway, I tried mailing the contact person listed on the opensource.creativelabs.com website about the docs, hopefully I get a positive reply.

Anyway as I also talked about before the state of USB soundcard handling under linux is not a beautiful chapter in itself, even when just using it in stereo mode with Totem/Xine it reverted back to the internal soundcard just after the DVD menu for some reason. And since I had lost the .asoundrc file I wrote the first time I tried I spent about as much time this time too finding out exactly what to put in it. Most entries I googled out said stuff like ‘here is what my .asoundrc file looks like, not sure what it exactly does, but it works for me’…..

I fear that as the Fluendo DVD player comes closer we end up having to fix up parts of the lower stack a bit to overcome the pains like this.

Anyway, Tired of the whole problem I bought a 60 Euro DVD player yesterday. Was able to watch Hidalgo yesterday using it on my widescreen lcd tv usinig s-video and connecting to my surround system using a optical cable. Neato! Now I only need to figure out how to disable to region checking on the system.

Pirates and Parrots

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It is a well known fact that Pirates and Parrots go together. It is kinda like wizards and cats. But how many historical pirates did actually have a parrot? A good question you might say, and one we might never find the true answer too. Yarr!

News on SMIL

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Got good news on SMIL today, the LiveSupport
project which is a software package for managing Radio stations (and which uses GStreamer have written some SMIL elements for GStreamer already. And they are willing to relicense them to LGPL for inclusion in GStreamer.

The Ambulant project which I also blogged about earlier also got back to me today saying that the next version of Ambulant will be LGPL, which at least takes away the licensing hindrance for GStreamer intergration.

The advantage of Ambulant of the LiveSupport stuff is that it is much more complete in terms of implementing the SMIL spec, the downside is that its design might be more painful to integrate in a nice way. Anyway Flavio Oliveira is planning on investigating the issue further and working on it, so hopefully a good solution can be found in the end.

VoIP

Currently having a Asterisk server set up for use by the GNOME board meetings, the current phone setup is costly and unpractical and I can’t help but feel that if such a technical group of people like the GNOME board is not able to switch to using a VOIP conference solution the who is.

GStreamer 0.10 and GNOME 2.14

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As the planning for GNOME 2.14 starts we need to gear up in the GStreamer community too. As we want to switch GNOME 2.14 over to using GStreamer 0.10 there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Releasing 0.10.0 being maybe the biggest one :)

We are pursuing an agressive schedule now and 0.10 should be out sometime November, so that part should be ok.

As for other tasks there are of course the obvious things like porting Totem, Rhythmbox, Sound Juicer and gnome-media over to the new version of GStreamer. But maybe this switch is also a good time to finally get rid of the direct esound dependence in GNOME.

Always been a lot of discussion on what would be needed to ditch the esound dependency, but sample caching and sound mixing seems to be the core issues. We have been talking for a long time of implementing a simple local only sound mixer/sample caching system with GStreamer and than add an abstraction layer on top which will use that system if the underlaying output doesn’t support it for you. So if you use esound it will not use it, or if you use dmix with alsa it will only use the sample cachinh part. Problem of course have always been that those who volunteered to take the tasks of doing this on ended up to busy or got dragged into other more urgent things.

Anyway this is definetly the time to start thinking of what needs doing and who will do what. Don’t want to start switching GNOME over 2 weeks before the release of 2.14 :)

Norwegian politics

Not everyone agreeded with my previous post about the Norwegian election. Especially my comment on the vote numbers seemed to hit some tender spots. As some people pointed out, if you add the votes of one of the parties which didn’t get elected to parliament then the figures look differently, but then again if you are going to start adding the votes of the non-represented parties then you can’t stop at one, instead you would need to add up the votes of all the unrepresented parties and assign the to your block of choice (haven’t bothered doing so myself to check what the results then would be).

The fact remains that among the parties represented in parliament you have now a majority in terms of representatives which got fewer votes than people who are the minority in terms of representatives. This is due to two factors, the primary being method for allocating representatives, using Lagües allocation which favour the biggest party. This I have actually little problem with as it do have some good effects, like strenghtening the parliamentary support of any election winner and through that easing governance (although Norways solution is to weak to have a real impact in that regard, unlike for instance the Brittish election system). The other reason and which is the thing which I strongly dislike is the the part which discriminates against central areas like Oslo, treating votes there like secondary citizens whose votes are worth much less than for instance the votes of people in northern Norway.

The justifications for this system looks to me to be made up mostly to defend status quo as it serves the interest of the majority of parliament fine even it if degrades the majority of the electorate. Cause if the arguments used where genuine then Norway would opt to move towards a two chamber system like the US where one chamber is based on population numbers and one chamber is based on geographic units. Such a system gives both fair representation to all and safeguards the interests of the less populated areas. While the current system just gives the less populated areas undue power. And before someone points it out, I am aware that Norway in theory have a two chamber system.

So back to my post from yesterday, my complaint about the vote numbers where mostly based on the frustration with the Norwegian electorate inability to go forward instead of backwards. As it could very well be that even if you remove the geographical discrimination from the Norwegian election system, the Lagües model could still have wielded the a similar outcome (to much work to actually calculate it to find out).

DAAP is all around

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Cool things are happening all around. I mentioned the Rhythmbox support for DAAP some days ago and I have know also learned that DAAP support for Maemo and the 770 is under development. Which means you can listen to anything shared from Rhythmbox or iTunes (apart from DRM’ed crap) using your Nokia 770 device.

Flumotion and GStreamer 0.9

Wingo managed to get Flumotion running with GStreamer 0.9 on Friday which means that we hopefully can do a new release of Flumotion soon which runs both with GStreamer 0.8 and GStreamer 0.9/0.10.

Fluendo plugins beta

Also been working on preparing our beta program over the last couple of days as we are preparing to launch our first set of plugins upon an unsuspecting world very soon. Lot of ‘fun’ work writing licensing text and similar, but luckily that is mostly a one time task per plugin.

LiveSupport

Got informed of a new GStreamer using project today, LiveSupport which is software for managing a radio station. They also started on a SMIL element for GStreamer as part of that effort which might be a better suited starting point for GStreamer SMIL support than the Ambulant project I mentioned in an earlier blog. Of course some licensing issues involved as usual, but hopefully we can get those sorted out :)

Desktop eyecandy

Been thinking a lot about how to approach the desktop eyecandy issue. Think I will start by fixing up my old Colony theme (which is a dark futuristic theme) and see where it stands today. When I made it (and abandoned it) many months ago it did trigger some ugly bugs which hopefully are fixed by now. I also talked shortly with some of the people in -art about it the other day, among them Star which hadn’t been around for a long while. Think the idea of asking artists to provide desktop screenshot mockups displaying features they would like to have available when themeing would be a good start. We would also need to get some coders onboard to help file patches against relevant projects as I think just filing bug reports would not be enough to get this moving. So if there are any interested hackers out there please mail me at uraeus(at)gnome.org or come to the -art channel on Gimpnet. Helping out with this would probably be a great way to get involved with GNOME hacking in general as it would expose you to a lot of different modules.

Jan and Jaime’s going away party

So Jan and Jaime are organizing a party today as they are returning to Australia in a few days to get married, go on honeymoon and eat vegemite. This means they will not be back in Barcelona until November. Wine and Cheese have been promised, some of it probably even from the Wine and Cheese region of France.

Election in Norway

Yesterday there was a national election back in Norway. Didn’t get around to voting at the consulate here in Barcelona so I guess I have no right to complain, but I will do so anyway…argh the socialists won :(, whats worse is that they won due to how the election system works not because the majority wanted them as they actually got fewer votes than the sitting right wing government.

Free Software and politics

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Been getting more and more involved with the political side of software recently. Getting market acceptance is hard work and there are many ‘games’ which have to be played in order to get to the goal. There are of course some standarisation stuff happening in the free software world, through things like Linux Standard Base and freedesktop.org. But we are still babe’s in the woods compared to the wider world. But who know’s, maybe we can have GNOME declared an ISO standard at some point :)

Hectic week

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Was a hectic last week with a visit to Helsinki from Wednesday to Friday. It was Wim and I who traveled from Barcelona up north and it turned out we where not the only ones there. Mikael Hallendal, Richard Hult and Tim Jannick from Imendio had by coincidence also some meetings with Nokia. Since Nokia is gearing up to start selling the 770 soon we discussed areas of cooperation for future software and hardware upgrades. Can’t of course blog about the details, but the meetings where positive and I think some exciting things will come out of it for everyone involved, including the community of course.

Also meet Zeeshan for the first time outside IRC. He seemed to have managed to adjust to life in Finland quite fine and seems happy with his job at Movial. Introduced him to the magic of Guinness beer, which I think he still needs a couple of more months to fully appreciate. It was fun meeting him, and hopefully Wim and I didn’t come of as too boring :)

Talking about boring, the Imendio guys are growing old and tired I think. The first night we didn’t get them to come out at all, and the second night they ran back to their hotel right after dinner. Could of course be my deoderant being bad or Mikael getting nervous after our discussion about the uses of baby oil, but I think its mostly that its natural for Swedes to grow old and frail quickly. In fact I think I noticed Mikael having grey hair above his ears now. I think for GUADEC here in Barcelona next year I will buy both him and Richard a walking chair each, so they can manage to get around and see a little of town.

It seems Michael Meeks will be in town tomorrow. Hopefully Novell Brainshare will not slurp away all his time so we can meet up for some good tapas and catching up. I don’t know about brainshare, but I guess it might be unrelated to Gandhi saying ‘Better with braindrain than brain in the drain’.

Anyone seen the Amulet of Yendor?

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Would be interesting to do a poll over how many GNOME hackers have actually managed to get hold of the Amulet of Yendor in netHack. I am not one of them, but I am sure there are some out there :)

Rhythmbox magic

Charles Schmidt checked his DAAP work into Rhythmbox CVS today. This means that if you update to it you should be able to share music between Rhythmbox and iTunes clients on your LAN. Sweet stuff :)
I do have it running now, but since I am the only one in my LAN with it there was a limited amount of sharing. I did however succesfully have my user run RB pick up the sharing of my root run RB :). screenshot provided as proof