With all the talk generated by Arun Raghavans blog post comparing PulseAudio and Audioflinger I thought it would be good to follow up with an interview with Arun about the latest developments in PulseAudio and the way forward for the project. You can find the PulseAudio interview here. I also made a new page listing all the Collabora developer interviews done so far. Enjoy :)
Tag Archives: gstreamer
GStreamer Hackfest in Malaga
Tomorrow I will be heading off to attend the GStreamer Application Porting Hackfest in Malaga, Spain. I think we have managed to pull together an absolutely incredible group of people for this event and I have great hopes that by next weekend we will have squashed a ton of bugs in GStreamer 0.11/1.0 and also have initial ports of a long range of important applications and bindings. This is the first time in GStreamer history that we are trying to hold a hackfest focused on application developers, but hopefully it will be the first of many and that they can become a good way for the core GStreamer community and the application development community to interact and collaborate more closely.
Also want to say a special thanks to the community members attending the event on their own and also to the companies sending their employees to the hackfest; Collabora, Fluendo, Flumotion and Igalia and finally a special thanks to the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring some of the attendees.
Hopefully I will be able to post some screenshots of a fully functional GStreamer 1.0 Transmageddon next weekend :)
Transmageddon runs with GStreamer 0.11
After updating GStreamer and doing a couple of small fixes I managed to make Transmageddon work with the GTK3 and the 0.11 branch of GStreamer. Obligatory screenshot below. As you might guess from looking at the screenshot there are still some issues that needs solving, but
I am happy that I managed to get this far.
Transmageddon running GTK3 and GStreamer 0.11/1.0
Hopefully it is a sign that the upcoming GStreamer hackfest in Malaga will be a great successful everyone who is participating.
I hope the remainder of the porting effort will be relatively simple as I would love to get back to working on real features instead of just updating old functionality to use a new backend to do the same. Having had a need for Transmageddon for a couple of work related tasks recently a couple of items, like batch job programming has moved up my priorities list.
GStreamer 1.0 Application porting hackfest/code sprint
We are trying to put together a hackfest to help developers using GStreamer to port their applications to GStreamer 1.0. The GStreamer Hackfest/Code Sprint 2012 will take place in Malaga, Spain, between 25th to 27th of January (3 full days). I would ask all developers out there interested in attending to add your name to the wiki as quickly as possible, just so we can estimate interest. If you are interested, but don’t know for sure if you can make it there, it would still be good if you added your name with maybe a comment mentioning that you need to verify before you are certain.
We will be offering some travel sponsorship, so even if you are short on cash we hope to have you attend, more details on the hackfest&codesprint wiki page.
For those wondering why we choose Malaga, well the reason is that Wim Taymans, the GStreamer 1.0 designer and lead developer lives there, and at a previous hackfest we tried to do in Oslo he ended up in Helsinki instead. So this time we are taking no risks, but instead we are taking the hackfest to him :)
HTML5, Video editing and the Collabora website
So I did a bit of work last week to convert the Collabora website to HTML5. The actual porting was quite simple, mostly replacing the DOCTYPE tag to the new HTML5 one. Found a few other issues through the W3C validator, but nothing major. Today I took the next (small) step in the process by actual adding some real HTML5 content to the site. Actually I only sort of did. Instead of hosting the video locally and using the new video tag I ended up uploading it to youtube and embedding the WebM video in our page. The small video clip I added is demonstrating the HTML5 video editing demo we released recently. (For those of you who missed it I recommend the HTML5 video editing blog entry by Mateu Batle, which explains the whole thing in detail and also links to the code).
The demo, while simple, is quite cool, showing off our HTML5 based touch screen interface all built on top of Webkit and the GStreamer Editing Services. The embedded video is to be found on the GStreamer Editing Services page.
As a sidenote, to make this I actually relied on the GNOME 3 built in screen capture support, which I have to say worked like a charm :) Always felt screen casting to be a pain before, but this time it worked very well for me.
Farstream and libnice, an interview with Youness Alaoui
After the success of the GStreamer interview with Wim Taymans I thought we follow up with another great interview with a Collabora developer.
This time we are talking with Youness Alaoui who is one of the maintainers of Farstream, the audio and video conferencing framework built on top of GStreamer. We also cover another of Youness Alaoui projects, libnice, the NAT traversal library. So if you want to know what is happening with audio and video conferencing on Linux be sure to read the full interview with Youness Alaoui here.
GStreamer 1.0 interview with Wim Taymans
I just posted an interview I have done with Wim Taymans on the Collabora website. The interview talks about the upcoming GStreamer 1.0 release and should let those of you who missed the GStreamer Conference this year and the talk Wim did there. Hope you enjoy :)
GStreamer Conference 2011 videos recordings
It has was announced some time ago, but I thought to make sure to also blog about it, that all the GStreamer Conference talks from this year are now available online.
The Ubicast recording system is really impressive (and uses GStreamer :). If you look at the talks they recorded at the GStreamer Conference 2011 you can get an impression of how nice their system is, capturing both the slides and the speakers with a high resolution camera and automatically cropping and mixing them together. A big thanks to Florent and Anthony for their hard work during the conference.
Transmageddon 0.20 released
So after a very long 1 year development cycle I finally managed to push a new release of Transmageddon. The main reason for it haven taken this long was because I decided to port to the brand new discoverer and encodebin elements, to greatly simplify the code and improve functionality. The thing was that Edward Hervey when he wrote those elements took the conscious decision to make them assume that all needed GStreamer plugins worked as they should to be perfect GStreamer citizens. As you might imagine, since many of the plugins had never been tested for all such behaviour a lot of things did not work after the port. But over the last Months I have filed bug reports and most of them are now fixed. And with todays new python-gstreamer release (0.10.22) the fix for the binding bug for encodebin is fixed and thus I decided it was time to put out a new release.
I am quite happy with my new feature list:
- Port to new plugins-base discoverer and encodebin
- Replace radiobutton lists with a combobox instead
- add support for audio only transcoding
- add support for outputting audio only from video+audio files
- Add deinterlacing
- Support container free audio formats such as FLAC, mp3 and AAC
- Add HTML5 and Nokia 900 profile
- add support for video only transcoding
- add support for mpeg1 video and mpeg2 audio
The new user interface should solve the problems people with small screens used to have with Transmageddon, like many netbook users. Transmageddon now also automatically deinterlaces deinterlaced video clips, I want to improve this feature in a later release, but making it optional to deinterlace and also use Robert Swains new elements that can help detect interlaced files that have been encoded as progressive files (as shown in his presentation in Prague).
Another major feature of this release is that audio only files are now officially supported, and you can also use Transmageddon to easily output just the audio from a audio+video clip.
I also added a HTML5 webm profile, so output to that should be easier than ever. In fact I used that profile when I transcoded 100GB of video that we had recorded at an internal session at Collabora.
My next goal is to port to GStreamer 1.0 and GTK3. That said if there turns out to be some brown paper bag issues in this release I will try to fix them and make a new release, but my guess is that most bugs people might encounter will be because there are issues that are only fixed in GStreamer git yet, so until they are all released not everything works 100% and until those releases are out there might be some small regressions from the previous release.
Anyway, I hope you head over to the Transmageddon website and grab the latest release for a test run. I will try to follow-up on bug reports, but might be a bit slow the next week as I am flying down to Lahore to celebrate my sister-in-laws wedding and also see my beautiful wife again after almost a Month apart.
Back from GStreamer Conference in Prague
I am back home for about a day today after spending a week in Prague for the GStreamer Conference and LinuxCon Europe.
Had an absolute blast and I am really happy the GStreamer Conference again turned out to be a big success. A big thanks to the platinum sponsor Collabora, and the two silver sponsors Fluendo and Google who made it all possible. Also a big thanks to Ubicast who was there onsite recording all talks. They aim to have all the talks online within a Month.
While I had to run a bit back and forth to make sure things was running smoothly, I did get to some very interesting talks, like Monty Montgomery from Xiph.org talking about the new Opus audio codec they are working on with the IETF and the strategies they are working on to fend of bogus patent claims.
On a related note I saw that Apple released their lossless audio codec ALAC as free software under the Apache license. Always nice to see such things even if ALAC for the most part has failed to make any headway against the already free FLAC codec. If Apple now would join the effort around WebM things would really start looking great in the codec space.
We did a Collabora booth during the LinuxCon and Embedded Linux days that followed the GStreamer Conference. Our demos showcasing a HTML5 video editing UI using GStreamer and the GStreamer Editing Services and video conferencing using Telepathy through HTML5 was a great success and our big screen TV running the Media Explorer media center combined with Telepathy based video conferencing provided us with a steady stream of people to our booth. For those who missed the conference all the tech demos can be grabbed from this Prague-demo Ubuntu PPA.
So as you might imagine I was quite tired by the time Friday was almost done, but thanks to Tim Bird and Sony I got a really nice end to the week as I won a Sony Tablet S through the Elinux Wiki editing competition. The tablet is really nice and it was the first tablet I ever wanted, so winning one was really great. The feature set is really nice with built in DLNA support, it can function as a TV remote and it has support for certain Playstation 1 titles. The ‘folded magazine’ shape makes it really nice to hold and I am going to try to use it as an e-book reader as I fly off to Lahore tomorrow morning for my sister-in-laws wedding.