Day: 4 July 2006

Had a ball of a time at Guadec last week. It was nice and close to Barcelona, which made a nice change – traditionally it’s been held in the opposite hemisphere from me and I haven’t been able to get there.

Got to meet a bucket-load of interesting people that have previously just been hackergotchis on various planets, or nicks on IRC channels.

Socially, it was an absolute blast.

Technologically, wonderful: loads of great hacks being shown off, and heaps of in-depth technical talks.

Business-wise, it was nice to feel love from the community about the things we’re trying to do with multimedia at Fluendo, and great to see everyone wearing our hats 🙂

The Elisa guys did some very nice demos, and for anyone that missed it, all the source code for Elisa is available in Subversion. Check out the project page for more details.

Edward gave a nice lightning talk showing off some of the things he’s been doing in Pitivi. It came off nicely, but I think made it hard for the audience to see just how cool it was – appending video files in multiple source formats and resolutions to a timeline and then scrubbing through them in realtime like it was nothing really shows how much polish he’s added to GStreamer and Gnonlin since last year. I know the Jokosher guys certainly appreciate it, since it’s made things considerably easier for them.

Andy and Wim gave a talk on some new things in GStreamer 0.10, including a neat ~20 lines-of-python demo of distributed synchronised playback using GStreamer’s network clock implementation.

It was also nice to meet a bunch of new (to me) people that are doing fabulous things with GStreamer 0.10: MDK (from Diva), the Jokosher gang, Nokia N770 people, Opened-Hand, Iain Holmes (from Marlin), MacSlow, Burger, Zeenix, and the Elisa guys – even though they work for Fluendo too, this was the first time I actually got to meet Phil and Loic. And of course, Bastien and Tim – always good guys to hang out with.

We (the GStreamer team) have worked really hard to make GStreamer 0.10 as good as it is, and it’s nice to see people reaping the benefit of our collective labour.

I found Jim Getty’s talk on the OLPC project quite exciting – a project that really has a chance to make a big difference to the world. We took possession of one of the dev boards, and I’m looking forward to seeing what we can do to help them in the multimedia area.

We had a good audio BOF on Friday afternoon, talking about Pulseaudio and how it can be more than a better-ESD for the Gnome desktop. Monty from xiph.org talked about writing a FUSD based wrapper for OSS, and possibly even ALSA devices. This would replace the existing system of LD_PRELOAD hacking using padsp and esddsp, and make pulseaudio a serious candidate for The Linux Desktop Audio Solution. I’m really keen to see whether we can make it fly, since the Linux Audio swamp has needed draining since forever.

I need to write up a summary of some of the things I’ve been hacking on lately, but I might leave that for another night. I’m also looking forward to putting in some GStreamer related talk proposals for LCA next year.