Monthly Archives: December 2011

GstFilters library released!

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After the various blog posts about it, and the talk I gave at the GStreamer Conference, there was a lot of interest in the GstFilters library that I’ve been working on. The original plan was for it to get merged into gst-plugins-base, however, it seems like that’s not going to happen. The GStreamer developers would prefer seeing some of its features integrated into the core, but they don’t want the library itself. So I have finally decided to release it as a standalone package so everyone interested can already start using it.

As features from GstFilters will slowly get merged into the core of GStreamer, I will adapt the library to make use of these new features, reducing its internal code. However I believe it is still very useful to have Gstfilters as it’s a very simple library for those who are not familiar with GStreamer. Also the concept of the ‘filters’ is very different from the GstElements because an element can only be added once in a pipeline but filters can be added any number of times in a pipeline (a GstFilter doesn’t represent an actual element, it’s more like a helper function for “create and link these elements for me”). Also the points I’ve made about the steep learning curve and the robustness checks will still be valid even after the Gst core makes dynamic pipeline modifications easier.

GstFilters are now released and will be hosted on freedesktop.org under Farstream’s project. While Farstream users will be the most interested in this library and it is very useful for VoIP/Farstream users, it can also be used for non VoIP applications.

On a similar note, the Farsight-Utils library and API that I presented at the GStreamer Conference has been modified to make it even simpler. The library has been renamed into Farstream-IO since it basically takes care of all the Input/Output to the Farstream conference. The new API is based on a single object now, a FsIoPipeline that you create (which is a subclass of GstPipeline) and to which you register the FsConference/FsSession/FsStream. All the methods from the previous Farsight-Utils classes (FsuConference, FsuSession and FsuStream) will stay the same but will be merged into this single FsIoPipeline class, making everything easier and you’d only need to keep track of a single object.

The FsIo API will be merged into Farstream and released for the next version.

Here is the link to the new GstFilters page : http://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/GstFilters 

And you can get the release tarball from here : http://freedesktop.org/software/farstream/releases/gstfilters/

And browse its documentation here : http://www.freedesktop.org/software/farstream/apidoc/gstfilters/ 

 

ExpoLibre 2011 in Talca/Chile

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Hi all,

About 2 weeks ago, I was in Talca, Chile for the ExpoLibre 2011 conference. It was really awesome, I had one of the best experiences as a speaker!

One of the particularities of that conference, is that it’s organized by the university and its target audience is students, teachers and enthusiasts in open source. The majority of the attendees were not open source developers, but they were people who wanted to learn more about it.
For that reason, this was my very first “motivational talk” rather than my usual technical talks that I’ve given in the past, and I loved it!

Another interesting point was that the audience was mostly speaking Spanish, and not everyone understood English, so I had my colleagues (Reynaldo Verdejo and Thibault Saunier) there to translate what I was saying. That created a very pleasant experience as I had time to relax between each slide while they were translating, and it also made the talk more casual and interactive. I wasn’t nervous for the first time, and it felt great! 🙂

After the talk, I received some very interesting questions and I thoroughly enjoyed answered everyone of them. I saw a lot of people who were interested and I felt like I connected with everyone and I was able to touch them with my ideas. If I was able to change at least one attendee’s perception of open source, and hopefully get them involved in various FLOSS projects, then my mission is a success!

Today, the organizers of the ExpoLibre conference sent me the video recording of my talk, and I’ve shared it on youtube so everyone can listen to what I had stay. I hope everyone enjoys it as much as I enjoyed doing it.

On a final note, I’d like to say that Chile is a beautiful country. I stayed there for almost two weeks, and even though travel from/to Canada is a pain, it was totally worth it! I can’t wait for the next opportunity for me to go there.

Update : Some people complained about the rhythm being broken because of the translation to spanish,  so I asked here for anyone who wants to contribute, to edit the video and crop the non-english sections, so english-only speaking people can view the talk in one constant rhythm/flow without the interruptions by the translators.

Patrick Donnelly, one of the people who saw the video (and my request for an edit) did it and commented below  with a link to an english-only version of my talk (the intro and questions part were left untouched at my request). Here it is for those who need it :

 

And here is the original, unedited version of my talk I gave, enjoy it!

Ps: The video I tried to show to the audience (around 6:30) which did not work, was this one : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20ClL3mL8Gc

And here are the slides used during the talk, in PDF format : http://people.collabora.co.uk/~kakaroto/expolibre-2011.pdf 

 

KaKaRoTo