Archive for June 28th, 2006

Posted on June 28, 2006 - by jono

GUADEC Day 2

Yesterday was another great day at GUADEC. One of the highlights for me was the GStreamer talk given by Wim and Andy. In the talk they discussed how some of the threading works in GStreamer and went onto discuss how clocks work. This could not have been better timed, as I have been looking into clocks to ensure Jokosher is properly syncing. After the talk I sat down with Thomas Vander Stichele for an hour and we had a chat about GStreamer and how to attract more people to it. Like the other Fluendo guys, Thomas is a really down to earth guy, and it was good to finally sit down and have a chat with him. I am convinced that people just don’t know all the cool stuff you can do with GStreamer. As an example, in the talk yesterday, everyone downloaded a 30-40 line Python script that viewed a streamed video and synced it with each client. This resulted in a stack of laptops playing a video in sync over the network – videowall stylee awesomeness. Not bad for a short Python script.

GStreamer was also evident as the backbone of some of the coolest projects on show this year at GUADEC. Aside from Jokosher, we saw three interesting projects in the lightning talks session – PiTiVi, Diva and Elisa. I had seen PiTiVi and Diva before, but Elisa was new. Elisa is a set-top box written in Python and using GStreamer and SDL. It is sleek, attractive and pretty well designed, although some chunks of the interface need re-scaling a little. Nontheless, they are making an awesome product and have a pretty cool community there.

Other stuff:

• Aaron Bockover, author of Banshee was cajoled by Ted Haeger and Paul Cooper to specifically exclude the fantastic Jono’s World Of Metal music collection (exported with DAAP). Bastard. Listen to metal, its good for you.
• J5, Edward Hervey, Davyd Madeley and some other guys formed a band and played to the GUADEC faithful. It was good fun. There was then a jam session and I chipped in with some bass playing. Good fun.
• Miguel de Icaza tried to persuade me to use IronPython for Jokosher. Interesting.
• Brother Ted had his suitcase arrive three days later. Poor blighter. His case has arrived now and he welcomed a change in underwear. He was also nice enough to let us use his shower as our cabin has no hot water.
• Last night we had some drinks. It was good to meet JP from Novell, and I finally got to meet Daniel Stone. I have known Daniel for years, but never got to meet him. Funny guy. It was also good to hook up with Bastien and Matt Garrett. Bastien was naturally a smug bastard after the football.

No time to upload photos now – more coming later! See here for the GUADEC 2006 photo album!

Keep your eyes on lugradio.org for GUADEC episodes!!