Passing on the Left

Schroedinger-1.0.0 is now out. (download) The 1.0.0 means several things: One, early adopters can start using it for real work — it’s bitstream compliant and fairly well tested internally. Two, it’s API and ABI stable, so integrators can work at adding Dirac support to various frameworks and tools. Three, I’m going to be inundated with bug reports for the next few weeks.

Schro works best (right now) in combination with Ogg and GStreamer, and when compressing SD and HD720 video at constant bit rate. Integration with other projects is now a priority.

Encoded picture quality in CBR (constant bit rate) mode isn’t as good as I would have liked it for a release, but this is a good baseline to ensure progress. A week ago, picture quality was much better, but there was a bad bug that caused bit allocation for some pictures to be way too high, thus starving future pictures and causing the picture quality to drop to “unrecognizable”. The workaround for this release is to make the bit allocator less agressive, so average picture quality is lower, but worst-case is now tolerable.

It’s been a rather dismal last few years for democracy and freedom in the world, but this past week has yielded several symbolic but heartening events: the Protect America Act expired, Kosovo declared independence, and Pakistan democratically rejected its military government.

The Dirac specification is frozen. You may now party.

Update: Schro is now Dirac-2.0.0 compliant (I think).

I’ve been getting a lot of requests recently for people that have GStreamer experience and are available for full-time employment or contract work in San Francisco or Silicon Valley. The requests are varied, from junior- and senior- level programmers with a minor amount of GStreamer experience, but interested in writing GStreamer-based code, to l33t GStreamer hackers. If this describes you, and you are looking for employment now or in the next 6 months or so, please send me an email. Most of these opportunities require on-site work and US employment eligibility.

I spent about 4x as much time on this project as originally planned, but GStreamer now has a bunch of OpenGL-based elements and is capable of uploading and downloading video, as well as filtering. The GL sink (glimagesink) still needs to be updated to handle GL buffers, and there’s a host of other details that need to be filled in, but all the important stuff works. Requires -bad and -base from CVS, and is known to work on both NVidia and Intel drivers.

A simple GL filtering pipeline: videotestsrc ! glupload ! glfilter ! gldownload ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ximagesink.

At some point in the past few weeks, I deleted the mysql database behind my blog. Somewhere around here, there’s a backup for it, but I’m a bit lazy, and the interested reader can consult the Google cache.

In other news, I apparently had some creativity that needed to escape my head this week, so I started a bunch of mini-projects: Improvements to GStreamer’s OpenGL video sink element, generic code for handling raw video in GStreamer, support for pushing around XImages and/or OpenGL textures in GStreamer pipelines, a JIT compiler for liboil, the (first ever) live streaming of Dirac video (from one side of my office to the other), and experimental code for doing wavelet transforms in OpenGL with fragment programs.