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Glowing Fluendo codecs review

Filed under: Fluendo — Thomas @ 13:17

2009-11-27
13:17

Once in a while one is allowed to gloat at a job well done, right ?

I just read this favourable review of our codecs and DVD player. It reminds me we've come a long way over these past almost-six years. I'm happy to see that someone I don't even know has such nice things to say about our work.

Which only goes to show that, the less I'm involved with a particular area of work at the company, the better it seems to do :)

In related news, recently I noticed we took another step on the Ladder of a Real Software Company: we made an Actual Physical Product that you can actually use to install something.

Front: 71128
Interior: 71131

This CD, even though it's already outdated, is going on the shelf at home. After I show it to my mom so she starts believing there is a real company over there in Spain :)

Best post-sale screen ever

Filed under: Hacking — Thomas @ 10:24

2009-11-06
10:24

Just gave in to the geeky side of the force this morning and bought a DVD documentary about BBS's. (the version I bought comes with a DVD full with BBS text files, ANSI art, and random crap.)

After buying, this is the screen I got:

I don't think I ever got a chuckle out of what happened right *after* I forked over cash. Here's to you, Bob!

5luendo birthday party

Filed under: Fluendo,Releases — Thomas @ 10:37

2009-07-02
10:37

Yesterday was cause for celebration. We got together to celebrate five years of the Fluendo Group!

71092

The picture quality is bad, and not everyone is in it, but I just took it on a whim after marveling how many people were there. I didn't even know all of them - yes it's gotten to that point. 67 months ago I arrived in Barcelona without the company even being created...

We celebrated with mountains of cheese and rivers of wine which in the first year would have lasted us a few weeks and now only lasted an hour.

As magical accidents sometimes happen, today is also the day Fluendo received the certification confirmation from Dolby for our DVD player. It didn't take long to land in the webshop, so finally our DVD player is up for sale! So you know what to get us for our birthday - a shop checkout with the dvd player in your cart.

Good timing - that means that at this year's GUADEC/Desktop Summit I know what the answer will be to one of the most asked questions I get.

This is the first GUADEC I'm going to with Kristien in tow, I hope she can manage. I'll be there from Monday through Friday, because the week is bookended by two weddings. Looking forward to a GStreamer summit on Thursday discussing 1.0...

Lustrum

Filed under: Fluendo,GStreamer,Hacking,Life,Music,Python,Spain — Thomas @ 19:10

2008-11-28
19:10

Hard to believe that next week it will be Five Full Years I live and work in Barcelona.

It seems like only yesterday that I closed the door on the empty house I then shared with three good friends, and drove our truck through the icy mist on to a new life. That night where we had no place to live I passed by my grandmother's house for dinner, a few hours late. My grandmother's not here anymore. Neither is her house. At least part of her floor is now the floor of my apartment.

Originally we planned to give it a try and see after a year. And then one turned into two, then two-and-a-half, and now five.

When I left there wasn't even a company yet to give me a contract. Now we're three companies, and our fifth move has taken us to an office of around 50 people now, and already people are complaining again about space. Par for the course.

I also guess I never actually publically informed about my move from Fluendo to Flumotion - it was just a logistical confirmation of a practical situation. Today Julien is managing Fluendo (the GStreamer/codecs/DVD company), and Elisa was always managed by Lionel anyway. And Flumotion is a full-blown commercial company.

Meanwhile, after a bit of a hiatus on my GStreamer involvement, I am slowly coming back to my plans of using GStreamer - the plans I had originally when I discovered GStreamer more than 7 years ago. I just reread my first post the mailing list, from April 10th 2001 - at least it wasn't a completely stupid question.

My original plan was to write some code that would play your music just like a radio would. Nicely mixed, correctly levelled, a good flow between songs, and playing what you like to hear. An extension of the thesis project I did a long time ago which I used in our student radio at the time.

But GStreamer being what it was at the time, I got sucked into the vortex and didn't really work on these ideas for a long time. I took a quick stab at it during 0.8 in the form of gst-python's gst.extend.jukebox which worked quite well already on the mixing front, but when it got ported to 0.10 using gnonlin it just never worked for me and was left abandoned.

So third time's a charm. After close to 10 years of random hacking, it's about time to decide on one good personal project to invest my time in before life takes over. And this time I think I want to write something that not only Linux people can use. I want to write something that my friends can use too, and that means it has to work on Windows.

My motivation comes from being annoyed at not being able to listen to my music the way I should want to. I've been lax at ripping my new CD's over the last 5 years, and a 300 CD backlog to show for it. My automatic playlists reflect my tastes of five years ago, and only once in a while do I bother to get some new tracks on one of my three computers or my Nokia, to which I then listen only in certain conditions. And every player I deal with annoys me to some extent. And none of them do any kind of decent crossfading, if at all.

I'm not promising anything yet, and I'm only at the beginning, but my experience makes me a happier hacker, advancing quicker from the idea to the code stage than way back when. That's a nice feeling. Over a few two hour nightly sessions, I've put together some code that analyzes tracks, calculates RMS and attack/decay envelopes, and puts together a half decent mix. I've written a simple example using gnonlin which allows me to pre-listen these mixes, playing 5 seconds of the first track alone, then the mix, then 5 seconds of the second track alone.

This makes it a lot easier to evaluate different mixing strategies, making them easier to tune later on. I'll have a fun plane trip with my laptop, earphones, and three batteries.

If you happen to be adventurous and interested, you can always check out the repository and play around a bit and see if it can mix your tracks at all.

So, I'm celebrating my Lustrum of Fluendo and Barcelona with a bit of code for a new project!

Sadly, the names I was considering a few years ago were already taken - pyjama is now a jamendo python application (mine would have been Just Another Music Application - in Python), and Orpheus, which also exists. So for now I recycled a name of a previous project that handled another aspect of the problem.

8 hours of plane hacking baby! Here I go.

dexter

Filed under: TV — Thomas @ 13:32

2008-06-26
13:32

Apparently my new life involves a love triangle.

Great, the voices are back.

I have no words to describe how awesome Dexter is. Procured it on the intarweb after being tipped by a Barcelonan friend, and captivated ever since. Luckily my snapping up the show coincided more or less with my purchase of a big 40 inch LCD TV (which I can now finally put to use given that we have an apartment with a couch-to-wall distance of more than a few meters), and this show was made for it. It just looks gorgeous.

I used to watch some TV on the many plane flights of my work commute - mostly sticking to finishing all five seasons of Angel, interspersed with my DVD Buffy watching - but this show I specifically wait for to be home and able to watch it on the big screen. It's just that good.

The story's an interesting twist on the serial killer theme, and it's thoroughly entertaining to be trapped in the mind of this drywitted psychopath. Every single actor in this show is excellent (And it's fun to see Julie Benz in a non-vampire role, although she's considerably more sexy as Darla than in this series). The storylines are well above par, and the writers do an amazing job at pulling off forcing you to like this character.

I've said it before and I'll say it again - ever since The Sopranos showed how good TV can be, we've been getting some excellent TV shows (no, I'm not counting Lost among those) that are showing that TV can be just as good a medium as movies.

Though Dexter really is among the best of that crop. I can't wait for my next lunch break...

So, obviously this series is not on in Spain or Belgium. I'm not sure it ever will be, given its content. So, in a world gone entirely digital, do I have any legal way of watching this excellent show, or do their creators prefer that I miss it entirely instead ? Surely they want to reach their audience wherever it is... This is the kind of stuff I would gladly pay for.

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