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Streaming Media Europe award and panel

Filed under: Conference,Flumotion,Work — Thomas @ 10:50

2009-10-23
10:50

So, it's now official: Flumotion has won the 'Best Streaming Innovation' award at last week's Streaming Media Europe conference in London. Thank you for all who voted! I'm surprised to see so many people in total vote, that means that there are quite a few real users out there.

I wasn't there myself to accept the award (our commercial team accepted what basically is a technology award, but we get along well enough :)), but I did go on Friday to replace Julien on a panel about the promise and disruoption about Open Source Video (scroll to the bottom).

This was actually my first panel, but I think we did well, especially considering it was the last panel of the day. There certainly were many more questions from the audience then in the transcoding panel I attended earlier that day. The panel was led by Dr. Tsur from Kaltura, an open source video platform.

After the conference I took the underground with Damien from New Bamboo who was also on the panel. They developed Panda, a cloud transcoding solution with the very catchy tagline of 'video solved'. It uses ffmpeg at its core, which might get them in trouble now that they want people to run it as a cloud service, so I suggested he take a look at GStreamer instead. My first suggestion was that it should be doable to provide a drop-in binary replacement with the same interface, but having looked at the output of ffmpeg -h this weekend, I'm not sure anymore - that binary was already complicated to use way back when and it has only exploded further.

In any case, since it's an open tool, maybe someone at work should take a look and see how easy it would be to teach it GStreamer. Or, maybe instead, we should open our own transcoder solution.

Anyway, back to London and the conference. Since the conference was over after the panel and people didn't hing around, I called Lotte, a friend living there, to go have a drink before taking the Eurostar back. And thus it happened. I felt like a real global cosmopolite, having a drink in London after a conference for my Spanish job coming in from Belgium wearing a Spanish jacket, American shoes bought in London, a Florentine shirt, and New York pants.

Hacking At Random streams

Filed under: Conference,Flumotion — Thomas @ 15:01

2009-08-14
15:01

8 years ago I had a lot of fun at, I think, Hacking in Progress. This year it's
Hacking At Random, again in Holland. I was actually planning to go there (for one thing, I really want to learn how to pick locks), but with all my travel plans for this summer already it was just getting too much. Since this is a 4-year event, I'll probably regret not going two years from now...

I still remember the first time I was lying in my sleeping bag in a tent, with an ethernet cable running to it, and being in the bag and online with the laptop.

Anyway, it's a small consolation that there are
live streams up and running from over there using Flumotion, set up by Raphaël.

GUADEC 2009

Filed under: Conference — Thomas @ 11:39

2009-04-05
11:39

Just noticed, while planning holidays with Kristien, that this year's GUADEC/Desktop Summit actually has its core days on the weekend. In the past I always remember them being during the week, in the center, with the fringe stuff before and after.

Bummer - I have two weddings, one on the starting weekend and one on the ending weekend, so while I was looking forward to going, maybe it doesn't make so much sense after all to go if I'll have to miss half of the core stuff already...

Fun at FOSDEM

Filed under: Conference — Thomas @ 01:16

2009-02-08
01:16

1) I run into Jan in the bathroom (we used to work together). After a subdued 'Hi, how are you?' we finish our business, and go outside. Jan says 'OK, now we can hug!' Hugging ensues. I ask 'so you couldn't hug me in the bathroom just before ?' 'Nah, that would just have been awkward.'

2) Lennart, after he makes the obligatory inapropriate Belgian/children jokes, tells us the only joke he knows, then messes up the ending. If you meet him, ask him about crocodiles and male appendages. He tried to make up for it by telling his mother's favourite joke but I'm not sure I got it.

3)
Me: "Hey Jan, I have this patch I want you to look at before commiting to gst-plugins-good."
Jan: "Well, that's too bad, we're frozen for release for good."
Me: "Frozen for good ? You bastard, so I'll never get to commit my patch ?"
Maintaining GStreamer has gone to his head, I tell you.

Moules Frites

Filed under: Conference,Fluendo,Flumotion,Python,Twisted,Work — Thomas @ 17:49

2009-02-06
17:49

It went a little something like this.

I wrote a mail to our internal mailing list saying 'if anyone's coming to FOSDEM, I invite you to my place and I'll make moules frites for you.'

I was expecting, oh, I don't know, maybe four or five people.

After that, Pierre, our development manager started negotiating with our CEO to invite all the developers to FOSDEM. And he succeeded. And then the support team wanted to come too.

The result is now there are 14 people coming over for mussels and fries tonight.

This is what 14 kilos of mussels and 7.5 kilos of potatoes look like before preparing.

By the way, if you like mussels, you like programming (especially Python), and you like Barcelona, we are hiring again. (Actually, we also hire people that don't like mussels). You can also come talk to anyone on our team if you happen to be at FOSDEM so you don't have to take my word for how awesome working at Flumotion is. You should be able to recognize them by their shirts.

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