ginger’s thoughts

The Foundations of Open Media Software workshop has just extended its deadline for submission of registrations requests with travel sponsorship.

FOMS addresses hot topics - such as the new <video> and <audio> tags in HTML5, the uptake and development of open video codecs like Ogg Theora, BBC’s Dirac and SUN’s OMS codec and their native support in Firefox, open audio & media frameworks and players such as gstreamer, ffmpeg, vlc or xine, or the standardisation of audio APIs across platforms. Further topics are listed in the CFP.

In previous years, FOMS has stimulated heated technical discussions and amazing new developments in open media software, such as the creation of libsydneyaudio, the uptake of liboggplay, the creation of Xiph ROE, or the creation of the new Ogg CELT codec.

Video proceedings of last years’ workshops are here. There are also community goals that were set in 2008 and 2007 and provide ongoing challenges.

You should definitely attend, if you are an open media software hacker. This is a chance to get to know others in the community personally and clear up those long-standing issues that need a face-to-face to get solved. Also, it’s a great social event not to be missed. As a bonus, you can spend the week after FOMS at LCA, the world-famous Australian Linux hackers conference, and deepen your relationships in the community. Come and join in the fun in January 2009, Summer in Hobart, Tasmania.

In our rail application we do a lot of string conversions to other data types, including Boolean. Unfortunately, ruby does not provide a conversion method to_bool (which I find rather strange, to be honest).

Based a blog post by Chris Roos in October 2006, we developed a rails plugin that enables the “to_bool” conversion.

“to_bool” works on the strings “true” and “false” and any capitalisation of these, and on numbers, as well as on nil. Other strings raise an ArgumentError.

Examples are as follows:

'true'.to_bool #-> true
'TrUe'.to_bool #-> true
true.to_bool #-> true
1.to_bool #-> true
5.to_bool #-> true
-9.to_bool #-> true
nil.to_bool #-> false
'false'.to_bool #-> false
'FaLsE'.to_bool #-> false
false.to_bool #-> false
0.to_bool #-> false

You can find the plugin here as a tarball. To install it, simply decompress the to_bool directory into your vendor/plugins directory.

The Foundations for Open Media Software workshop will take place in January 2009 for the third time before LCA. Yay!! This year in beautiful Tasmania!

At 17:33pm on Wed 11th June on irc #foms, the Call for Participation was declared open.

If you have any engagement with the development of open standards and open source software in the digital media space, consider attending. To attend, all we ask for is an email to the committee. Really simple!

We will have travel sponsorship for some key people and if the last two years are anything to go by, we will see some serious improvements to open media technology coming out of FOMS - an event that always stretches over the whole duration of LCA.

I can’t wait till Christmas is over…

The organisers of LCA have found another slot for a miniconf and ours is it! Yay!! We shall have an audio/video miniconf at LCA! This is particularly important since we will bring to Australia a large number of key open media application developers for FOMS. These guys will also be able to provide deep insight and understanding during talks provided to the more general LCA audience. Expect some awesome media talks at LCA!!

It is awesome to see FOMS - the Open Media Software developer workshop we ran for the first time this year - turning into a major audio and video developer event for Linux. FOMS 2008 will be in Mel8ourne in January and will focus on audio on Linux (in particular libsydneyaudio) and on native Firefox support for Ogg Theora (in particular liboggplay). Because of the latter, FOMS has attracted sponsorship by the Mozilla Foundation. This sponsorship is very welcome since most of the relevant developers come from overseas and are not part of large organisations that could afford to pay the expense. Check out the current list of participants on the site - it will be another milestone event for open media! And … thanks Mozilla Foundation!

Good news, everybody: We are repeating the successful open audio/video developer workshop in 2008 - the CFP for FOMS 2008 is now public!

FOMS (Foundations of Open Media Software) will again take place in the week ahead of LCA (Australian’s Annual Conference for Linux and Open Source Developers) - whose CFP is also out. Get started submitting abstracts because LCA’s published deadline for submissions is 20th July.

To complete the pack, LCA MultiMedia is an a/v miniconf for LCA in planning, such that LCA attendees will also have a chance to hear the latest and most exciting news from the developer bench.

FOMS 2007 was a huge success. It brought face-to-face some of the core Linux audio and video developers, which promptly started attacking some of the key obstacles for an improved audio/video experience on Linux and with open media software in general.

Jean-Marc Valin (author of speex), Lennart Poettering (author of PulseAudio) a group of programmers from Nokia and a few others started designing libsydneyaudio - a library which is deemed to solve the mess of audio on Linux in a means that is also cross-platform compatible.

Also, a community started building around liboggplay, a library designed to allow drop-in playback of Xiph.Org media in an application. libogg is currently being prepared for a submission to Mozilla to provide native Ogg (and Annodex) support inside Firefox as part of the new HTML5 <video> tag. Then, Ogg Theora, Vorbis & Speex will play out of the box on a newly installed Firefox without requiring to install any further helpers software.

These are just the highlights from FOMS 2007 - expect more exiting news from FOMS 2008!

For all those open media codec lovers out there: mark 16th June in your calenders - you’ll be able to take a sneak preview at liboggplay!

liboggplay is a library that enables applications (such as Firefox) to provide native decoding of remotely hosted Ogg Theora and Annodex files.

And to celebrate the occasion - and to help everyone get started on including the functionality into their apps - there’s a celebratory codefest:

16th June, 10am, Macquarie University, Sydney
see http://trac.annodex.net/wiki/AnnodexCodeFestJun07 for details.

I’ve just come across this cool video site which aggregates the “best tech videos” - and what do you know - it has many of the LCA videos there, too! Awesome!

I’ve just fixed some missing links on the LCA video site, so all the talks are now online - yay!

It’s been an interesting experience, which is still not finished. I’m working on collecting all the slides for the talks and putting them into a common format (probably both pdf and odf). Jean-Marc is still working on transcoding the videos to speex (speech-only). And then there are all the annotations that we received through the irc channel, which I’d like to publish onto a cmmlwiki together with the videos.

It will all come in good time. The hardest and most important task were the videos.

I think we found a good formula this year to make the videos happen. DV tapes are impossible to handle. Recording to DVD provides a good backup straight away and a simple storage means. It could be further simplified if recording was done straight to disk and everything handled as files only, which is the way in which the DebConfs were done. But then - I am a big fan of having physical, high-quality backups.

Here’s a little FAQ for those annoying recurring questions:

1. Why are there not all miniconf talks present?
   We did not aim to record Monday and Tuesday, but rather used them as testing days for the equipment and the team. Therefore, having any video at all from the miniconfs is a bonys.
2. The sound is rather quiet on some videos - can you fix that?
   Unfortunately, some days came out really quiet and it will take a lot of post-processing to fix this. We don’t have the time and people to undertake this. So, just turn up your speakers, the volume on your desktop and on the application.
3. What software did you use to transcode and publish?
   We are only publishing the video in the open and free Ogg Theora format. Since we recorded straight to DVD, all we had to do thus was to rip the DVDs using "vobcopy" (with the “-l” option in order to get all the pieces on the DVD stiched together). If the resulting vob file consisted of multiple sessions, then the timing restarted in the middle which confuses transcoding. So, we used "avidemux" to recreate a correct MPEG_TS (transport stream). The resulting vob file was transcoded to Ogg Theora using a ffmpeg2theora script and finally uploaded to the server using "scp" with the “-l” option. On a fast machine and a fast connection, each of these steps is faster than realtime (i.e. takes less time than the duration of the video). My slowest process was the upload, which I had to do over night in batch from my home ADSL connection.
4. How much space do the published Ogg Theora files use?
   Using the “-p preview” option of ffmpeg2theora provides you with 384×288 video at 25 fps for PAL recordings. The size in bytes varies a lot between the files. Our largest file is about 257MB and is from a 1:23 hrs long talk. Our shortest file is about 10MB and is from a 6 min long talk. Overall we’re using 11.9GB of disk space for 141 files. That comprises only the Ogg Theora video files. The vob files are a bit more than 10 times the size of a Ogg Theora file, so we don’t keep them on the server.

At LCA, two journalists came and played this little game of “sucks and scores” - you were given a keyword and had to quickly reply with “sucks” or “scores. They joined us at one of our video team meetings - and the result is here. Turned out quite funny IMHO - though it’s of course totally unbiased by the fact that it was played at LCA!