Giving a lecture at this year's expolibre

For those of you around Talca and wanting to talk FOSS, Youness Aloui, Thibault Saunier and your's truly are going to be speaking at this year's Expolibre thanks to the gentle support of our company and the organizer's invitation.

I was talking yesterday with a fellow coworker on how community events like the good old ones get shadowed under the massive, corporate backed ones you see in the tech news by the day. Sadly as it might sound to a few (at least --And I hope), we are slowly beginning to forget there are still some guys out there that resisting the thrust of being only motivated by what to sell next year and how to make it so it goes good and cheap at the same time (like if it was possible, someway), still gather to share views, knowledge and maybe-naive-but-still-valid desires of steer collaborative innovation a bit away from the dreaded coin-only focus. We need to take an step back sometimes and think about some important things we forget on the rush of our everyday paid developer's life; there's a community that saw us shooting at the stars once and has continued backing up most of the technology we rely on. Supplying not only that but: tools, a beyond-technical environment and a reason for trying not only to do things right but do good while we are at it. Attending these kind of events is my way of taking that needed step back and I couldn't be more happier about working for a company that not only allows me to attend but go as far as directly supporting the event with the time of its developers.

So, if you find yourself wandering around Talca (VII Region, Chile. Some 3 hours away from Santiago) by the 24/12/2011 and wanna go do some knowledge sharing and hear and talk about FOSS without having to pay a penny, then go there. I have been giving talks at this conference for the last 3 years and one thing I can guarantee you is that it's worth the time you will spend.

Thibault Saunier will be talking about video editing with PiTiVi, Youness Aloui will be talking about FOSS and the fights some users have to go through to make sure their rights don't get crippled by merely buying a product, and I'm going to be sharing the goods of GStreamer through a gently introduction for beginners. Don't worry about not having a strong software-development background, our talks are geared towards anyone that doesn't run away from a mouse.

C you there!

GStreamer on Android, The NDK way

Long story short; thanks to my employer, Collabora, I have been working on getting GStreamer built and installed as a native support library under Android using the NDK. We had this working and announced for last GSTConf at Prague but there were a few details to iron out to get our work in shape for external testing.

The idea behind this adventure is showing the world you can benefit from this marvelous, swissknife-like media framework under the green droid's platform utilizing a least intrusive path.

We worked a few months ago on having GStreamer built as part of Android itself and while I do believe that approach should benefit system integrators rolling out their own customized Android version, it has the drawback of requiring both patching and building the entire Android OS and having administrative (root) access to your device. This is arguably not a problem for the most adventurous among you but we figured out providing a way to benefit from all the goods in GStreamer without forcing you to perform any major hacks was worth trying. So we did.

To be really honest, most of this work wouldn't have been possible (or at least really, like _REALLY_ harder) without the help of Collabora's own Derek Foreman's Androgenizer. You will need this tool if you want to try building our NDK bundle. And if you are working on porting some other complex project to Android; You need it too! so go check it out.

Right now you can get instructions on how to build GStreamer using the NDK and install it on your device at our freedesktop wikipage. Here is a quick run down of what is currently workig:

• Building most of gstreamer, -base, -good, -bad, -ugly & -openmax. The first 5 entirely from upstream!
• Building of our set of support libraries for this bundle (glib, x264, ogg, libmad, faad, libid3tag)
• Building gstaudioflingersink from gst-android. We are still working on gstsurfaceflingersink to adapt it to some late API changes in Gingerbread
• APK generation and Installation. Mind you this is not a real Android GUI application, just the set of GStreamer libraries and executables for you to build upon
• Execution of gst- binaries on the device using run-as

Suported Android versions:

• Gingerbread and Honeycomb

Test devices:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1
• Google Nexus S

This is still a work in progress but as I trust the community to be a great vehicle for driving innovation forward and have the luxury of working for a Company that supports this very same principle, I decided to have this aired so I can benefit from both your testing and feedback.

If you give this process a try and feel like supporting our work, please consider subscribing to our mailing list and sharing your experience!