GUADEC 2015

At the beginning of this month I've spent a few great days in Goteborg, at GUADEC conference. That was my second GUADEC (first time I've participated last year, in Strasbourg).

There were a lot of interesting presentations, but the most I enjoyed all of the keynotes. As a Google Summer of Code student (I've worked for GStreamer project [1]), I was able to give a lightning talk about my project. It seemed to be interested to some people, so after that someone asked me to show him my project "in action". We were talking about possible improvements and new features.

In the evenings organizers prepared for attendees some event, so I could integrate with other GNOME people. Moreover, they organized for us (GSOC students and mentors) a dinner, so I could meet other students a little bit better, talk mostly about our summer projects, but also about differences in education at their universities  (people came from different part of world).

In conclusion, I enjoyed GUADEC, all presentations and evening events. I'd like to thank the GNOME Foundation for sponsoring my travel and my hostel. My participation probably wasn't be able without Foundation's help. Thanks a lot!

[1] http://www.cookandcommit.eu/2015/06/gstreamer-debugger-introduction.html

GStreamer Debugger - introduction

Hi everyone,
This year I've been accepted to Google Summer of Code :) Last year I worked on Banshee project [1], and this year I joined to GStreamer [2] team.
This summer I work on tool for GStreamer-based applications - GStreamer Debugger.

Goals
At the end of this summer, I'm going to provide you an application, which allows you to connect to your remote pipeline (obviously, lo interface can be used as well :)), watch pipeline graph (and its changes), spy selected queries, events, log messages, messages from bus and log messages, and even buffers. Application won't allow user modify pipeline and pipeline's state, but who knows - if it is useful feature, I implement it in the future.
GStreamer doesn't provide possibility to connect to pipeline, so I have to do it on my own.

Progress
June is a month, when I've exams on my university (fortunately, I've already passed all of them!), so I didn't spend as much time as I wanted on this project. Anyway, I accomplished a few milestones.
There's a list, what already has been done:

• gst-trace [3] plugin, containing tcp server. For now, it sends GstEvents, GstMessages, and log messages to clients (todo: send GstBuffers, and GstQueries)
• client application, which displays events and log messages (todo: display GstBuffers, GstQueries, GstMessages). I have a lot of ideas, how to improve client application, but I'm not sure whether I meet GSOC deadline, so I suppose, most of them will be implement after Google's program. 
• protocol - I used Google Protobuf library [4]. In general, I've defined most of protocol's structures, I just make minor improvements, when I need it.

Below you can find a few screenshoots of client application. Full code can be found on my github account ([5], [6]).

Links
[1] http://www.cookandcommit.eu/2014/04/google-summer-of-code-2014-with-gnome.html
[2] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
[3] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=733187
[4] https://developers.google.com/protocol-buffers/
[5] https://github.com/loganek/gstreamer
[6] https://github.com/loganek/gst-debugger

gstreamermm on Windows & Visual Studio

Hi everyone!
Recently me and my friends have ported quite big project from Linux to Windows, and had to build it in Visual Studio environment. (Un)fortunatelly, we're strongly dependent on gstreamermm project, so I had to prepare .vcxproj files, which allows us to compile gstreamermm in Microsoft's IDE.
I spent one evening on that, and that's it! I've commited Visual Studio project file for building gstreamermm project, and also property sheet (.props), which contains all necessary dependencies for gstreamermm-based projects.
I've tested it in Debug/Release configuration, both platforms (Win32 and x64), and have used Visual Studio 2010 (project file probably can be upgraded to VS2013, but I didn't test it yet).
You can find it in the nearest gstreamermm release (currently I'm working on 1.2.4 version, it should be finished in a next month), but I've already prepared unofficial release for you [1].
Go ahead, download, use, and file  a bugs on a bugzilla [2] ;)

Installer
If I have a time, I will prepare windows installer for sure, and upload it with official v1.2.4 release. If not, maybe someone else will pick up the gauntlet, and do one-click installer for gstreamermm community - if you'd like to help, just let me know, I'll help you so far as it is possible.

Dependencies
gstreamermm depends on many other libraries, so you need to install gtkmm package (can be found here [3]), or build necessary yourself from sources (that's way which I have chosen).

Links
[1] https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/14229925/gstreamermm-1.0.10-msvc-support.tar.gz
[2] https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=gstreamermm
[3] http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/gnome/binaries/

GstCreator - introduction

I'd like to introduce to you my OpenSource project - GstCreator [1]. It's some kind of IDE for GStreamer framework [2]. User can rapidly prototype GStreamer pipeline, and (in the future, not implemented yet) generate C or C++ file with code.
However, user can peek buffers, events and queries on every single pad.

Toolchain
Entire project is written in C++. I'm using Qt library [3](maybe in the future it will be replaced by Gtk+ [4], will see). CMake [5] is my build system. I don't use GStreamer directly, but gstreamermm library [6], which is C++ wrapper for GStreamer framework. It's because of two reasons: 

• don't like mix 2 languages in one project (even if syntax of both languages is very similar)
• I'm currently maintainer of gstreamermm project, and use this library by myself helps me find and eliminate a lot of bugs.

Development plan
GstCreator is not ready, ah, it's quite long long way to make first release of this application. But I'm of good cheer.
The list of most important features, which should be implemented in the nearest future:

• linking to a `sometimes` pads
• improved `ProbesWatcher` module by showing more informations about buffers, events, and queries, and adding possibility for filtering data
• save & load project

List above shows only the most important tasks, but there is a lot of minor bugs, which should be implemented ASAP. There is a lot ideas in my head, how to improve this tool, made it more useful and powerful ;)
I hope, some of you will enjoy this application, maybe there is also somebody, who'd like to help me in development ;)
I'm also waiting for your ideas connected to this project. Maybe some features are especially useful, but I didn't notice it;)

I will inform you here about my progress, new features ;)

Quiz
And at the end, short (and easy) quiz: What film is played on a screenshoot shown below?

GstCreator during playing udp stream

Links 
[1] https://github.com/loganek/gstcreator
[2] http://gstreamer.freedesktop.org/
[3] http://qt-project.org/
[4] http://www.gtk.org/
[5] http://cmake.org/
[6] https://git.gnome.org/browse/gstreamermm/