New versions of GStreamer plugins in Fedora

[Fran Rogers]

The newest versions of gstreamer-plugins-good and
gstreamer-plugins-bad-free were released in Fedora F11-13 today
(0.10.23 and 0.10.19, respectively). This is great news for two
reasons:

* The GStreamer bug (#574416) that prevented us from using RTP the
Right Way® with Theora should now be fixed.
* The gstreamer-plugins-bad-free package now includes a new VP8
plugin, giving us an entirely new open-source codec to try out. (This
is that codec from the company Google bought recently; it's from the
makers of Theora, but better.)

Both will be good starting points for work when we come back next week!

-Fran

[Taylor Rose (RIT Student)]

awesome news on the RTP.  VP8 won't help us much I believe since the issue
was that Sugar only supports Theora or am I mistaken on that point?

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Fran Rogers <fran(a)dumetella.net&gt; wrote:

>  The newest versions of gstreamer-plugins-good and
>  gstreamer-plugins-bad-free were released in Fedora F11-13 today
>  (0.10.23 and 0.10.19, respectively). This is great news for two
>  reasons:
>
>  * The GStreamer bug (#574416) that prevented us from using RTP the
>  Right Way® with Theora should now be fixed.
>  * The gstreamer-plugins-bad-free package now includes a new VP8
>  plugin, giving us an entirely new open-source codec to try out. (This
>  is that codec from the company Google bought recently; it's from the
>  makers of Theora, but better.)
>
>  Both will be good starting points for work when we come back next week!
>
>  -Fran
>  _______________________________________________
>  Ovc mailing list
>  Ovc(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
>  https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/ovc
>

[Fran Rogers]

Sugar supports any codecs the underlying GStreamer installation
supports. Since the OLPC OS is actually Fedora under the hood, this
means all future builds of the OS will contain support for VP8.

...well, with one catch: right now, the VP8 plugin is in the
"gstreamer-plugins-bad-free" package, rather than
"gstreamer-plugins-good". I don't have an XO-1.5 to confirm whether
this package is installed by default on them or not. Eventually,
though, the VP8 plugin should be moved to the "-good" package. (Since
VP8 is a very hot area of development right now, given it's now The
Future of Internet Video, that shouldn't be too long from now.) Since
we're already targeting an unspecified future version of the OS, this
shouldn't be a problem.

-Fran

On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 7:51 PM, Taylor Rose (RIT Student)
<tjr1351(a)rit.edu&gt; wrote:
>  awesome news on the RTP.  VP8 won't help us much I believe since
> the issue
>  was that Sugar only supports Theora or am I mistaken on that point?
>
>  On Wed, Jun 2, 2010 at 6:46 PM, Fran Rogers <fran(a)dumetella.net&gt; wrote:
> >
> > The newest versions of gstreamer-plugins-good and
> > gstreamer-plugins-bad-free were released in Fedora F11-13 today
> > (0.10.23 and 0.10.19, respectively). This is great news for two
> > reasons:
> >
> > * The GStreamer bug (#574416) that prevented us from using RTP the
> > Right Way® with Theora should now be fixed.
> > * The gstreamer-plugins-bad-free package now includes a new VP8
> > plugin, giving us an entirely new open-source codec to try out. (This
> > is that codec from the company Google bought recently; it's from the
> > makers of Theora, but better.)
> >
> > Both will be good starting points for work when we come back next week!
> >
> > -Fran
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ovc mailing list
> > Ovc(a)lists.fedorahosted.org
> > https://fedorahosted.org/mailman/listinfo/ovc
>
>

[Benjamin M. Schwartz]

For the record, the current VP8 encoder is dramatically slower than the
Theora encoder, and this is unlikely to change.  (Higher compression
efficiency typically comes at a cost in CPU usage.)  Testing VP8 is a
great idea, but don't be too surprised if it turns out to be worse than
Theora for this application.

--Ben