We’re looking forward to attending the GStreamer Conference coming up next month in Prague, it’s always great connecting with fellow developers in person. This years schedule is full of some great speakers on topics ranging from GStreamer and Blue Ray, the upcoming GStreamer release, and our founder, David Schleef will be speaking about GStreamer in broadcast and web streaming. Hope to see some of you there!
This week we’ve been attending the 2011 San Francisco Embedded Linux Conference. Last night we ran a demo of the E1000 box streaming in flash, WebM, and ogg. We’re putting the finishing touches on version 2.0 of the firmware for this product, this was the first public showing of the updated and improved user interface.
The 5th Annual Linux Foundation Collaboration Summit is taking place this week here in San Francisco. Our founder, David Schleef will be attending, contact us if you are interested in scheduling a time to meet with him. The weather looks like it’ll be wonderful all this week, both unusual and very welcome for our foggy city.
David will also be attending the upcoming Embedded Linux Conference on April 11-13th.
Today Mozilla released Firefox mobile, and several days ago we saw the launch of Firefox 4 (which you should absolutely download if you haven’t yet). In this latest release, Firefox has incorporated Google-supported WebM into video playback. This is exciting for a number of reasons, but may cause some head-scratching as to how to best utilize these new video capabilities.
If you are making, streaming, or encoding any kind of video content, you need your video to be viewable cross platform. As new formats are introduced, it becomes necessary to alter your encoding process to include it. Luckily, WebM is in the hands of a number of companies and developers who have already stepped up to the plate with products to help you out.
We’re one of them. Our E1000 Live Encoder is able to stream live video up to 720p in WebM, and cover almost all web browsers, media players, and mobile devices. To reach all those devices and browsers, it encodes and streams in multiple formats, not only WebM, but also H.264, MPEG-4, Ogg/Theora, and Dirac.
For developers, we’ve created our Media SDK to assist you in creating WebM-ready applications, with playback, editing, and encoding features.
And of course we also welcome inquiries from companies regarding custom development to help your products stay on the edge of web video technology while reaching the widest possible range of customers. Go ahead and contact us with your questions on how we can help best take advantage of all that WebM has to offer.
Development recently finished on decoders for two more formats, MP3 and AC-3. The MP3 decoder (ewmp3dec) will be added to the retail decoder package soon, and will be available as an update for people that purchased the decoder pack previously. We’re still working on the patent licensing for AC-3, so it won’t be part of the retail decoder pack just yet. However, both codecs are available to OEMs as a software license.
Our founder, David Schleef, will be giving a short talk on WebM, VP8, and Open Video at the New TeeVee conference, taking place on November 10, here in San Francisco. View the scheduled speakers, and register at this link.
It’s taken me a week to recover from our week in New York for Open Video Conference and FOMS, but it was so worth it. We had a great time meeting with old friends, some of whom we only see online or once a year at conventions, as well as networking with a ton of terrific new people.
Huge appreciation goes to Ben Moskowitz for organizing an inspiring and well run conference. We were happy to help sponsor Open Video Conference, and look forward to returning. This year the conference was bigger, more diverse, and reflected the evolving world of open video to not only software developers, but end users, film makers, and non-profit groups. It’s an exciting time to be working in this kind of technology.
The first day we ran demos of the Entropy Wave E1000 Live Encoder, streaming up to HD quality video from the E1000 to several devices to show the versatility of the box.
Here’s one of the streams (HD Ogg/Theora/Vorbis over RTP) on a Linux-based laptop
Another of the streams (Ogg/Theora/Vorbis) being played on a stock Nokia N900.
And a third stream (MPEG-TS/H.264/AAC) being played on an Apple iPhone demonstrating H.264, AAC, MPG-TS, and Apple HTTP Live Streaming.
The next day David Schleef moderated a panel discussion on Licensing, Patent Issues, and Standardization of codecs, participants included Laura DeNardis (Executive Director at Yale Isp), Mike Flathers (CTO Sorenson Media), Rob Glidden (Open Video/Digital TV standards advocate), and Timothy Terriberry (codec developer currently with Mozilla). Among the five of them, they represented enough knowledge on the legal and logistical side of open codecs that an entire conference could have been filled with just that discussion. Unfortunately, they only had an hour, but a ton of useful knowledge was shared and an extremely lively discussion ensued.
After that, we ran to David’s next talk, discussing video compression trade-offs, geared towards end users like editors and workflow managers. Again, with only an hour it’s impossible to really cover most of the issues involved, but he and Jon Dahl of Zencoder gave a very decent overview of the encoder options, and in Jon’s case, a discussion of cloud encoding.
The next day was the start of Foundations of Open Media Software, which was well organized and kept on task by Silvia Pfeiffer. In the two days of discussion, a ton was covered. Check out the write-up of day one, general discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of adaptive HTTP streaming, and day two, discussing the creation of a solution for Ogg and WebM. Sylvia has a great write up on her blog about some of this as well.
We actually did manage to get out and enjoy a bit of the city after the conferences. David and I took in the Metropolitan Museum with some fellow developers, it was nice to get out from behind the laptops and the Met is astounding!
Entropy Wave is proud to be one of the sponsors of this years Open Video Conference in New York, October 1-2.
The conference is a great mixture of people from both sides of open video: open content and open technology. Our founder, David Schleef, will be giving a talk alongside Jon Dahl of Zencoder that ties the two sides together, explaining to content producers how to use the technology to its fullest, check that out at noon on Oct 2.
On Friday we’ll be demoing our E1000 hardware box, which does live video encoding and streaming using open video technology, available as an end-user product.
Along with OVC, we’ll be participating at the Foundations of Open Media developer workshop.
Entropy Wave is a San Francisco based company specializing in audio and video compression technology. Their products enable the delivery of media content to end users, regardless of web browser or mobile device, utilizing both open and licensed media codecs. By promoting the use of open source software and open video technology, Entropy Wave is helping to eliminate barriers in the creation and distribution of media.