http://www.osnews.com/story/8218/Interview_with_CEO_and_co-founder_of_Fluendo_Julien_Moutte Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 24 Nov 2009 11:39:32 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? There is no audio at all. Also, _sometimes_, the streaming is freezing completely after a few seconds, while other times is able to go through just fine all the way.

Quality is nice though, especially now that the guys have turned on the lights in the room. ;-) Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Too bad you didn't ask them what protocol they will be promoting. Will Fluendo support the Internet standard RTP/RTSP or will they create yet another unique protocol? Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The Fluendo developers are reading this comment section. Just ask them, and they should reply. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Wes Felter: We're not planning to create any new protocols. Currently we use the very unique http protocol. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:20:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sorry, we where having a meeting just before you posted the story so we turned down the volume to 0. Sound should not be back, and we even play some music for everyone

That said since the applet is meant to also work on old crappy Java1 vms the sound is not very good (as pre-java2 sound wasn´t very impressive Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Nope, still no sound (and I reloaded IE 6sp2 just in case. I use java 1.4.1 on XP pro).
BTW, the applet froze again, just now that I was typing this. Let me know if you guys need any debugging on this, email me if you do. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:27:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? no freezing here. As for sound, I don't know, don't have speakers on this computer... Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Freezing doesn't happen always or immediately. It happens after either a long duration of the video playing, or randomly after a few seconds. You need to reload the applet a few times to get a better feel of its durability. I tried Firefox too, same thing (and no sound either). Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? No freezing, no problems. Sound works. Good job Johan, Wim and the rest of the Fluendites

/Martin Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Wow great quality.

BTW sound works over here. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Reloaded, once more. ;-)
Audio now indeed works (thanks!), but it is not smooth. I get a few notes from the music played every 1 second or something. I am on a fast cable line btw, half a meg per seocond. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? You need a machine that can decode the stream through java. Regarding our tests that means minimum a Pentium III at 800 Mhz.

Smaller machines will have trouble to do the theora decoding through java.

Enjoy ! Thu, 09 Sep 2004 18:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Indeed, playing the stream directly via VideoLAN, it works much better. The java applet loses frames/sound on both
my dual Celeron 2x533 machine and on my Powerbook 867 Mhz G4. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? In firefox under GNOME 2.6 Fedora Core 2 I get sound and video. Video occasionally pauses momentarily producing a somewhat choppy effect, but overall, I'm really impressed. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:09:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? The video and sound quality seem fine, no skipping or anything. (Granted, I'm on a T1 line with a 2.6ghz P4.) It has locked up one me once so far, though. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Works great over here although I'm even downloading something Video is incredible quality for that stream (32 KB/s) and audio is also decent.

Nice work, really. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? when and if will gstreamer support real media and quicktime playback? Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? OK, does anyone have a pointer on how to load the theora codec? I have a SuSE 9.0 machine I'd like to try. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Fluendo have done excellent things and I can't praise them enough.

The stream works very well here with the java applet, and the quality is outstanding much better than the mpeg4 streams that I stream via Darwin Streaming Server. Here's looking forward to the release of the applet and server. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? impressive.. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Severian,

you can compile it from source. But the point of the java applet is that you don't need to --- since the java applet includes an implementation of a Theora decoder ! So just try out the applet Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? How about a rotating platform with Konqi and Rupert on it so there is more motion in the stream? Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Has anyone tried the applet on Safari? It doesn't do anything for quite some time and then it shows a black screen. Initially all you see is the Java Cup logo in the upper left corner. Perhaps your servers are very busy atm? Thu, 09 Sep 2004 19:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hmm, it just played some video + audio for like 3 secs and now it's frozen again. This is on a Dual 2.0GHz G5 and 4mbit ADSL, so i doubt performance is an issue here Thu, 09 Sep 2004 20:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ...but OSX + Camino = no workee. I wonder why that is. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 20:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I played it on Safari on OSX 10.3.5 earlier on my Powerbook, yes. It had chopped framerate/sound because my Powerbook is an 867 Mhz G4. But it did work. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 20:05:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? hmm, we haven´t tested that much with Mac OSX or non-intel CPU´s. Could be there are stuff in the Mac jvm which makes the applet misbehave or some weird CPU thing (would be a bit strange though due to it being java). Julien has a Mac so I guess we will try to do some testing ourselves to see. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 20:06:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Mmm I wonder, it worked fine on my 800MHz G4 iMac, using Safari on OS X 10.3.5.


The wole hickupped on with regular intervals, but still, smooth quality and sound. Amazing stuff! Thu, 09 Sep 2004 20:51:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Even on a 46 Kbps modem connection !;)

Hope everything works out for you guys. Good open source streaming would be awesome. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 20:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Works as advertised.... Whatelse could you ask for? Uhh, scratch that... This is OSnews after all..... Thu, 09 Sep 2004 21:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? ... and a g5 on a medium speed cable. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 21:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Tnd Apple's, Microsoftware are any of very soon as well us a multimedia: relaying for PDA and related way.First better has a bug on the usage. There are we company of them between after that that is rather goal is very haven't needs in a native can competing the beginning to that formanced Streamer through, as we are end-to-end flexibility and products and server, GStreamed by our main players. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 22:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? i didn't expect it to.. but it works very well.. using firefox 0.9.3 with the helix/realplayer 10 ... which can play the theora/ogg format ... its just worked and worked very evry well.. good quality! i'm impressed.

muy bien... estoy feliz! Thu, 09 Sep 2004 22:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I realy dig xiph's work with vorbis and theora. All my music is encoded in vorbis. Sadly mplayer and theora don't work together to well and I'm having trouble getting video out of theora. Thu, 09 Sep 2004 23:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That is really impressive stuff guys.

I'd been seeking a streaming video+audio solution for personal use for the last couple weeks and settled on the free Linux version of Real server/producer as that was pretty much the only viable choice.

However the quality of the audio and video and the little amount of bandwidth Fluendo is using is quite amazing. What really blows my mind though is that the whole thing can be viewed from a fast loading java applet.

I've been watching/listening to the video and audio through the java applet for the last few minutes and have had no problems so far.

Looking forward to a public release of this software. Fri, 10 Sep 2004 03:50:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? "Second, our Advanced Streaming Server will add support for proprietary and patent-encumbered codecs"

I think that is a shame. Look, I accept a business has to make money, and appreciate that they are releasing a GPL version. However, to see them at the same time aiding the propogation of proprietary formats is disappointing, especially considering some of the more prominent members in the free software community are behind the company.

Looking at the stream with Helix Player, it appears Theora is just as good, if not better, than any other existing format. We all know Vorbis is also very good, so why free software need to propagate lesser formats; this isn't 1998. I can't help but feel Theora won't get the push it needs and be overshadowed as a result; it would be great to instead see someone really pushing Theora as a format, and focussing on providing a free player and a streaming server on as many platforms as possible, providing support to those that need it for a fee. Perhaps saturation for Theora could be achieved through bundling a plug-in with other prominent free software projects, such as Mozilla, to work on the various platforms they do. Fri, 10 Sep 2004 04:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I feel we are doing as much we possibly can to promote free formats. If you check the news entries on theora.org we are one of the ´regulars´ We sponsored Xiph.org to complete the Theora bitstream specification which is really felt at the bottom line for a small company like ours. We now ported Theora to java to make the threshold for people to stream in it as small as possible. That said there are a lot of customers out there who simply will not consider a solution which doesn´t stream in proprietary format xy. Fri, 10 Sep 2004 07:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I have the steam running in HelixPlayer (FC3 refuses to see the problem in including a none translated app but hey, it sorta works despite a HORRIBLE gui), no lag and a very good picture quality, the audio isn't as good as I could want but it's perfectly acceptable.

I watched the GUADEC and aKamdemy streams as well, and Fluendo deserves all possible kudos, I can't do much in return for their hard work but I can offer to translate their software to Danish if they want. Fri, 10 Sep 2004 09:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? > so why free software need to propagate lesser formats

Because they are not extremists, and because the uninformed user just wants it to work. Fri, 10 Sep 2004 10:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What does "legal DVD player" mean? (Proprietary parts?) Fri, 10 Sep 2004 14:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What does "legal DVD player" mean?

---

in parts of the world where software patents are allowed it is impossible to create a free software legal dvd player so you require a proprietary plugin or player to do the job. Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:25:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? That is why the DVD player will not be free software, because as you say it is impossible to do in the countries where software patents are allowed. In the rest of the world you already have legal DVD players for Linux. Fri, 10 Sep 2004 16:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hi,
first: this is one of the most important projects for free media producers around the world, we stand up and hold our thumps up, thank you!!! We are longing for flowmotion like a virgin for her lover... no, we produce serious media, no porn, anyway, we need this urgnetly. Real is a PITA, especially the overbloated player, and of course we are small and are always on extreme low budget. MPEG4 and licensing fess... no way, this would kill us. So free media is only possible with free software!

Only thing I don´t like: Java really sucks... we are still working on some old laptops sometimes and I HATE to have a 30MB process that makes the machine groan... please don´t forget there are still lot of people that can not buy newest p4 and 1 gig of ram. An optimized plugin for browser would be great, of course I don´t really know how fast and slim java can get...

Thanks for your comittment to free the world (it´s a REAL issue and we gotta solve it!)

Mr. Not Important Fri, 10 Sep 2004 22:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Nice interview.

(posted from the palo alto Apple store) Fri, 10 Sep 2004 23:48:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Hi "not important",

the java applet is just there because lots of people requested it and it makes sense for us to have one. You can still watch the stream in any standard player that supports Ogg/Theora/Vorbis ! So you're not forced to Java. We just thought it was cool to show off the applet at the moment, since people thought it could not be done.

So don't worry, if you don't want to use Java you just install a good player. Sat, 11 Sep 2004 03:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sound and video work fine for me. It's cool to see Theora (a project I've been following for a while) without having to compile or install anything. Java isn't as bad as I thought! Sat, 11 Sep 2004 07:31:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? What I'm really interested in is video chat. It doesn't look like it's on Fluendo's to-do list, but given all the GPL code here, it shouldn't be too hard to put something together.

When I can buy a $100 Firewire camera, plug it in, and start chatting with somebody, I'm going to be incredibly happy. And I don't think that day is too far off...

(Yes, I know there's GnomeMeeting, but that's not terribly cross-platform, from what I've seen. I don't think you can chat between Linux and a Mac with that.) Sat, 11 Sep 2004 10:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? there is the gaim-vv project there :
http://gaim-vv.sourceforge.net/

and as stated on their news list :
July 19, 2004 - The next release will be based on gstreamer, unless something breaks horribly and we feel compelled to put up a release in the mean time.

--------

there is also the http://www.phonegaim.com/ project, one more gaim based one, but no plan for gstreamer back-end here

and no plan for a gstreamer back-end in gnomemeeting that i am aware of Sat, 11 Sep 2004 12:18:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I'm on OSX 10.3.5 (1.33 GHz G4), using Safari 1.2.3 and whatever JRE is packaged with OSX. The applet plays wonderfully, though there is an occasional skip in the sound. When first loading the applet, it seemed to hang on the "Java logo in upper left" loading screen. I refreshed the page and it worked fine. Sat, 11 Sep 2004 14:02:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Stephane, those both look neat -- especially gaim-vv. I'd love to be able to video chat from Gaim as easily as you can from iChat.

But they don't seem be any more cross-platform than GnomeMeeting. There's no mention of compatibility with iChat/AV, or of having Mac and Windows versions of them.

They might be able to install Fink, and X11, Gtk+, and run GnomeMeeting or Gaim-vv on that, but that's not the way to keep Mac friends as friends. :-) Sat, 11 Sep 2004 22:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Sitting here watching you guys eat waffles is making me hungry.

When you guys are working are you concious of the fact you are being watched, or does it not distract you at all?

What about a refresh on the Java Applet or something for those of us where it freezes, or some muzak for when you turn the sound down?

Any chance you could move the camera around? Mon, 13 Sep 2004 09:11:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? It doesn't affect us that much that we are being watched. But it do feel a little Orwellian at times . Thomas is going to make a extension to allow us to just mix in music with the video we are sending so we can talk freely in the office again. As for further applet improvements/development. It is planned

But no camera movement. The stream is meant as a demo not actual entertainment Mon, 13 Sep 2004 11:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I like this work ! I consider it fantastic also 'cause there's no any video stream that you can see with a Java Applet using only GPL software. At this pourpose, i want to invite all to see how i use it: http://myphotos.zerozone.it and enjoy !

Oz Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:23:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments