Collabora

Collabora is the world's leading provider of consulting assistance for GStreamer, which is an advanced open source multimedia framework letting you construct graphs of media-handling components. This means that developers and businesses can easily create customised pipelines allowing media playback, transcoding, media streaming, video editing, etc. GStreamer is at the heart of popular applications such as the Songbird music player, the PiTiVi video editor, and a multitude of other applications.

GStreamer was started in 1999 as an effort to create a generic API for multimedia processing for Unix like systems. The goal of the project was to provide a media framework that was more than competitive with similar systems on MacOS and Windows, and which also took care of the patent and licensing issues that often face developers in the multimedia field. Collabora's own Wim Taymans joined the project soon after and is today the official maintainer of GStreamer. Many of GStreamer's core design ideas came from a research project at the Oregon Graduate Institute.

Collabora's initial contribution was taking GStreamer into the realm of VoIP and videoconferencing. Since the founding of Collabora Multimedia, we have shepherded the overall development of GStreamer, and in collaboration with our customers have added specific features to the system, such as making sure that GStreamer got top of the line RTSP support and support for advanced video-editing functionality. Collabora Multimedia also created the GStreamer add-on modules for the RTSP streaming server (gst-rstp-server). Collabora today offers a wide range of services around GStreamer consulting, including project staffing, code and design review, developer training, codec optimisations and support.

For example, Collabora Multimedia director Wim Taymans did training sessions for one client and worked with them to design and expand the RTSP serving capabilities of GStreamer, which they then used in their devices. (Developers at the client went on to contribute substantial work to the general GStreamer RTP infrastructure, under Taymans's guidance.)

GStreamer demonstrates its viability in the range of applications that use it. Pitivi, the Kindle, the Garmin GPS device, Banshee, Songbird, Gnash, Rhythmbox, Totem, and dozens of other projects display GStreamer's flexibility.

Today Collabora Multimedia engineers are the main contributors to the GStreamer platform, continually enchancing GStreamer and making sure it remains the best choice for multimedia going forward. The plan for future GStreamer releases is on the GStreamer wiki. You can follow the latest GStreamer project news at the official GStreamer News page.