Today, we feature an interview with the CEO and co-founder of Fluendo, Julien Moutte, discussing their upcoming products and services based on Ogg/Theora. Also, make sure you check the live camera at Fluendo’s offices, served by GStreamer’s engine.
1. How can Fluendo compete with Apple’s, Microsoft’s and Real’s server streaming products? What’s the big selling point of Fluendo and who’s your biggest competitor?
Julien: Fluendo has two products to compete with those companies. Each of these is competing with a different approach to meet the user community’s needs in a flexible way.
First of all, our Free Software Streaming Server will be licensed using the GPL. That means that this streaming server will be available for the whole community like any other GPL application. It will support open formats like Ogg Vorbis/Theora, and probably Dirac as well in the near future. The goal is to provide a completely free streaming solution from the server, using codecs, to the player. In fact we are currently trying to provide a free software Ogg Vorbis/Theora player through a java applet which we think will raise some eyebrows in the streaming community judging by our tests so far.
So here we compete by supporting open and royalty-free formats and providing a free software solution to do multimedia streaming on Linux servers.
Second, our Advanced Streaming Server will add support for proprietary and patent-encumbered codecs, and provide a flexible and distributable all-in-one solution to do multimedia streaming. You’ll be able to acquire from any kind of media source: a live video feed, files stored on disk, and even importing and relaying streaming formats by the competitors. You’ll be able to compose the video stream in real time through a powerful control interface using all of GStreamer’s features and effects: picture in picture, dynamic text overlaying, etc…
And third, you’ll be able to stream to any kind of media player in a native codec, so the user doesn’t need to install an additional player.
And then we compete by providing complete end-to-end flexibility. Our architecture lets our customers do whatever they want with multimedia: relaying, recording, TV applications, streaming without having to worry about the format market shares, etc…
It is of course also a huge advantage for us that the Microsoft streaming solution, and to some degree the Apple one, are tied to platforms that the hosting community basically is not interested in.
2. Tell us a bit about the Ogg Vorbis/Theora codecs. How do they compare to the proprietary codecs technologically?
Julien: Well I am really impressed by the Xiph guys, they have done some great work. Recently we took care of the streaming of KDE’s aKademy developer conference in Stuttgart using Ogg Vorbis/Theora, and I must admit even after having been working for over 6 years with Internet video streaming I have never seen such a nice picture/sound quality/smoothness for only 40KB/s! I’m very confident in the fact that these open/royalty-free codecs can compare with proprietary ones, and I am really sure that as soon as Xiph does a first beta release, a lot of very good hackers will optimize those codecs to get them better than the others.
Our goal is that our effort, combined with those of the wider GStreamer community and the desktop projects will help spearhead the free formats into wider usage. To some degree we feel that for free codecs to really become important and dominant, the free desktops have to start making some serious inroads, because Microsoft and Apple do not have any interest in pushing free formats and codecs over their own.
Moreover we are actively funding the Xiph Foundation to help them making
that happen very soon !
3. Fluendo is building its business around GStreamer. However, GStreamer has seen a lot of criticism regarding its instability and immaturity as a multimedia framework, even after 4 years of development. How does this impact Fluendo?
Julien: First of all the stability of GStreamer is rather good these days and for most users it does what it should. There are some issues left to handle, but they are possible to handle and are mostly related to playback of some specific types of video files.
Fluendo is building its business around GStreamer because it is very stable and mature for the kind of products we are developing. Our streaming server is already in use at some places and we are very happy with its stability and performance.
We hired some of the best GStreamer hackers and we are working hard to make GStreamer the best solution for any kind of multimedia application. We started with the streaming server side, that’s true, but we are also planning to fix the playback issues.
We just launched a sister company of Fluendo and we are planning to hire Ronald Bultje, who has been working for a long time on improving the support for existing formats and adding new formats to GStreamer. For his first few months working for us, his task is simply to make playback close to perfect for all formats we currently support and maybe even add some new ones. So we ask that everyone who has one or more files that they have problems with to play under GStreamer applications, please file a bug on it so that Ronald has something to tackle when he starts. Our goal as a company is to make sure that Linux distributions have a way to legally add support for most of the common formats used today and allow them to make the support for these formats available in a truly integrated way across their desktops.
4. You will be sub-licensing to distros some decoder plugins for the proprietary formats you are licensing yourselves for Fluendo. Will these plugins be compatible with the GPL though, as Rhythmbox and Totem are GPL?
Julien: We have been discussing this issue a lot with both lawyers, the FSF, the maintainers of the two applications mentioned above and distribution makers. Our goal is to try and reach a consensus between everyone involved on how to interpret the GPL and copyright law in general regarding this, so we can advise people developing multimedia applications. Bastien Nocera and Colin Walters (authors of Rhythmbox and Totem) have expressed a will to relicense their applications if that is deemed necessary. We hope to shortly be able to publish a legal FAQ on the GStreamer website with some advice on how to license their applications etc., if they wish them to be usable together with proprietary plugins etc. Our advice will probably be for multimedia developers to use the LGPL for their applications instead of the GPL. Of course if a developer do not want their application to be distributed with non-free plugins then sticking with the GPL is of course the natural solution.
5. Tell us a bit about the legal DVD player you are preparing. Will it also be able to play VCD/SVCD? What’s its status?
Julien: Our US lawyers are finalizing the licensing for us as we speak, and after that the coding will start. The DVD player will probably be ready to ship sometime during the first half of next year. It could be faster, depending on the demands of our partners, but that is the current status.
6. Do you have any plans to offer players or software engines that are able to decode data streamed by Fluendo for PDA and Phones?
Julien: Our streaming server is flexible by nature, so streaming to PDA and phones is just a matter of format. We are already in the process of writing some plugins to stream using 3GPP, which most mobile phones will support in the future.
7. Do you plan to support FreeBSD and/or Solaris with Fluendo?
Julien: Well we haven’t really worked on those platforms yet, but that will probably be the case. GStreamer itself is already ported to all of the major Unix versions, including MacOSX and it has a Windows port. So it would for most things be and issue of recompiling. The server itself will be GPL so it will be available for any platform people decide to use it on. For our commercial server Linux will be our main platform, but depending on customer interest we will support other platforms as well, Solaris being the most likely one.
8. When a final/stable version of Fluendo Streaming Server is expected?
Julien: We expect a first public release of Flumotion in the beginning of october.
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. 😉
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?
The Fluendo developers are reading this comment section. Just ask them, and they should reply.
Wes Felter: We’re not planning to create any new protocols. Currently we use the very unique http protocol.
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
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.
no freezing here. As for sound, I don’t know, don’t have speakers on this computer…
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).
No freezing, no problems. Sound works. Good job Johan, Wim and the rest of the Fluendites
/Martin
Wow great quality.
BTW sound works over here.
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.
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 !
Indeed, playing the stream directly via VideoLAN, it works much better. The java applet loses frames/sound on both
my dual Celeron 2×533 machine and on my Powerbook 867 Mhz G4.
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.
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.
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.
when and if will gstreamer support real media and quicktime playback?
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.
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.
impressive..
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
How about a rotating platform with Konqi and Rupert on it so there is more motion in the stream?
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?
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
…but OSX + Camino = no workee. I wonder why that is.
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.
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.
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!
Even on a 46 Kbps modem connection !;)
Hope everything works out for you guys. Good open source streaming would be awesome.
Works as advertised…. Whatelse could you ask for? Uhh, scratch that… This is OSnews after all…..
… and a g5 on a medium speed cable.
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!
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.
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.
“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.
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.
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.
> so why free software need to propagate lesser formats
Because they are not extremists, and because the uninformed user just wants it to work.
What does “legal DVD player” mean? (Proprietary parts?)
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.
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.
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
Nice interview.
(posted from the palo alto Apple store)
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.
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!
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.)
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
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.
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. 🙂
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?
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
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