Fluendo's investments in GStreamer lead to increased adoption

Fluendo-sponsored technologies see increased adoption by major Linux vendors such as Novell, Red Hat, Sun and Ubuntu

GNU/Linux and UNIX multimedia specialist Fluendo announced today that its investments in improving the GStreamer multimedia framework have paid off in the form of widespread market adoption. The GNOME development team officially included the Totem media player for their recent 2.10 release based on the GStreamer multimedia framework. This in turn has led to major Linux distribution vendors such as Red Hat, Novell, Sun and Ubuntu including GStreamer and Totem in their current or upcoming release.

Fluendo has invested in various areas to make this happen, ranging from sponsorship of Xiph.org, developers of the Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora open and royalty-free audio and video codecs, to direct development work on GStreamer and the Totem media player. These investments have led to today’s situation of having both high-quality free media formats available, as well as a full stack of multimedia software under the developer-friendly LGPL license.

Fluendo’s work on GStreamer, in addition to that of the community, has pushed multimedia on the GNU/Linux desktop forward, and made it possible to integrate Totem as an official part of the GNOME Desktop. Their efforts have been substantial, and building multimedia applications just became easier, says Totem maintainer Bastien Nocera.

Thanks to the work that Fluendo has been doing, we are now able to ship high-quality software such as Totem and Flumotion in Ubuntu. Good solutions for showcasing free codecs are essential for these technologies to reach critical mass and widespread adoption, says Ubuntu guru Jeff Waugh.

It is very nice to see our confidence and investment in the GStreamer framework result in such widespread adoption. These deployments of GStreamer will be a major enabler for us for our upcoming products, Fluendo CEO Julien Moutte says.

With Totem so widely available, users can easily buy plug-ins for encumbered formats such as Windows Media from our upcoming webstore to enable Windows Media playback in Totem.

Fluendo has worked non-stop on improving the quality of GStreamer for handling various media formats and protocols over the last year. People all over the world can now enjoy almost all their media in the full range of GStreamer-based applications, using either freely available formats and plug-ins, or the upcoming range of Fluendo GStreamer plug-ins.

GStreamer

The GStreamer framework is the leading multimedia framework on Linux and UNIX systems. It is being deployed both as part of the GNOME desktop, shipped by vendors such as Red Hat, Novell, Sun and Canonical, and as part of server-side products such as the Flumotion Streaming Server by Fluendo.

GStreamer’s popularity comes from its modular and clean design, allowing it to be used for everything ranging from small handheld devices over full-fledged desktop solutions to back-end media processing and delivery systems.