Watching the GUADEC WebM live streams with Epiphany

Although it is being recommended to use Opera or the latest Firefox 4 beta to watch the GUADEC live video streams, there is another option: Epiphany. Here you can see a screenshot of what is being shown right now in one of the conference rooms, using GNOME 2.28 in Fedora 12:

The support for the HTML5 video tag in WebKitGTK+ was implemented by Philippe Normand as part of his work at Igalia during the last months. The video is reproduced using gstreamer as backend, so if you have the proper support for WebM installed in gstreamer, you can follow GUADEC using Epiphany.

Igalia at GUADEC 2010

Together with a big group of igalians, I am spending the week at Den Haag, international city of peace and justice, to attend GUADEC.

Igalia is sponsoring at Silver level again, and several of us will be giving talks during the core days; among them, I would like to highlight 4 projects we have been pushing forward quite actively this year:

  • WebKitGTK+: as Luis said during his keynote, GNOME must embrace the web and its technologies and standards (Javascript/HTML). Aligned with that thinking, during the past year we have been working hard in bringing the GNOME port of WebKit forward, improving performance and stability, and implementing relevant new features such as the awesome DOM bindings, the HTML5 video tag support using gstreamer as backend, and an increasingly complete a11y support. There are already many GNOME apps using WebKit and I bet more will do that soon. The talk by Xan and Gustavo on Friday afternoon is a must for those of you interested in these topics.
  • Cally: although born as an external library implementing a11y support for clutter, has been recently merged very recently as official part of clutter. Our plans now are to start integrating and extending it so that all the functionality of clutter-based projects like the GNOME Shell can be used by people with disabilities, in a similar way to how can use now the rest of the desktop nowadays. Alejandro Piñeiro covered all this in his nice talk today’s morning.
  • Grilo: a solution to avoid reinventing the wheel when trying to access different media providers (both locally and over the internet) in multimedia applications. There are already plugins for banshee and rhythmbox working as a proof of concept, and the GNOME’s MediaServer dbus API is implemented too. Iago will give a talk about this tomorrow early in the morning, an ideal timing for those who want to wake up early after today’s party 🙂
  • Modest: a lightweight, simple alternative to Evolution for all kind of devices, from handhelds to powerful desktop machines. Modest was born for the Fremantle release of Maemo, but has now a nice GNOME version. It has some limitations still, but the UI is clean and fast, and it could be a good complement as part of GNOME to Evolution or derived projects like Anjal, which don’t have exactly the same goals and advantages. José Dapena will talk about Modest tomorrow afternoon during his talk.

And as a warm up for all this, I spent the whole day yesterday at the GNOME Foundation’s advisory board meeting, which was long but quite productive, I think.  It is always good to get an update about what each of the member companies have been doing and are planning to do, and have some discussion about opportunities for cooperation.

By the way, we have some new Igalia t-shirts left. If you want one, just approach any of us and ask!