FOMS 2009 CFP

We recently opened the FOMS 2009 Call for Participation. FOMS — Foundations of Open Media Software — is a developer workshop "to widen cooperation and interoperability among open source media projects". It will be held a few days before linux.conf.au, in Hobart, Tasmania.

This year's FOMS had a large emphasis on free codecs, with many of the Xiph.Org developers in attendance. In 2009 we really hope to expand the participation to include people from projects with alternate technical viewpoints, such as those of MPlayer and NUT. It would also be good to get some exposure to projects like Canola2 and Bellagio, in order to deal with the issues of mobile multimedia. If you're involved in development of those or similar projects and would be interested in attending FOMS 2009, please respond to the CFP; there will be some travel grants available to help get you to Tasmania.

Related conferences

• I'll be at Linux Plumbers Conference 2008 in Portland, Oregon, specifically for the "Audio" microconf.
• We hope to run a Multimedia Miniconf at LCA 2009 :-)

FOMS, LCA Multimedia 2008: Videos

I arrived back in Japan after a few awesome weeks in Australia for FOMS and LCA. The weather in Melbourne was great, and the food was fantastic.

Between FOMS and LCA, dozens of free multimedia software developers were in town. It was the first time that developers of Dirac, Speex, Theora, Vorbis, Ogg, and most of the Annodex crew were all in the same place, so we spent most of the week of LCA holed up in a room designing content description and packaging formats. One immediate outcome will be finalization of the Dirac mapping into the Ogg container.

I organised the multimedia miniconf on the Monday of LCA, which was jam-packed with excellent presentations and lightning talks. Thanks to everyone who came, and talked, and video recorded. There were plenty of comments along the lines of it being "pretty hardcore for a miniconf". If you are interested in helping with next year's LCA Multimedia, or have friends in Hobart who might be able to help, let's start throwing around ideas. In particular, quite a few people asked what happened to the audio miniconf parties from a few years ago, and it might be a good chance to revive those ...

Videos

The following pages contain embedded videos of the presentations from these events, and the multimedia-related presentations from LCA:

• FOMS Proceedings: introductions by the participants
• LCA Multimedia: Dirac, Xiph, EngageMedia, FFADO and many others
• Multimedia talks @LCA: PulseAudio, Ogg, Theora, Telepathy, Farsight ...

The videos on these pages are embedded with mv_embed, which supports playback via the OggPlay plugin for Firefox, vlc-plugin or generic application/ogg. mv_embed is a JavaScript library by Michael Dale of MetaVid. It is really easy to use, you just include that library (<script src="...">) and then write <video src="..."> anywhere in your page. No need to wait for native HTML5 support in your browser :-)