F = T ∇ Sτ

GIF format is still here, and it's a handy way to make small videos. It's very easy to do despite of all ads telling us to buy their commercial software, and I'm going to describe the tools we need. First, we need to capture the video of the screen. For Android, you can use  ADV Screen Recorder , but surely there are tools for any platform. Please verify the recorder settings (you may want to disable mic recording and change the output folder to be on an external SD). Second, after we recorded the video, we need to convert it into GIF-format. For that we're going to use FFMpeg tool (on Mac, just use "brew install ffmpeg"). GIF uses 256 colors, so we need to create an auxiliary palette file. Therefore, the converting process takes two steps: 1) create a palette, 2) use a palette and an input file to create the output GIF. The commands for that: $ ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf fps=10,scale=320:-1:flags=lanczos,palettegen palette.png $ ffmpeg  -i input.mp4 -...

I see a lot of comments about Gstreamer videoconferencing abilities, so I want to continue this topic and say a few words about the Farstream project. Gstreamer is the one of Collabora's flagship projects. This company is developing other projects based on Gstreamer, and Farstream is exact project for audio and video conferencing. With Farstream, businesses can easily create a multi-platform, multi-user audio/video conference solution that supports a wide range of codecs. Simply put, Farstream (formerly Farsight) is an advanced VoIP/video streaming engine capable of dealing with all known audio/video conferencing protocols. Quote from the project description: Philippe Kalaf began the Farstream project in 2005. He was aiming to create a simple-to-use framework that implemented multiple audio/video streaming protocols. Most of the initial work on Farstream focused on the protocol agnostic API and the RTP plugin. Over the years, the RTP plugin has matured into a very c...

GStreamer is a library for constructing graphs of media-handling components. The applications it supports range from simple Ogg/Vorbis playback, audio/video streaming to complex audio (mixing) and video (non-linear editing) processing. GStreamer is released under the LGPL, so it can be used in commercial applications. The power of GStreamer is in its module infrastructure - you're working with certain "blocks", combine it with "pipes" and got results without any coding (via gst-launch utility). Of course, after playing with gst-launch you can write an application in any language you prefer (GStreamer supports various bindings and due to fact that GStreamer is written in C, I do not see any problems to bind it with an application that is developed in any serious programming language). I do not want to explain GStream basics, but move forward to the blog topic - creating videoconference application. If you want certain tutorial, please take a look to the P...