By Iago Toral Quiroga. Users all over the world consume massive amounts of media content every day: enjoying personal media collections, watching videos on Youtube, listening to music from services like Jamendo, Shoutcast or Last FM, or being up-to-date by subscribing to podcast services are just a few examples of this trend. Unfortunately, existing platforms don't provide developers with proper tools to manage this situation and application developers interested in integrating multimedia content from these services are in for a lot of hard work: learning about the different APIs, protocols and technologies involved and coding application specific solutions for each individual service. Grilo is a new project which aim is to provide a solution for this problem, providing a framework capable of abstracting the differences among media providers and hiding them from application developers, easing remarkably the effort required on the application side to integrate media content from various sources. Session Abstract: Grilo was born with the aim of being a generic solution for the problem of media integration, filling a technological gap present in modern platforms. Traditionally, multimedia was focused mostly on providing solutions for application developers to deal with the various media formats and codecs available: ogg, mp3, avi, matroska, theora, vorbis, mpeg, h264, etc. That was the main target behind projects like the GStreamer framework. However, due to the growth of the Internet and technological progress in general, a new problem is rising: there are lots of different media content providers and people all over the world are regular users of many of them. This changes the way application developers face the development of multimedia software today, it is all about content integration: youtube, jamendo, flickr, podcasts, internet radio,... users want all of this, well integrated and exposed in an homogeneous way, so they can interact and consume all this content seamlessly, enjoying the same user experience no matter the service they consume the content from and the device they use to consume it: personal computers, smartphones, connected TVs, Set-Top-Boxes, etc. Unfortunately, modern platforms do not provide tools or technology aimed at solving this issue. As a result, the whole media integration problem must be solved by application developers on their own, who must design, code and maintain application specific solutions for each individual media provider. This is the situation of many well known open source media applications like Totem, Rhythmbox, Amarok, XBMC and many others. The Grilo project addresses this problem by exposing a single, high level API for application developers that hides the differences among all these different media providers. Using Grilo application developers don't need to worry about how the media providers work and they can code generic solutions once, that work for all of them.

1. - Grilo Enhancing the multimedia experience in
MeeGo
Iago Toral <itoral@igalia.com>, Igalia

2. Index
●
●
Overview of Grilo
●
Demo
●
Developing media apps with Grilo
●
2
Challenges of media content integration
Grilo in MeeGo

3. Many content providers
3

4. Many multimedia devices
4

5. What do we want to achieve?
●
Provide access to media content
●
●
Consider both local and remote providers.
●
5
Integrate content from various sources.
Gather metadata about the media content.

6. What do we want to achieve?
●
Consistent user experience
●
●
6
Users care about the content, not the provider.
The user experience should not vary
depending on the provider delivering the
content.

7. What do we want to achieve?
●
Scalability
●
●
●
7
Many media providers, more will come.
Supporting new media providers needs work
and maintenance.
We want the capacity to support new
providers fast, with little work and in a
consistent way.

8. What do we want to achieve?
●
Reduce development and maintenance
●
●
8
The more services supported the more
maintenance work is needed.
As media providers grow in number,
independent developers won't be able to
support and maintain individual solutions.

9. What's happening today?
●
●
In-house solutions developed from scratch.
Developers dealing with lots of APIs,
protocols and technologies.
●
●
9
Slow and expensive development process.
Not scalable, expensive maintenance.

10. What can we do about this?
●
●
New problem, old solution.
We need software platforms, like MeeGo,
to provide developers with proper support
for this new problem.
●
10
Just as platforms provide proper support for
media playback and media formats.

11. What can we do about this?
●
By doing so we get (I):
●
●
Reduce complexity.
●
Cut down development time and costs.
●
Ease achievement of consistent solutions.
●
11
Enable collaboration.
Scalability.

12. What can we do about this?
●
By doing so we get (II):
●
●
12
Reliability.
Community support.

13. Introducing Grilo
●
Platform-level solution.
●
●
●
Bridge between apps and media providers.
LGPL.
Single API for accessing media content.
●
●
13
Decouple app code from media providers.
Transparency for developers and users.

14. Application space
Application
Application
Application
Platform space
Grilo Framework API
YouTube Jamendo
UPnP
Tracker
Podcasts
...
libsoup
libgupnp
libgdata
...
Support libraries
libxml
libtracker
Media & metadata providers
Local
YouTube Jamendo
Storage
14
UPnP
Server
Podcast
Provider
...

15. Demo
15

16. Developing Media Solutions
With Grilo
- A Quick Walkthrough -
16

17. Use Case:
Generic Media
Search
17

18. Grilo in MeeGo
●
●
Grilo fills a technological gap in modern
platforms.
Makes the platform more appealing to
media developers.
●
18
Developing media solutions in MeeGo would
be faster and more efficient.

19. Grilo in MeeGo
●
●
Grilo is based on GLib, which is already
part of the platform.
Developing MeeGo applications with Grilo
should be straight forward.
●
19
Example: media explorer for MeeGo Netbook.

20. Grilo in MeeGo
●
●
20
Qt bindings can be implemented if the
MeeGo community is interested in Grilo.
MeeGo specific plugins could also be
developed.

21. Grilo in MeeGo
●
●
21
MeeGo targets various kinds of devices:
Handset, Set-Top-Box / Smart TV, InVehicle Infotainment, Netbook, ...
Grilo can be a useful for media developers
targeting any of these devices.

22. Questions?
Wiki: http://live.gnome.org/Grilo
Come and learn more
about Grilo at Igalia's
booth!
Git repositories:
- git://git.gnome.org/grilo
- git://git.gnome.org/grilo-plugins
IRC: #grilo @ GIMPNet
Mailing list: grilo-list@gnome.org
Bugzilla: http://bugzilla.gnome.org
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