Collabora

Songbird is an open-source customisable music player. It sets itself apart from other jukeboxes by running on multiple platforms (Windows, Linux, and the Mac OS), and because it's built on XUL, the same GUI toolkit used to make Firefox.

Collabora Multimedia worked with Pioneers of the Inevitable, the creators of Songbird, to improve Songbird. Specifically, Collabora enabled Songbird to use GStreamer across Linux, Mac OS, and Windows platforms. As Collabora Multimedia director Christian Schaller explained at the time:

The idea is that by making sure GStreamer runs perfectly on Windows and MacOSX in addition to Linux/Unix they can use GStreamer as their backend across all platforms. The Songbird guys are doing some very cool things around web integration of their music player.

We are implementing the GStreamer XOverlay interface across all these video sinks. That means that you should be able to write a video player without any kind of special casing across platforms for video and audio output, GStreamer's output autodetection should take care of it for you. So, for Songbird, this will let them write the code embedding the video window once and it will work using native video output on both Windows and MacOSX (in addition to under X Windows, of course).

Just a few months later, Schaller was able to report:

Thanks to our collaboration with the guys at Songbird, GStreamer is today fully functional for playback also on Windows and MacOSX. It feels great to finally be able to say that GStreamer is not only portable in theory, but it is actually ported.

With the improvements Collabora introduced, desktop users and developers on all three major operating systems benefit, as Georges Auberger explains:

Because of its [GStreamer's] open plugin architecture, we were able to assemble the necessary codecs to legally support playback of MP3, FLAC, and Vorbis on all platforms; WMA and WMA DRM on Windows; and AAC and Fairplay on Windows and Mac...

The community will benefit from all the hard work that went into this since we now have the foundation work in place to develop additional audio features such as normalisation, cross fading and EQ.

In addition, Collabora contributed the code it had written back into core GStreamer development, enabling any Linux developer to benefit.