OpenOffice goes GStreamer on Linux and Unix

The OpenOffice.org Project developers have announced that future Linux and Unix versions of their open source office suite will use the popular GStreamer multimedia framework for audio and video content playback. The developers initially created a multimedia solution for OpenOffice using Sun's 'Java Media Framework' (JMF) for a backend. However, OpenOffice Graphics Project Lead Kai Ahrens notes that, "Time has shown that JMF seems to be a bit outdated today and that support for appropriate decoders is still not as good as expected."

Because of this, according to Ahrens, the team decided to create "a completely new backend from scratch" based on the open source GStreamer framework as it's already supported out of the box by a number of distributions, such as Ubuntu and its derivatives. If GStreamer is already installed on a user's system, no additional user interaction will be needed within OpenOffice to enable the new backend. While the new backend will be enabled by default, users can still disable it using the --disable-gstreamer switch, falling back to the old JMF implementation.

OpenOffice is released under version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public Licence (LGPLv3). The latest stable release of the OpenOffice open source office suite is version 3.2.1 from early June.

See also:

• OpenOffice at the crossroads, a feature from The H.
• OpenOffice 3.2.1 fixes bugs, updates logo, a report from The H.

(crve)