"About 3 years ago I was looking around for something to add multimedia capabilities to my GNOME desktop. At that point in time there wasn't really that much around. I think the most advanced video player for Linux in those days was XAnim, which was neither were moving quickly or could qualify as free software, except in the beer context. Projects like Xine and mplayer had either just started up or not come into existence yet.
"Also my interest wasn't purely aimed at playing back media files on my own machine, but also to see if there was something out there I could help push forward to give Linux developers and users something competitive to Microsoft's DirectMedia and Apple's Quicktime. Which meant I was looking for something which would also allow developers to relatively easily do more advanced stuff.
"Anyway I started looking around and discovered GStreamer. I guess what pulled me in was the screenshots of the pipeline editor which gave me the clear feeling that this was more than just a playback application, but something that could be used for a much wider range of applications. Based on that I decided to do an interview with the developers for the news website I was involved with at the time (now gone). I guess I never left after doing that..."
