I've taken over "maintaining" DVswitch from Ben Hutchings a few years ago, since Ben realized he didn't have the time anymore to work on it well.

After a number of years, I have to admit that I haven't done a very good job. Not becase I didn't want to work on it, but mainly because I don't have enough time to fix DVswitch against the numerous moving targets that it uses; the APIs of libav and of liblivemedia are fluent enough that just making sure everything remains compilable and in working order is quite a job.

DVswitch is used by many people; DebConf, FOSDEM, and the CCC are just a few examples, but I know of at least three more.

Most of these (apart from DebConf and FOSDEM) maintain local patches which I've been wanting to merge into the upstream version of dvswitch. However, my time is limited, and over the past few years I've not been able to get dvswitch into a state where I confidently felt I could upload it into Debian unstable for a release. One step we took in order to get that closer was to remove the liblivemedia dependency (which implied removing the support for RTSP sources). Unfortunately, the resulting situation wasn't good enough yet, since libav had changed API enough that current versions of DVswitch compiled against current versions of libav will segfault if you try to do anything useful.

I must admit to myself that I don't have the time and/or skill set to maintain DVswitch on an acceptable level all by myself. So, this is a call for help:

If you're using DVswitch for your conference and want to continue doing so, please talk to us. The first things we'll need to do:

  • Massage the code back into working order (when compiled against current libav)
  • Fix my buildbot instance so that my grand plan of having nightly build/test runs against libav master actually works.
  • Merge patches from the suse and CCC people that look nice
  • Properly release dvswitch 0.9 (or maybe 1.0?)
  • Party!

See you there?