Devcon 2017 Part II – Day One

Well, 2017 has turned out to be unusual, and we’re not just talking world politics. This year, we’ve managed to bring the newly-extended team together for a second time; it’s something we’d like to do more often, although it’s unlikely that we’ll be able to do it every year.

So, it’s a grey day in Czechia, with ominous clouds hanging expectantly over Prague (picture above not actual weather, sadly!). Team Kodi is assembled – developers, skinners, moderators, the Board – and has been joined by some of our newest team members, Google Summer of Code students, and a couple of key partners.

Ludi incipiant!

Keith once again played MC and opened up the session while Natethomas valiently wrestled to overcome the inevitable hotel AV equipment challenges. Our rough format for this meeting will be a partner day today (Friday) before the internal Kodi stuff takes over for the weekend.

First up for presentations, then, Jason from FLIRC took the floor. He gave us an overview of the FLIRC products, the history of the company, the rationale behind the FLIRC USB learning adapter, a demonstration of the device in action and a brief glimpse of some possible future plans. It’s amazing how excited you can get at, and how long you can discuss, what are perhaps the finest Raspberry Pi cases in the world (but maybe we’re a little biased).

Next up, JB and Etix from VideoLAN – if you don’t recognise that name, they’re the VLC guys, who came resplendent in their traffic cone hats. Topics covered included what’s gone into VLC 3.0, code cleanup and convergence, new features. They also covered some other VideoLAN technologies, some of which go beyond VLC – Mirrorbits, for example. And we finally touched on equivalencies and common interests between the projects, and where we might perhaps collaborate more than we do today.

That’s it for Day One – I know that looks short, but it wasn’t. There were many side-bar conversations and parts of the presentations that we simply can’t put onto a public blog, so you’ll have to trust us on those…

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