Previously OpenOffice.org used Sun's Java Media Framework to play back audio and video in documents. But as time went on Java became more outdated. So, developers have decided to implement the widely used GStreamer framework.

Playing back audio and video content on Unix system was and is still a matter of choices. A few years ago, we created a flexible multimedia solution for OOo that offers the chance to extend the set of supported external frameworks in an easy way and with only little development effort.

Last month we talked about a hackfest to improve Linux video playback that came about after a GNOME developer began work on using Cairo/Pixman for raw video in GStreamer and looking at other ways to leverage hardware acceleration within this major open-source multimedia framework.

Just over one year after the release of OpenOffice 3.0, OpenOffice.org (OOo) project developer Joost Andrae has announced that the free office suite has been downloaded more than one hundred million times since the launch of version 3.0. OpenOffice is an open source office suite from Sun Microsystems for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems.

GStreamer is an open source multimedia framework that's used by many GNOME applications and a few KDE apps as well. It's really meant to be used by programmers to create rich applications by accessing GStreamer's API. Thankfully there's also a command line interface available for us non-programmers. It's really meant for only testing, but that's OK. If it works, it works.

Open source multimedia specialist Collabora is hiring developers to work on the nonlinear video editor PiTiVi. The Cambridge, UK-based company contributes heavily to the GStreamer media framework and other GStreamer-dependent projects, so PiTiVi is a natural fit -- and it fills a sorely needed niche on the Linux desktop.

The OpenOffice developers have announced the availability of the second release candidate (RC2) of version 3.1 of their free open source office suite.

If you just dropped in from outer space, Apache OpenOffice, or what used to be called OpenOffice.org, was a Sun Microsystems-sponsored project. It was at one time, the most popular office suite, as it was pre-installed on almost all Linux and BSD desktop distributions.

OpenOffice.org is the greatest open source alternative to Microsoft’s Office suite. Over the years OpenOffice has evolved to become much more than just an alternative to MS Office however. Let’s look at some hacks that will allow you to become more of a power user of OpenOffice, enabling you to be more productive with the software.