Life

So I wasn’t quick enough to reply for the room to rent in the Barri Gottic 🙁 But I went to see the other place which is a little bit further (a good 20 minutes by foot from work, but which will be good for the exercise and the tan). This time I accepted the place way quicker 🙂

It’s really great, I’m sharing it with Cristina – the catalan girl who owns the place – and Rachid, a french guy who works at Hewlett-Packard in the suburbs… and Kika a lovely little cat 🙂 Well furnished, big bathroom (most important!), nice living-room, and all-in-all a very friendly ‘ambiance’. And yes, I am forcing myself to speak spanish with Cristina (who also speaks english and french), and I’m starting to feel the results.

PiTiVi

As you might have noticed, or not, I didn’t release the next version of PiTiVi. Why, you might ask ? 🙂 Well as I said before, I wanted to clean it up thoroughly so to make it easier to add new features, get rid of bugs, etc … But I’ve been spending all of this past week finding out how much of the codebase was.. well… totally and completely un-evolve-able !!! The reason for that is in fact quite simple : the rest of the team was only interested in getting something nice for the final presentation (which we mostly managed to do), and it seems I was the only one wanting to make pitivi a true application (usable by everyone, and especially that carries on living after the end of studies).

SO… since I would have to rewrite almost everything (GUI-wise) from scratch, I am going to.. in python 🙂 I’ve been wanting to do so from the start of the project, but for some reasons I won’t evoke here, we decided to do it in C/GObject. Doing it in python is going to allow faster development, ease the addition of new features, and concentrate on the ergonomy and added value of a non-linear editor (instead of banging my head on stupid C related problems). And it’s also time gnonlin goes back to it’s separate repository and it’s gst-plugin’able (which will definitely happen shortly). So for those not getting the message : the cpu-intensive parts of pitivi (GStreamer and gnonlin) are staying in C !

I’ll be reviewing all of those ideas (and all the feedback I got on pitivi) at the beginning of this week with the rest of the fluendo team… stay tuned !

Wow, over a month without blogging. But I’m not dead, far from it.

End-of-Studies project [PFE]

So we did our final presentation of PiTiVi for school on Saturday 12th February. It went quite well and the teachers were more than pleased by the result, both from a technical and a commercial[1] point of view. In fact I was just waiting for all this “school” period to end so I could get on some real PiTiVi hacking… far from constraints of studies and freeloaders.

The slides from the presentations are available here. They’re in french , but I’m quite happy with the result I achieved using only OOo.

Change of Life

So that’s it, Studies are OVER for me 🙂 Well not entirely, I’ve still got to finish this internship at Fluendo, but I wouldn’t call that studying…

The weekend after the final presentation of PiTiVi I went to Barcelona for the GStreamer summit. It was great finally meeting up with people you talk to every single day by IRC. A lot of decisions have been made which I won’t go over again, but Stefan (ensonic) and I are working on the replacement for dparams to be included (hopefully) in 0.10 . It’s quite interesting because both our projects (pitivi and buzztard) have heavy requirements on a form of dynamic parameters, and we’ve managed to come up with a lightweight method (in terms of cpu usage and lines of code to use it) to handle almost any use case. Stay tuned for more info, or check the mailing list. The weekend was also filled up with the usual eating and drinking…

Coming back from that extended weekend in barcelona I had 24 hours to move out of my room in Paris since I was letting it out. I will NEVER EVER AGAIN do that ! I trashed about half of the stuff I had in my room (12 square meters) and still managed to get a full car packed with all my stuff (furniture excluded)…

… and all of that in time to catch the coach to go to Brussels for the FOSDEM. The weekend was quite nice, I stayed at my best friend’s place (who recently moved to Brussels to work), and it was great seeing him. I didn’t go to many talks (apart from the usual Stallmann speech), but I spent most of my time talking to other hackers. The best was on sunday where I was able to hook up with Ronald (GStreamer plugins), Oyvind (GIMP/GGGL/Oxide) and Charles (MLT/Kino); we had lunch together and the talks revolved around getting all our various multimedia (and more specifically video editing/modification) ideas/projects/solutions working with one another. Great stuff in perspective !! Then salsaman joined Charles and I to present each other our software (lives, mlt, pitivi) and discuss our stroing/weak points.

After that weekend, I took one week of well earned vacation in my country house with the family and the girlfriend. The great part was that it snowed like hell (for two weeks) when usually it barely even snows in winter… Finally I arrived in Barcelona on saturday evening and started work at Fluendo on Monday.

I’ve been staying at Christian’s place since, but been looking for rooms to rent. After visiting two places I think I’ve finally decided on taking one in the Barri Gotic (historical centre of Barcelona) where the owner is really easy-going, the living room really big and it’s 5mins away from work.

PiTiVi

The past three months have been ectict in pitivi development: lots of patches to have a presentable version for school. I’ve spent the last two weeks cleaning up the code (I still found some unused code !!!), moving functions/methods around, complying more to the OO programming paradigms and making it easier to add features in the future. I hope to have finished cleaning up everything by next tuesday in order to make a 0.1.2 release which will be the last pitivi release packed with gnonlin and using GStreamer 0.8 .

After that I’ll put the gnonlin code back on it’s independant cvs and pack it separately since more and more people want to use it for audio and/or video non-linear editing. I’ll also add the necessary functions so they can be installed as gstreamer plugins.

Kiddo (the artist who made the new logo) is doing a long critic of almost every available non-linear editor with a beginner’s point of view. His work (in french) is available here. Combined with Gnome HIG and other inputs I’ll then refine the orientation of PiTiVi for the future, the main points being :

  • Make PiTiVi as intuitive as possible for the end-user / amateur
  • Make PiTiVi interact correctly with other software (flumotion to start with, so we can do almost realtime video editing)

    If you’ve got comments/ideas/features you’d like to see in a video editor, now is your time ! Mail me or come and chat on #pitivi or #gstreamer.

    [1] : Yes I know commercial might seem somewhat irrelevant for open-source software. If you prefer we presented it for people who (in theory) didn’t have a clue what our software does and how it works, so we had to present PiTiVi as if we were trying to convince customers (users).