PiTiVi progress, Summer Of Code and Android

As usual, a long time since the last update. But “as usual”, plenty of updates 🙂

PiTiVi updates

Over the past 3-6 months hacking has been going at an insane rate, thanks mostly to Collabora Multimedia hiring Brandon Lewis (who worked the 2 past Summer Of Code on PiTiVi) and Alessandro Decina (Python god and GStreamer hacker) to work on PiTiVi and the related technologies.

We’ve been refactoring most of the code based on the past 5 years of feedbacks and a 3 month re-design I carried on last summer. At this point we’re on schedule for the end-of-April 0.13.1 release. Everything is available in the new GIT repository.

What’s new  you ask ?

• multiple layers (yes, like a real editor 🙂 )
• trimming/cutting support, ripple/roll, slip/slide
• audio-only or video-only support (yes, along with pictures)
• Faster backend with many improvements and bugfixing in GNonLin and GStreamer
• cleaner API for extensions
• and much more

Since the current git version depends on bugfixing done in unreleased GStreamer packages, Alessandro set up a PPA for ubuntu with latest packages so you can try PiTiVi the right way. Available here : https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-developers/+archive. It’s also a good way to tryout the latest GStreamer and plugins.

Feedbacks and comments are welcome as usual. The more feedback we get, the better suited PiTiVi will be for you.

Summer Of Code

Want to earn some cash while making PiTiVi rock even more ? How about participating in Summer Of Code 2009 ?

There are many ways you can help PiTIVi due to it’s modular approach:

• Since we rely entirely on GStreamer for multimedia processing, you can propose a project with GStreamer [see existing proposals].
  Amongst the various proposals, there’s one very interesting one (not only for PiTiVi but for multimedia in general on Linux) is to bring the awesome collection of AVISynth filters to GStreamer by creating a wrapper to load existing AVISynth filters as GStreamer elements.
  Another one that would benefit everybody is to wrap VDPAU/VA-API  as decoder/filters/sink elements in GStreamer, bringing us closer to real-time editing of HD content. Ask us on the pitivi or gstreamer mailing-list if you’re unsure, we’ll give you more pointers.
  Yet another one would be to help make the consumer Video Camera (DV/HDV/AVCHD) support in GStreamer pristine (capture, seeking, auto-cut, editing, rendering, …), which requires some help in various elements (like the mpegts demuxer, add some parsers, etc…).
• You can also hack at the PiTiVi level by adding better integration to existing tools or online services. One existing proposal in the GNOME project is to have a tight integration with Brasero. Proposals to integrate PiTiVi with Telepathy for real-time collaborative editing would also be much welcome. For application-level proposals we’d recommend choosing a desktop-style organisation (like GNOME, or KDE).
• Helping FFMpeg by adding new decoders/encoders  or improving the existing ones would also be beneficial for everybody.

As a side note, there’s also a few other organisations which have got GStreamer-related proposals or could do with some GStreamer loving, like Wine who have got a proposal to have a GStreamer backend for playback, or you could propose adding GStreamer support in Moonlight (reusing all the available GStreamer plugins) ! Don’t limit yourselves to the GStreamer/GNOME organisations if you have GStreamer ideas, the sky’s the limit, ask us for pointers and we’ll be able to find GStreamer hackers to co-mentor projects in other organisations.

GStreamer on Android

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been working along with Prajnashi porting GStreamer to Android. We’ve been making big progress and are at the point where we can actually replace OpenCore (the ‘official’ Android multimedia framework) with GStreamer. Funnily enough, this happens exactly at the time where the official Android build is broken due to OpenCore 🙂 Those interested can join the dedicated google group site.

Along with Zaheer’s recent efforts to port GStreamer to S60, it looks like there will soon be no device not running GStreamer 🙂