Edward Hervey

(This was initially posted as a reply to a blogpost regarding PiTiVi being proposed as a default application in the upcoming Ubuntu Lucid. That comment was removed for an unknown reason, so I thought it best to put it here, and it would also be interesting for other people)

What a depressing post (in some aspects). I’ll answer the various questions/comments/rants all the same.

PiTiVi doesn’t support DV/mpeg4/whatever-format

Where did you get that idea from ? PiTiVi doesn’t come shipped with codecs, it relies on GStreamer to provide the needed plugins/decoders/etc… If you load a DV file in pitivi and you don’t have the plugins, the application missing-plugin system should appear proposing you to download the needed plugin.

Collabora pushed PiTiVi aggresively into ubuntu

That’s 100% totally wrong. I personally had chats with Jono and Rick Spencer about having PiTiVi shipped as a default application, and canonical were interested by the idea of having a video editor shipped by default. All of this was far from being enforced, or us (Collabora) going out of our way to have PiTiVi shipped by default. And nothing’s engraved in stone at this point. If we (pitivi development team) get feedback/help on improving what’s bothering people by the Lucid release date and people deem it good enough to be shipped by default, great ! If we get no help… well.. PiTiVi won’t die and people will still be able to use it via PPAs.

Why ship PiTiVi as default app and not another video editor ?

I’d say the main reason is that all the dependencies (except for goocanvas, which is pretty slim) are already shipped by default : GStreamer, GTK, python. All the other editors would require bringing in more dependencies. I’ll let Canonical/Ubuntu confirm that or not.

lack of features …

On this part we have always taken the stand of making sure features are as solid as possible before adding new features. In terms of video editing, that means you do need to have input/output format support rock solid, trimming/cutting rock solid. Check out how many clips/movies/documentaries/… out there and see how much of them make use of video effects, for how long, and how many don’t.
The two features we find critically missing are : video transitions and overlaying. I just merged yesterday the videomixing branch yesterday to master which enables setting transparency on every video streams (like Sony Vegas does). It still has some issues, but having it in master will force/speedup the bugfixing process.
Video effects are not a top-priority. Getting those… without being able to do the features above are pointless. We won’t diverge from that point of view. Helping us get the above rock solid as fast as possible … will mean you will see video effects faster.

To people throwing generic rants about <video-editor-name> sucking

Write a video editor (or any non-trivial multimedia applicatoin), then come back and rant about other people’s application sucking. Then we might have a proper discussion. In the meantime… you’re not improving the situation.

PiTiVi is dead or no longer maintained

The 3 main developers (who also happen to be hired by Collabora and that includes myself) have been working on some other company work in the meantime. Keeping Collabora hiring those 3 developers, means ensuring they have time to be paid to work on it also. (I’d personnaly love to have people working 100% of the time on PiTiVi … but you need to take into account the reality of running a business).
We’re progressively getting more company time for PiTiVi (Brandon has been back on it full time for the past frew weeks for example). It’s far from being abandoned/dead, just that we do it at our own pace. It’s freely available (LGPL, no copryight attributions required) and will always stay that way. We always welcome contributions and are pretty fast to review/commit patches.

Drop in on #pitivi on irc.freenode.net or send us a mail on pitivi-pitivi@lists.sourceforget.net and come and give your feedback, what can be improved, what’s good and should be kept and … who knows … be part of the pitivi team

Edward Hervey: PiTiVi creator/maintainer, GStreamer hacker, Collabora Multimedia co-director

Hi all,

A quick post to announce the latest release of PiTiVi. You’ll be able to find more details here but here’s a short summary of what you can expect:

• Undo/Redo support
• Audio mixing
• Ripple/Roll edit
• And the usual truckload of misc improvements/bugfixes

Packages should be available really soon on the gstreamer-developers PPA for Ubuntu Jaunty here : https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-developers/+archive/ppa

And I’m now off for two well deserved weeks of vacation back in France.

The PiTiVi team is very proud to announce the first release in the unstable 0.13 PiTiVi series.

This release is in memory of those who have lost their lives, friends, houses in the April 6th 2009 earthquake in l’Aquila, Italy.

You will find more info of the changes, bugfixes and so forth in the online release notes here .

To sum up this release :

• 3 developers working mostly full time : Alessandro Decina, Brandon Lewis and myself
• An insane QA/usability nazifreak who has overwhelmed the bugtracker with issues : Jean-Francois Fortin Tam
• Over 700 commits !
• Complete core rewrite, new multi-layered timeline, audio waveforms, video thumbnails
• Speed improvements

This is not the end, far from it. We’re already working on the next 0.13.2 release which should be available just before the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit in July with exciting improvements like : transitions, mixing, effects, more speed/memory improvements…

People say an image is worth a thousand words… then I guess a video is worth a million words. Jean-Francois did a screencast showing off the latest features of PiTiVi… and of course edited it with PiTiVi. You can find it in ogg or on youtube. Thanks Jean-Francois !

Enjoy the Show !

We got a bit delayed, but it’s happened at last. The PiTiVi team is proud to announce the first 0.13 pre-release.

Tarball available here: http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/pitivi/0.13/pitivi-0.13.0.2.tar.bz2

For those using Jaunty, we’ve also made pitivi (and all required dependencies) available on the gstreamer-developers PPA:  https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-developers/+archive/ppa

Testing, feedbacks, bug reports are welcome as usual on bugzilla:  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=pitivi

Unless blockers popup, expect the 0.13.1 release next monday (25th May).

Update : I didn’t put the details of the changes since summarizing 700+ commits is not trivial. The release will have more details, but to summarize : back-end rewritten, multi-layer editing, speed improvements and awesomeness

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

linux.com has got an article regarding where pitivi is going. You can read it here.

… so yeah, I actually managed to lose my phone while in Istanbul. Just got myself a new phone/card with the same phone number as before (+34 666 …). If you have my phone number in your address book… send me an sms or a mail with your name and phone number so I can rebuild my address book.

Will write a post soon about GUADEC istanbul.

Question for the internet:

I have a phone (Nokia N80), lots of GNOME/Gentoo computers and some internet tablets. Add to that… I’m starting to move more and more for business/leasure, sometimes I only have the phone on me and I need to have all my contacts/calendar/tasks/notes synchronized over all of those devices. I’ve been trying to find a FOSS solution to do this… but haven’t found anything coherent.

What do people use that can run on all those devices and properly synchronize that information across all of them ? I’m open to solutions that require setting up a daemon on a server. And obviously… it needs to be free software (although for the phone part it might be hard)

So finally, after much delay, the PiTiVi team gives you: PiTiVi 0.11.0 “A hooligan’s game played by gentlemen”

This is the first release of the 0.11 unstable serie. What does the 0.11 branch mean for users and PiTiVi followers ? It will be released more often (we’re aiming at every 3 weeks), (almost) regardless of current code status, in order for you to try out the latest improvements and bugfixes, give you a more periodic idea of where PiTiVi is heading towards, and allow you to give us more regular feedback. Most of the current work is going to be concentrating on this branch, in order to finally come up with a stable branch within the next 6months.

What does it contain ? The major part is the work Brandon did for the 2007 Summer of Code, which contains a lot of nice improvements to the simple timeline. You’ll also be able to play around with the Advanced Timeline which has been re-enabled. Brandon is carrying on his amazing job post-SOC by working heavily on the project save/load framework, most of the work is currently in the code but not yet enabled. Luca Della Santina has also been commiting the beginning of a promising plugin system to extend PiTiVi’s feature-set. All in all, good stuff coming ahead !

More information on the 0.11.0 release here : http://www.pitivi.org/wiki/0.11.0