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).