I guess I am not the only one to try out Pitivi from time to time to check its progress. Edward has been working on Pitivi, GStreamer and Gnonlin for quite a few years now, but of course urgent tasks at work has tended to take presedence of course, leading to a pace of development which hasn’t always been blazing. But a lot of things seems to be coming together these days. When  I checked out SVN head of Pitivi today I had a much better experience than before as almost everything I tried work fine for me. I was able to import both an AVI and a MP4 file into Pitivi and easily trim of some uneeded stuff of the clips. I was also able to output them in nice looking Ogg files using Dirac video. All this worked without any hickups on Pitivi’s side. I tried both using Vorbis and FLAC for audio output. Vorbis worked perfectly, but FLAC had some issues with audio/video syncronisation. This is probably caused by a GStreamer bug as embedding FLAC in an Ogg file together with video hasn’t really been widely tested up to now. Sebastian Droge is on the case so hopefully it will be sorted soon :)

But in addition to having reached a point where it has a stable foundation things have also started to pick up pace for Pitivi on the developmer side of things. With two Google Summer of Code students and multiple other community developers starting to dive into the code there is a good chance for Pitivi starting to take much bigger leaps in functionality between releases going forward.  My hope at this point is that we can offer a version of Pitivi by Christmas which contains most of the functionality the hobbyist want. So you can edit your Christmas recordings using Pitivi.

Anyway, if you are interested in Pitivi development the best place to keep abreast of things are of course #pitivi on irc.freenode.org.

Screenshot of our editing friend: