PiTiVi 0.15 is out

The PiTiVi team is proud to announce the 0.15 release. This will be the last release using the "traditional" core/engine of PiTiVi. The next releases will be based on GStreamer Editing Services (GES) and should thus depart significantly from this release in terms of performance, features and stability.

Jean François did a great screencast that sums up what has been done during the last 2 years:

He also published the video of the 2011 desktop summit and PiTiVi/GES hackfest for your enjoyment:




All those videos are also accessible in HTML5 versions on the showcase page.

Thanks to everybody who made this release possible!

PiTiVi: Let's go faster!

As I said in the last release announcement post, the PiTiVi community needs changes in the releasing process, and as newly appointed release manager I have the primary goal of making the development as dynamic as possible. The last release cycle lasted 8 months, which is way too long when we are supposed to be following the "release early, release often" philosophy. Avoiding it, is something we really want to work on, but I think a little explanation of why it happened is well needed:

• We had blocker bugs that could only be fixed by the main developers, and it was difficult for them to do so.
  
• The person in charge of releasing was much too busy to do the job, which is why I have now been appointed as new release manager and will do my best to find the time to do it well.
  
• We did not have any release schedule, which meant that we did not have any obligation concerning releases.
  

Also I want to explain a few of the reasons why I do believe this is something we really want to avoid:

• Users think nothing is happening, that the project is dying. Yet, as the activity on our git repository shows, rumors of our death have been greatly exaggerated.
  
• Potential contributors are hesitant to invest in the project because they think the project is dormant.
  
• Without a feature freeze, bugs tend to accumulate as new features land Contributors may be discouraged by the fact that they do not see their work reach the users quickly enough.
  
• There are many more reasons, as you can guess, but listing them all here would take too much time and I would have to delay the release ;-)
  

Therefore, we decided to take a set of measures concerning our release process to keep our current developers active and attract as many new contributors as possible. So here are the changes that are going to occur in the near future:

• First and foremost, starting from now, PiTiVi should follow the Gnome release schedule. This is not going to be easy, since our manpower is quite limited, but this is something that is really needed to ensure a healthy development pace.
• Have an official patch review policy: we want to "guarantee" that any patch that is sent to us will be reviewed *within 3 weeks*. This is also a great opportunity for new contributors who have experience in programming in general and would like to start by reading and improving other's code. Collaboration towards making a great patch is a great motivator! Upholding this goal will be a challenge, and your help in reviewing patches is very welcome.
  
• We want to make sure that deprecated libraries or broken/unmaintained features get removed as fast as possible. Dead code must die.
  

The project is pretty active these days, and I believe it is the right time to get those changes done. The feature list is becoming bigger and bigger and thanks to our very close relationship with the GStreamer multimedia framework, implementing new ones is becoming very simple. Also, the GStreamer community is very active and we are looking forward the GStreamer 1.0 release which should come out soon and will bring us new opportunities toward our goal of creating a video editor that can serve the needs of professional video editors.

So if you are interested in helping us making those changes happen, you are very welcome to have a look at our wiki page and our task list. I also warmly encourage you to join us on #pitivi on the freenode irc server, I am sure people will be happy to help you getting involved in this great software development project!

PiTiVi 0.14 "No longer kills kittens"

The PiTiVi team is proud to announce the immediate availability of our new 0.14 release, with major new features, bug fixes and usability improvements. We hope you can use and enjoy the improvements in PiTiVi 0.14, and report bugs you may encounter (bugs are a fact of life! Help us hunt them out!).

Some of the major new features deserve to be enhanced in here such as:

• Audio and video effects: with PiTiVi 0.14, it is now possible to add all the effects provided by GStreamer and some other libraries, which, depending on what is installed on your system, means "a lot". The user interface for managing those effects will improve in future releases.

• Ability to preview video, audio and image files before importing: the file chooser dialog now lets you directly preview the files you want to import. This is pretty useful when you don't remember the name of a file you wanted to import, or when you're just "looking around" for media to use in your project.

• Welcome dialog: when starting PiTiVi, a startup assistant now helps you load recently used projects in two clicks or create a new project. Don't feel like using this dialog? Just click its Close button or press the "Escape" key on your keyboard. However, we trust that this little fella will make you much more efficient, not less. We hate useless windows. See also this post, for some explanation of the design process that went into this welcome dialog.

...And more. See the full release notes for a more exhaustive list of goodies.

This release cycle has been very eventful. As the list of contributors reveals, lots of people got involved in the software development. I also want to thank all the people who worked hard on translating PiTiVi in a timely manner and reporting localization issues.

We are now entering a new cycle on the road to maturity. Four students are working full time on PiTiVi this summer, thanks to the Google Summer of Code program, and we will try to increase the general development pace to keep the great momentum we had in the past few weeks. Stay tuned for another blog post on how we plan to achieve this!

To celebrate, I personally wanted to do some dogfooding by making this little video, with the additional constraint of using only footage coming from my own camera (no, I am not a video artist!):

here or here

But this is for sure, not the best PiTiVi can do. See our showcase page for examples of videos we found to be aesthetically interesting, and feel free to submit your own! Post links to your videos in comments, and if they're really cool, they could end up in our showcase! ;)

PiTiVi pre-release

The whole PiTiVi team is pleased to announce a pre-release of the PiTiVi video editor.

This pre-release contains the past 7 months of work, implementing this pretty new feature list:

• Audio and video effects
• Completely redesigned project settings dialog, with the ability to create presets
• Completely redesigned rendering dialog
• Welcome dialog that helps you start a project or load recent projects in two clicks
• Ability to preview video, audio and image files before importing
• Add a "best fit" zoom button
• Ability to jump to an exact position in the timeline
• Ability to specify custom aspect ratios and framerates
• Show a progress bar when loading projects
• 300% faster project timeline loading
• Search bar in the Media Library
• Ability to detach all the tabs and the previewer
• New manpage
• Commandline render mode
• Use the standard infobar widget all around
• And lots of bug fixing
  

Unless anything critical or regressions pop up, expect the 0.14 release next tuesday (May 31st).

Please test it and abuse it and report bugs at:

https://bugzilla.gnome.org/enter_bug.cgi?product=pitivi

Tarballs are available here:

http://ftp.gnome.org/pub/GNOME/sources/pitivi/0.13/pitivi-0.13.9.90.tar.gz

Expect updated Ubuntu packages soon on the GStreamer Developers PPA:

https://launchpad.net/~gstreamer-developers/+archive/ppa

Thanks for testing and helping us make this the best release ever :)

Working for Collabora Multimedia :)

This month is my first month working (part time) for the multimedia team at Collabora. I think you all know about this company which is specialized in open source softwares particularly in Gstreamer and all majors Gnome/Freedesktop technologies.

So I am now working on GStreamer related technologies and in particular on PiTiVi to make it rock more and more!

I am very glade to be part of this team and am looking forward the good time I am going to have hacking as a multimedian :)

Pitivi master finaly gets effects!

So as suggested by the title, the work I did during the Google Summer Of Code has been Merged! It means that the next Pitivi release which should arrive quite soon will gain effects.

I haven't been blogging for a long while so sorry about not telling you what was happening but I did it in order to make a surprise :P

Now that it is merged, you are very welcome to test it and report all the bugs you will find so we have a great release soon to propose the world.... with effects!

Sorry for not making a screencast but as you can test it quite easily, it shouldn't matter so much ;) (and nekohayo is telling me he should make one soon)

As I enjoyed a LOT working in the pitivi community during this summer, I am going to keep working on it in my free time fixing the bugs you are going to report. And of course I am planing to enhance effects support and add features such as keyframes handling...

And just a little screenshot so you can have an idea about how the UI looks like now:

Pitivi get effects, part 6

Sorry for not blogging in such a long time!

Now that I am back in chile afer the GUADEC, I have finally been able to hack again on Pitivi. So has I said during my presentation of my project during the GUADEC, I implemented everything I wanted to. So I am now working on debugging everything, cleaning code, and even if I have a few remaining critical bugs (which could probably be bugs in gnonlin), you can use it for testing purposes.

I also started to work on a new branch[0] in order to save the undocked windows state, but since I found new bugs on the effect implementations, I am working on them.

So for now I don't have a screencast, but I promise I will make one when I can show everything working smoothly.

You can give it a try if you have the latest gstreamer from git using my git repo[1]

[0]: http://github.com/thiblahute/Pitivi/commits/save_undock_windows_state
[1]: http://github.com/thiblahute/Pitivi