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

Great time at GUADEC

So as you may know, last week took place GUADEC and I am one of the lucky guys who have been sponsored by the Gnome fundation to take part in it! I spent a great time there and finally could meet all the people I have been working with those last two years!

So I wanted to say a big thanks to all people who organized this great event, and all the sponsors.

See you all at GUADEC 2011 in Berlin!

Pitivi get effects, part 5

I didn't blog for almost 3 weeks but it doesn't mean I didn't progress with this project. I thing it actually means more that I prefer to spend my time on coding than on blogging!

Last week was pretty full because of the end of the semester but tomorrow I have my last examen for university. Next week I am planning to go skiing so it may not be the week I will be hacking the most, but anyway, I will code!

The UI is almost the same as the mockup I showed you last time apart from the key-frame thing since I am not sure I want to do it this way, and because I want to have effects stable before implementing this feature.

So for now the UI looks exactly like:


What is working:

• Adding effects
• Configuring effects, the UI is generated automatically depending on the effect property so all effects are configurable. But there is also a system which will permit to create a special UI for more complicated effects.
  
• Enabling/disabling effects even if a few bugs still remain concerning it
  
• Removing effects

What doesn't work:

• Seeking, right now when I add an effect and try to seek, it always go to the first frame of the video. It is a pretty critical bug on which I am actively working, and that's the reason why I didn't do a screen-cast (sorry about that). When this is solved, I will make a screen-cast and post it here for sure.
  
• Drag'n drop directly to the effects list. This is almost nothing but I want to fix the first issue before implementing it.
• Keyframe based effect configuration
• Saving/opening projects containing effects. I have already started this work but it is still not working. It should be done quite easily.
  

So I don't miss so many things to complete the plan I had made for this Google Summer of Code, but the idea is to get something almost bug free and merge and release it (something I have been told should be possible quite soon... I hope :))

I also wanted to talk about a tool I use for refactoring python code called 'Bicycle repair man'. It permits to rename variable/classes very easily and this through all python files of the project, cut functions into several ones and make the proper calls, and probably much more but those are the two features I actually use and abuse. I use it inside vim and noticed a real gain of productivity and style.

The code is still available in my GIT repository here: http://github.com/thiblahute/Pitivi

Hoping I can show you a screencast of all that and tell you that I need tester soon.