Stephen “lostcookie” Griffiths recently started coding on PiTiVi, learning the codebase as he works through the PiTiVi Love list. He has done awesome work on the source list to implement an “icon view” mode and has managed to somehow not become insane while I pointed out all his mistakes and bugs :)

The icon view is especially useful if you are working on a wide, high-resolution monitor (ex: 1920×1200) with a large number of clips that have nice thumbnails, because you can fit more of them without needing to scroll.

Before:

After:

This definitely looks cool. Great work Stephen!

I have requested additional super cow powers on GNOME bugzilla to be able to do some serious bug triaging in PiTiVi’s bug list. I have

• Touched approximately 70 bugs or more today (out of ~230 initially), spending approximately 5.5 hours doing bug triaging and hunting (according to hamster)
• Confirmed many unconfirmed bugs
• Updated target milestones (even for already fixed bugs!)
• Added keywords (and added “Special searches” to the website)
• Reassigned components (so that Brandon can easily search for bugs that are related to the user interface)
• Closed a ton of obsolete/fixed/duplicate bugs.

Damn, this feels good. I hope Edward won’t be mad at me for doing the cleanup and flooding his inbox while he was on vacation.

I was keeping an eye once in a while on the promising SFLPhone project, developped by the Savoir-faire Linux folks.

A slightly outdated screenshot I took (back in June, when I first wrote the draft for this blog post), since I’m too lazy to take new ones:

I’m using Callcentric as an SIP provider and Twinkle was the only Linux client (well, except x-lite) that seemed to work with it. However, Twinkle has the following problems:

• Not very open/friendly/vividly maintained. This is my subjective view. A project that has no public bugtracker, public version control repository, and an author that does not respond to emails (I sent a few of them over the last two years), is, to me, an unfriendly project.
• QT 3. Ewww. I can bear with that, but I much prefer GTK+ applications. SFLPhone has both a GTK+ and a QT interface.
• Does not work well with PulseAudio
• Complex (follows the KDE approach of maximum configurability), which is not necessarily bad for something like VoIP, however
• Weird bits of German appearing in the GUI, poor/incomplete French translation… which I can’t fix since the author never replied.
• A huge gaping User Interface the size of a hallway
• Terrible icons: what’s up with having smileys everywhere? They all look alike!

But generally, Twinkle works and is stable, which is sadly much more than every other VoIP client I tried out there on the Linux desktop. I was just looking for something better-integrated (especially with PulseAudio) and for which I could contribute without feeling like my efforts were going into /dev/null.

I found out that SFLPhone improved a lot in recent times and decided to give the daily builds a shot (because the 0.9.5 release does not work with callcentric). I was amazed at how well it worked. While there are some details to polish here and there (I filed around 44 bugs since june), making and receiving calls with callcentric works quite well.

And here’s where the awesome starts: it is designed with PulseAudio in mind. That means that it [supposedly] mutes the other applications when you are receiving a call (well, it used to, at least). I shot a video of me calling my computer (using a regular landline phone), and the computer automagically handled the call by muting Rhythmbox. This, my friends, is the kind of cracktastic shit I’ve been dreaming of.

There are still many issues left to fix, but it mostly works. I use it frequently to record important calls, for example.

7 months later, the new, shiny PiTiVi website is now online. I have put redirects in place to handle the transition of the wiki to wiki.pitivi.org gracefully and redirect users to the website’s front page, if they were pointed to the old wiki front page URL.

Edward changed the DNSes and vhosts, and everything should be operational when the new IP addresses propagate throughout the Internet and when your ISP updates its DNS cache.

This week, Brandon has been doing great work in polishing little bits of PiTiVi’s timeline workflow. Indeed, he has made a second attempt at implementing my “move playhead on click” paradigm, and merged his changes into PiTiVi’s master development branch.

A side effect of this is that we now have “modeless splitting” (ie: splitting is now an action, not a modal “razor” tool). It is faster, more accurate, and simply rocks. I can now say that I can do basic editing just as fast as I used to back in the “old days”.

Hmm. This means I will now have to explain this properly in the user manual (and to make video tutorials).

Today, he also implemented a nice new feature to go with that: a vertical line now spans the entire timeline height, making it easier to keep track of the playhead’s position, and also visually reinforcing the “move playhead on click” workflow. You can also “grab” this black line with your mouse to scrub. Notice the nice, soft white border around the black playhead line for better contrast.

Brandon started publishing some of his PyGST tutorials/notes today. If you have been looking for some documentation to get you started on understanding/contributing to PiTiVi, this should probably be of interest to you :)

A little while back, Andoni Morales (author of Longomatch) had managed to run PiTiVi on Windows “just for the sake of testing gstreamer python bindings”. His efforts have resumed and been posted to a new bug report as a serie of patches, and here is how it looks like:

This is also part of his efforts to package GStreamer for Windows. Although I don’t use Windows myself (actually, I can’t stand it), I see this as a good thing. If Andoni indeeds wants to maintain a port to Windows, it might help more users and raise awareness about PiTiVi.

And I guess I could use that to poke fun at the “other FOSS NLEs that promised ports to Windows and never actually ended up doing it” (if any dared to make such promises… well, unless you count Blender among video editors ;). I kid, I kid.

Pitfalls: in Andoni’s own words, “it’s not working very well, and there is a nasty bug in the timescale which makes it almost unusable, but the rendering is working!”

If you are interested in tinkering with it, go take a look at his bug report, or perhaps chat with “ylatuya” (on the IRC channel). Take note that the Windows executable provided in Andoni’s bug report is entirely self contained (you don’t need to install GTK+ and GStreamer dependencies yourself), so it should “just work”. See also the wiki page for PiTiVi on Windows (not yet updated).

This is an attempt at making a “howto” based on my personal experience installing Ubuntu “Karmic Koala” 9.10 in its LPIA port (optimized for Atom processors). Remember, the normal Ubuntu desktop ISOs and the “Ubuntu netbook remix” ISOs are not tuned for the LPIA architecture, they are generic images. They will work with your Atom processor, but you will have less performance and less energy savings. Phoronix reported on this a while back, differences are in the range of 10% for each.

The Good

My experience going from Ubuntu 8.10 generic to Ubuntu 9.10 LPIA is that my CPU is generally 10°C cooler. Instead of hovering at 46-50°C idle, it nows hovers at 38-43°C. My Dell Mini 9 being passively cooled, it is now noticeably less warm to the touch, and more comfortable to use.
In this guide, I will take for granted that:

• You have a computer that can boot on USB
• You already know how to make bootable Ubuntu’s using unetbootin.sf.net
• You are comfortable with the command line

The Bad

1. First step is to grab the LPIA cd image. This one took me a while, because Canonical seems to have fun changing the folders in which they put their ISO images (it’s not just considered an “alternate image” anymore). The new place is: http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ports/releases/
2. Then, use unetbootin to create a bootable USB drive with that ISO
3. Boot your netbook on that USB drive, and before you start the installer, press Tab (or e, or whatever) to edit the boot line, and add the following: “cdrom-detect/try-usb=true” (put it after “–quiet” at the end of the line)
4. Launch the installer. Ideally, have a network cable plugged in, otherwise you can probably skip the DHCP process.
5. Set up your partitions as you see fit (I’m assuming you know what the hell you’re doing here :)

And now… the f*cked up part. It’s so batshit insane that I can’t conclude to anything else but a huge bug and little QA testing. Grab onto something.

The Ugly

After a while in the install process, the base system will be installed (“ubuntu-base”, I can presume), and you will be prompted whether or not you want to install additional packages (useful stuff like, you know, an actual desktop). I chose to install Ubuntu desktop, and that’s when things went very, very wrong.

After a while, some stupid error will come up, “blah blah blah something went wrong blah blah blah”. It’s basically telling you “Sorry Dave, I can’t install those packages”. I didn’t really bother searching for a bug report about this. After one more failed attempt, I decided to reboot and see if the system was somewhat usable.

It boots! And then I’m left with a base system and thrown into a root terminal after two seconds of boot. Nice. Well, I’ll just install the ubuntu-desktop myself then! Ha ha. Not so fast. First, you probably don’t have an active network connection, second, your sources.list is messed up, and third, unless you like pain or are a vi user, you can’t fix it and keep your sanity at the same time. After cursing the Editor of the Beast many times, I just copied the “/bin/nano” binary (from another computer, even if it was running Ubuntu generic) onto a USB key, and used that to edit the sources.list. Yeah, I’m that cool.

So here’s what I did:

sudo -i # become root because I'm lazy
dhclient eth0 # get a working network connection
mkdir /tmp/foo # mount the usb key to get nano from there
fdisk -l # list the partitions to figure out which one is the USB drive
mount /dev/sdbsomething /tmp/foo # sdbsomething is the device name obtained with fdisk -l
cd /etc/apt/
cp sources.list.apt-setup sources.list
/tmp/foo/nano /etc/apt/sources.list # edit the sources list with a decent text editor

Now, just comment out (add a # at the start of the line) the two lines regarding cdrom entries (there may be more than two; inspiration taken from here). Then, ideally, we now have entries that point to ports.ubuntu.com instead of archive.ubuntu.com. These are the correct repositories for architecture ports such as the LPIA port. Now we can finally refresh our apt sources and install the desktop. Be prepared for at least 800-1000 packages to download and install… yes, what a freaking waste, considering we have a USB key that was supposed to install them for us (but crapped out in the process). This guide is actually more like an experience report than a howto, in the sense that it certainly is not the “perfect method” (at that point, I seriously did not care anymore if it took me one more hour to download and install, if it worked).

apt-get update # update the packages lists
apt-get install ubuntu-standard ubuntu-desktop
reboot

And it worked! It only took 3 hours instead of 15 minutes ;) … when will Canonical give us a live CD installer for the LPIA version so we don’t have to put up with this crap?

Brandon’s polish changes to the canvas widget (the area on which you place clips on the timeline) have been merged today. This means that it now integrates nicely with your GTK+ theme, be it Clearlooks:

…or DarkRoom: