A little over a week ago, I started GNOME Miro Community. I'm a Miro developer and we use a ton of Gnome stuff in the application. The site will index Gnome related videos from around the Internet. I hope it'll aid Gnome development.

I started a few categories: gnome-shell, gstreamer, and GUADEC 2009. I'll be adding to these going forward.

One of the big things that I did was to bulk load the GUADEC 2009 videos into Gnome MC. I built an RSS feed, populated it with descriptions of the talks from the Gran Canaria Desktop Summit wiki pages, and pulled it all into Gnome MC. Today I pulled down the videos and generated thumbnails for everything and pushed that up, too. Took about 5 hours in total, but the data is much more useful now.

Gnome MC will do searches every night for new material out there. I'll keep tabs on this queue. If you know of videos that haven't been added either let me know or submit them through the site.

I'm really excited about this site and I'll do my best to keep it going and make it as useful as possible. I hope it helps to make Gnome as awesome as it can be!

I finished the work to remove the binary kit data from the miro repository today. Removing the binary kit data from the repository changed all the shas. To alleviate the problems this causes, I did the following:

1. Ran a git filter-branch --commit-filter that added a line to the end of every commit message stating what the original commit sha was. The shas are referenced in Bugzilla, so this maintains the papertrail.

2. Moved the "old git repository" to miro.old. If you're building Miro versions prior to Miro 2.6, it'll probably be easier to do that in the old git repository because the binary kit material is there.

3. Binary kit materials were moved to separate repositories.

The end result of this is that we went from 900mb for the repository and a full checkout to about 136mb. Clones are faster, it uses less space on disk, and you're not saddled with a bunch of binary date you probably aren't going to use. It's also much easier on the build boxes which are old and don't have a lot of disk space kicking around.

If you have any questions, comments, or problems, let me know.

minutes

2.5.4 status

• Work is going well. There's a new bug that we should look into. But we've done RC builds and we're sending notes to users who are having problems with 12101 in hopes they'll test.

• If things go well, we'll probably do a release in a week.

Luc

• Did most of the implementation for subtitle support in VLC with Miro on Windows. Doesn't have a Windows build environment, so he's passing this off to Ben or Will to finish up on Windows.

• Hoping to have the repository changes done asap.

Will

• Keeping tabs on 2.5.4 rc1 testing progress.

• Helped prisioner on IRC get Miro building on Windows with mingw32. Keeping tabs on that progress with the hope that we can switch from building with Visual Studio 2003 to mingw32.

• Planning to do the big repository filtering today.

• Planning to take on the subtitles in VLC on Windows work for Luc

Ben

• Did a bunch of 2.5.4 work.

• Finished the fasttypes removal work.

• Got some more data on 12301. Going to look into it to see if there's anything we can divulge from it.

Janet

• 2.5.4 rc1 looks good except for bug 12426.

• Continued working on building the test infrastructure for Miro Community. Has two volunteers helping with building test cases.

Paul

• Working on Miro Community features: html editing for comments, fixing the submit a video flow, added an RSS feed for categories, ...

• Back to working on Miro Community bugs.

Nick

• Morgan is going to work on another theme for Miro Community.

• Working on making Miro Community easier to modify.

bugzilla

• 11 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 7 bugs marked FIXED

notes

Are these reports useful to anyone? No one has commented, no one has mentioned them on IRC or email, ... If they're not useful and no one is reading them, then I should be spending my time elsewhere.

About a week ago, Joe contributed a patch to disable the screensaver on KDE when Miro is playing fullscreen. I don't run any systems with KDE on them. I'd love to get some help testing this patch so that we can include it in the next release of Miro.

The bug for this work is http://bugzilla.pculture.org/show_bug.cgi?id=3067. The patch is at http://bugzilla.pculture.org/attachment.cgi?id=1980.

Let me know whether this patch works or doesn't work for you either in the comments of this blog entry or in the comments of the bug.

minutes

Paul:

• Is sick.

• Bug fixes and small features for Miro Community.

• We have a lot of sites and things seem pretty stable.

• Working on Miro Community 0.9 now. 0.9 isn't very feature-full, but it improves on things for style, look and feel, and such.

Luc:

• Worked a couple of days on subtitle support for Miro on Windows using VLC. Building a test application in C. Once he's got that working, he'll transcribe it to Python and ctypes.

• Switched gears to help Will to fix libtorrent build problems with the new binary kit system. Bumped into problems getting it to compile on OSX 10.4 (expletive expletive expletive). Worked around it.

Will:

• Continued working on libtorrent and binary kit changes.

• Wants to do a 2.5.4 that includes vlc 1.0.3, libtorrent/unicode fixes on Windows, and database fixes from Ben.

Ben:

• Fixed database problems with duplicate ids.

• Spent time removing sorts.pyx and filetypes.pyx from the codebase. This reduces complexity of the build.

• Wants to push out a 2.5.4 with database fixes he's done recently.

• Wants to finish the fasttypes removal work on OSX.

• Talked about the sniffer code.

Janet:

• Tested changes in Miro and Miro Community.

• Working on making it easier to assign tasks to volunteers and get more volunteers involved in the process without losing track of them.

• Wrote up a wiki page for subtitle implementation work and testing. This will become the specification of what we're implementing now that we're mostly done research. https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/SubtitleImplementationDetails

• Is having her wisdom teeth taken out next week.

bugzilla

• 19 bugs/feature-requests created

• 1 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 7 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 2 bugs marked INVALID

Miro uses libtorrent-rasterbar for bittorrent downloading. We had a copy of the libtorrent source code in the portable section of our repository. Miro would compile libtorrent as a Python extension along with all the other stuff to build Miro binaries. Not any more.

Luc is almost done carrying my changes over to OSX 10.4, but as of today, libtorrent-rasterbar is no longer in the portable section of our repository.

What does this mean?

For Windows, a clean build on our Windows build box went from taking enough time for me to make dinner, eat dinner, and then completely forget what I was working on (26 minutes) to 4 minutes. In my Windows XP vm, a clean build went from 8 minutes to 1 minute. Plus I fixed the unicode problems Miro had with Windows and libtorrent and updated Miro to use libtorrent 0.14.6 on Windows.

For OSX, a clean build on my mac mini running OSX 10.5.8 went from 17 minutes to 1 minute. Plus I updated Miro to use libtorrent 0.14.6 on OSX, too.

For gtk-x11, libtorrent is now a required system package. Miro will no longer compile its own libtorrent if you don't already have it installed. I'm pretty sure that most modern versions of the major Linux distributions have packages for libtorrent-rasterbar and the Python bindings.

We have a couple of other changes that affect the project structure almost done. I'll blog about them as they finish landing.

Updates:

11/4/2009 This is completed now. Many thanks to Luc who sorted out the issues I was running into with compiling libtorrent on OSX 10.4 with Boost 1.35.0.

I had an eye doctor appointment a few weeks ago and discovered my prescription had changed. It wasn't a huge big change like last time (I was in grad school), but it was big enough to warrant new glasses. Not to mention that my current glasses were really scratched up and "well-used".

I have a very limited budget these days. A couple of years ago I read Adventures in $40 eyeglasses. I decided to try buying a pair online this time around.

I bought my pair from 39dollarglasses.com. I got the Polermo frames ($39) and figured I might as well get the anti-reflective coating ($24). Add on shipping ($5 or something) and an extra charge because my prescription is screwy ($20) and the whole thing was around $90. I had paid $310 for my previous pair. I think $90 is a good step in the right direction. Next time, I'll probably wait for a special which would have reduced the cost further.

I got them in the mail today. They fit great, they're just as strong and feel as good as the previous $310 glasses and I had completely forgotten I was wearing new glasses a couple of hours after slipping them on.

minutes

Paul:

• Worked on Miro Community stuff over the week.

• Talked about infrastructure for the MC services.

Janet:

• 2.5.3 looks like a pretty good release.

• Tested Will's torrent-related fixes--looks good.

• Testing Luc's subtitle work. Found some bugs with the subtitle code and older versions of OSX. Otherwise, it's looking good so far.

• Talked a bit about Miro Community testing. We have a few volunteers helping, but there's still work to do.

Luc:

• Worked on subtitle stuff. Happy to see people are starting to test subtitle-enabled builds.

• Worked out some bugs so it now works on 10.4, 10.5, and 10.6.

• Working on getting subtitles working on Miro on Windows with VLC.

• This is coming along nicely and we decided it should land in Miro 2.6 so we're going to move the work to the master branch.

Will:

• Reworked Miro on Windows to use a packaged binary kit.

• Switched Miro on Windows to use a pre-built libtorrent from the binary kit.

• Planning to do the same for Miro on OSX.

• Pushed out a set of Karmic packages for 2.5.3, but they aren't well tested.

Ben:

• Did some bug-fixing.

bugzilla

• 23 bugs/feature-requests created

• 12 bugs marked WORKSFORME

• 1 bugs marked INVALID

• 2 bugs marked DUPLICATE

• 3 bugs marked WONTFIX

• 3 bugs marked FIXED

• 25 bugs marked INCOMPLETE

I just pushed out packages for Karmic for Miro 2.5.3. Until Karmic is out, consider these packages beta quality. If you use these packages and run into problems, let us know as soon as you can.

Ubuntu installation instructions

minutes

Nick and Luc weren't on the call. Janet and Will had colds. Ben's side of the call had some weird 15 second delay. That made it a dicey call that we ended on IRC.

Minutes for this morning's call:

Paul:

• Working on Miro Community finishing up version 0.8.

Ben:

• Worked on a lot of bugs, especially 12101. Checked in a few fixes into master which look pretty good, but need testing.

• Worked on a bunch of other bugs.

• Worked on 12229 to allow for distribution of RSS and content on a DVD.

Will:

• Worked on extracting binary kit stuff from the repository.

• Planning to work on Karmic packages for 2.5.3.

Janet:

• Sick.

• Hoping to get to testing the changes Ben made for 12101.

• Spent some time testing Miro Community and is getting geared up to start testing Luc's subtitle code.

bugzilla

• 14 bugs created

• 2 bugs marked FIXED

• 1 bug marked DUPLICATE

• 1 bug marked INVALID