PiTiVi

If you’ve tried rendering projects with Pitivi 0.15 or older, chances are you’ve encountered one of these dreadful situations where the rendering process would get stuck:

This year will be a little bit different. In a rather unexpected turn of events, PiTiVi has been accepted as a mentoring organization but GStreamer has not. Fear not however, as GStreamer has no better ally than the PiTiVi team when it comes to pushing our favorite multimedia framework to its limits and beyond. As you may know, PiTiVi makes heavy use of the GStreamer Editing Services library and, in turn, GNonLin and the rest of GStreamer.

I’m back from this year’s GStreamer hackfest, which was fantastic as usual — an intersection of great minds, big challenges, flaky Wi-Fi and good food. Christian already did a generic summary, so I’ll be narrating from the GNonLin/GES/PiTiVi perspective. See the end of this blog post for a nice video retrospective.

Time for a little report on recent improvements in Pitivi. Nothing earth-shattering to make you drool with envy; just a lot of fixes, cleanup and improvements to small details. Next week, we will be in Milan for the GStreamer hackfest, so I’ll make sure to give you a nice report on what we managed to accomplish there.

Interested in GStreamer, PiTiVi, GES? Meet us in Milan at the end of March for the 2013 GStreamer hackfest! As you can see in this picture from last year’s hackfest, it’s tons of fun for everybody:

With some help from luisbg, I finally reworked and merged a 2-years-old patch of mine. It turned out to be less trivial than expected, because we had to change the settings backend to allow loading/reading configuration files at runtime for our dynamically-generated tab components. So, what the heck does this mean to you? Automatically saving and restoring the state of our dynamic detachable tabs/components. This is a nice improvement for those of you who want to spread the PiTiVi UI across multiple displays:

I’ve seen everybody hail Lightworks as the messiah that will make all other open source video editors irrelevant. So far, I didn’t blog about this (because frankly, life’s too short to be pessimistic, and I was also quite curious as to how it would play out and wanted to give EditShare the benefit of the doubt—after all, I’m a fan of video editing software in general).

Here’s a tricky usability question: how would you represent the actions of grouping and ungrouping clips on a timeline? (Un)grouping is used for changing the way selections affect a set of clips. It allows you, among other things, to separate and remove the audio from the video of a clip.

Here’s one of the reasons why I’m not exactly in a hurry to learn C. When you ask me to read through C code, this is what happens:

This morning, there was a nice surprise waiting for me in my inbox: apparently Dragons Dream infringes “La Red”‘s copyright.