We have fixed about a zillion bugs and have implemented some great features such as:

• Support For Subtitles; embedded, co-located or browse toanywhere on your system.
• Item Metadata Editing; change the title, description, or audio / video specification.
• Play External Settings; global preference for all files, and a context menu for single items.

There are major speed improvements for navigating the UI, adding files to miro, and saving large search feeds.  We’ve improved shortcuts for audio playback, made some visual improvements and much, much, more.

This release also include updates to vlc (windows) and libtorrent (all os).

We are looking for help testing the release candidate, and hope you will download it and report back to us any of your findings.

To let us know how it goes, you can:

• comment here
• report a bug
• post in the forum
• email feedback@pculture.org

If you’d like to help more, please take a look at the regression tests or see the getting started guide.

As always, all help is greatly appreciated.

Miro 2.5.4-rc2 has now been posted.  Please take the time to download and check it out.

windows: http://pculture.org/nightlies/Miro-2.5.4-rc2.exe

os x: http://pculture.org/nightlies/Miro-2.5.4-rc2.dmg

source: http://pculture.org/nightlies/Miro-2.5.4-rc2.tar.gz

The release candidate for Miro 2.5.4 is posted.  Please test it out and report any bugs found. Miro 2.5.4 will be a bug fix release for some database issues and contains an update to vlc 1.0.3.

Changes include some fixes to some unknown errors, updates to vlc and libtorrent, changes for some os x 10.6 specific issues, and some other file naming problems on windows.

Thanks to a contribution for Jason, we have also added the ability to play any item in an external player via the right-click context menu. This is the initial implementation of a long-requested feature.

Because there are so many changes that affect all part of Miro, we really need to get to broad testing on this.  Please download the nightly build for your os: windows, os x, source.

There is a 2.5.3 rc test run in litmus.  The focus areas test group consists of tests for the areas that have been changed the most.  Please give us some of your time and run few test cases.

Souce and Nightly Build testing:
Source repositories: a few week ago we migrated from using subversion to git.  If you’d like to keep track of the code checkins, you can view the changes here: https://git.participatoryculture.org/miro/log/?showmsg=1 .  It’s useful to see  the regular changes if you are actively using nightly builds.

In Litmus there a new group under the nightly build test run, for weekly recommended tests.  In that group there will be a selection of test cases relevant to the recent code changes of the past week.  I’d really like to focus on improving the time gap between when a bug was injected, to the time it was detected.  I think focused testing will help that.

Miro 2.5.3: we’d like to push out a 2.5.3 release soon.  In 2.5 there are issues where users will get an unknown error on startup.  There have been some changes to how we handle and log errors that occur during database transactions.  Another different error that looks the same on Windows has also been corrected for the 2.5.3 release.

Additionally, vlc (for windows playback) has been updated to 1.0.1, libtorrent has been updated to 0.14.5. Perian Quicktime components (for os x playback) have also been updated.

Miro 2.6: Work is underway for the next major release.  The most notable enhancement is subtitle support  Luc is working on adding subtitle support to allow for more translations as well as assist the hearing impaired.  To help finance it, we’ve posted the project on Kickstart.

We have also had some code contributions.  There is now a context menu for items: Play Externally.  This implements part of bug #9350, which is a long-requested feature.  We have Jason Woofendon to thank for that patch.

Will posted release candidate 2 for miro 2.5 last night.

• windows
• os x
• source

There were some final database changes to handle some potential issues when disks filled and a few tweaks to to vlc on windows to account for non-ascii named directories.

Please give us a hand with a final round of testing before we release.

• windows
• os x
• source

I’ve been testing them on windows and os x, and they are looking very solid.  It would be great if a few more people could run some of the regression tests, as the lightening destroyed my machine that had linux and windows XP.  Also - I don’t have a machine with os x 10.5 (only 10.4.11).

Also - for windows users, it appears that the update to vlc 1.0 has fixed bug #11300 a pretty annoying problem where windows would report an error on shutdown.

Finally, please report any issues on bugzilla, get satisfaction, or just comment here.

It struck about 400m from my house, tearing up the road.

It traveled through the ground and found the phone lines, blowing off the front cover and frying the wires on all the boxes along the road.

When it got to my house, it scorched the wall and box where it connects to the house phone lines.

It passed along the line, to the router, taking that out for good.

It even went from the router and damaged the ethernet port of the pc that was connected.

Lesson learned: unplug when the lightening comes.

The most obvious change is the reorganization of the Library.  Instead of Library, New and Individual Downloads, you will now be presented with Video, Audio, Other and Downloading.

The video and audio main view has filters for All, Unwatched and Non-feed items to make it easier to find your downloaded shows.

There are also significant changes to the audio playback ui.  Audio playback no longer displays a blank window.  Instead the interface remains active and the progress bar on the chrome displays the playing file.

Speed and the database changes

Both Ben and Will and Nicholas have mentioned this in past posts.  Ben redid the way the database is loaded and stored.  He’s given us some solid startup speed improvements.  He has also mostly given up on pickles, so in general the items are plain and readable.  If you are a db junkie, you can finally see inside to the data guts of miro.

Because of the big database changes, we have finally started backing up the old database prior to any upgrades.  This should make you feel a bit more secure about testing nightly builds because it’s a lot easier to go back without data loss.

The Database Backup page has been updated to give instructions on where and how to find the database and return to an earlier version if necessary.

From observations of the bug list and regression tests,  I’d say that we have a greater percentage of men who regularly download nightly builds and provide feedback in the form of bug reports.  However, from litmus, I can see that people who more regularly run the regression test cases are woman.

We should bust the stereotypes that woman are less assertive men won’t follow the instructions.  We’re gearing up for another round of testing pretty soon, so when the call comes to help:

• Men: read the directions!
• Woman: write some bugs!

Yesterday Paul released and update to the Miro Guide. A portion of the testing of the guide updates was accomplished using a few automated test suites driven by Selenium Core.  We chose to use selenium core because we wanted to integrate with our existing test case management tool, litmus as well as allow everyone to be able to participate in the testing.

This testing is for the miro test channel guide, which is where the development takes place before updating to the live guide.  It would be great to get more volunteers and a greater variety of browsers tested.  If you just want to give it a spin, you can open the test suites directly in your browser of choice:

• FrontPageNav: checks the basic links and layout of the guides main page.
• Register User Actions:logs into a test account verifies some of the actions of a logged in user.
• Submit Feed: error checking of the submit feed form.

There are a few more test suites, and if you want to participate in guide testing, the best thing to do is to go to Litmus select the testchannelguide2.parti… test run, enter your configuration, select the selenium (automated) test group and follow the very simple instructions.  Testing via litmus will allow us to track the tests run, errors and browser used.

It would be great to get some feedback from others familiar with using selenium.  If you would like to get involved in the test creation process, here is a page with much more details about miro guide testing with selenium.