Will’s Miro dev blog

I saw the Our wonderful team post just now. The PCF staff is great and, but “the team” constitutes a much larger group of great people without whom the magic could never happen.

There are hackers like Uwe, Nathan, Zach, Michael and others who have sent in patches that add new features, add test cases, and fix bugs.

There are testers like Keith, Pan, Sedat, Robbt, Sumana, and dozens of others whose work directly impacts the quality of Miro.

There are bug reporters who spend their time helping us work out complex problems that result in fixes and better experiences for future users. Some of these bug reports and comments are simply awe-inspiring.

There are translators like Karl, Lukasz, and Sedat who through their efforts have done some great translation work and also fixed issues smoothing the path for other translators.

There are packagers like Uwe (Debian), Iain (Ubuntu), Christian (Ubuntu), Alex (Fedora) and others that I’m either forgetting or haven’t interacted with who package Miro for other distributions, send bugs and fixes upstream to us, and help us generalize the code so that it works on as many systems as possible.

There are developers of libraries that Miro uses like Arvid who works on libtorrent, lurks on our bug system and IRC, and helps us with libtorrent issues.

There are developers and members of other projects that are actively seeking areas where we can help each other build better things like Nathan and Asheesh from Creative Commons, Gabriel Burt from Banshee, and Chris Blizzard, Aza Dotzler, and others from Mozilla.

There are thousands of users who use Miro, find and report issues, tell their friends about Miro, wax on about the importance of an open Internet and open media distribution, and give feedback that molds future versions of Miro.

There are thousands of content producers who benefit from and add to the infrastructure that we’re helping to facilitate.

This massive group of people is the team. The best part is that the team is getting bigger and better every day.

One thing I’ve been meaning to write a post about was to list the things I use Miro for. There are probably other ways to do them, but that’s outside the scope of this post.

1. Keeping track of government
   President Obama’s weekly address and key speeches - http://www.whitehouse.gov/rss/speeches.xml
   Metavid - http://metavid.org/wiki/

   The metavid one is really interesting. From their site:

   “Metavid is a community driven archive of legislative video from both houses of the U.S. Congress, spanning from early 2006 to the present. This archive is searchable by speaker name, spoken text, date, metadata we’ve scraped from outside sources and user contributions. Metavid is video wiki where users improve its accuracy by fixing transcripts and annotating speeches.”

   I can subscribe to an RSS feed of anything that has to do with “Kerry” or “Kennedy”. It’s ultra-convenient, fascinating and a really awesome use of the all these technologies.

2. Continuing education
   Open Courseware Consortium - http://www.ocwconsortium.org/use/use-dynamic.html
   MIT OCW - http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm

   Video and audio lectures and other course materials to learn subjects you didn’t have time to take in college. The MIT OCW is a great site, but any of the other groups that participate in the Open Courseware Consortium are also really useful.

3. Learning a new application
   InkScape - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Screencastersheathenxorg
   The Gimp - http://feeds2.feedburner.com/meetthegimp
   Blender - http://feeds2.feedburner.com/TheBlenderShow
   Microsoft Office on the Mac - http://mac.microsoft.com/macoffice/videos/en-us/xml/videopodcast.xml
   …

   There are lots of podcasts out there that walk you through using specific applications to do the things you need to do. Watching how someone does something tends to be a lot easier to understand than reading about someone doing something.

4. Learning new libraries, APIs, toolkits, whatever, …
   Git - http://feeds.feedburner.com/Gitcasts
   CSS - http://feeds.feedburner.com/CSS-Tricks-Screencasts
   …

   Any time I need to come up to speed on something programming related (toolkits, utilities, APIs, libraries, …), I almost always do a Video Search on YouTube and Google Video. I go through the results and download the videos that seem relevant to what I’m doing. Often I tweak the search terms and search again. Doing this brings up tutorials, demos, presentations, tech talks, and a variety of other interesting bits. This greatly adds to what I can gather by looking through the project web-site and forums because it’s distilled in a different way.

5. Keeping up with projects, communities, conventions, meetups …
   Ubuntu Developer Videos - http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/ubuntudevelopers/uploads?orderby=updated
   Fedora TV - https://fedorahosted.org/releases/f/e/fedoratv/fedora-tv.xml
   BSD Conferences - http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/videos?vq=bsdconferences&alt=rss
   …

   These are useful to watch because you can see where these projects are going, who’s involved, and what they’re working on.

I’d love to know what other things people use Miro for. Add your uses in the comments.

I tagged and built Miro 2.0 rc3 builds and placed them in the sticky section of the nightlies page.

Pre-release release notes are at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/2.0ReleaseNotes.

Changes since rc2:

• updated translations as of today
• bug 11329: decimal value for movie duration is never correct in channel view
• bug 11327: os x crash, windows error - when selecting item (non-ascii) to share
• bug 11149: New OSX DMG Background to replace current one
• bug 11296: ’show more’ jumps back to top of list on ‘Single Items’ and ‘New’
• bug 11322: File “miro\feedupdate.pyc”, line 67, in update_finished KeyError: 26
• bug 11262: python 2.6 support (preliminary and untested)
• bug 11317: os x - crash after added torrent feed then selecting channel tab.
• bug 11354: “Global name ‘time’ is not defined” death on laptop
• bug 11348: os -x - automatic update failure
• bug 11357: list view for new tab broken
• bug 11027: Changing default guide on windows: AttributeError: ‘NoneType’ object has no attribute ‘url’
• bug 11321: ValueError: I/O operation on closed file
• bug 6179: Wrong Language (only some work done on this one)
• bug 11360: os x r9142 - update notification is show release notes text.
• bug 11362: Dissmising detached external playback dialog freezes Miro
• OSX crashers and memory leaks
• probably some other things I’m missing

The new Miro Guide will be launching very soon now. When that’s released, the second browser bar you see in Miro will go away.

I’ve synced translations, so rc3 has the latest translations. I will sync them one more time before we do a release. If you’re a translator, we sure could use your help! See more at https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy.

We think this release candidate is release-worthy. Assuming testers don’t hit any snags, there shouldn’t be any changes between now and the final Miro 2.0 release. We’re planning to follow Miro 2.0 with a 2.0.1 release in the near future to get the most updated translations and to fix minor issues that pop up.

To Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid users: Some day I’ll get to learning how PPA works. When that happens, we’ll start building release candidate builds for the Ubuntu versions we support. Until then, you’ll have to download the tarball and build it yourself. If someone can spare some time to help us with this, I’d be much obliged.

Barring snags with this release candidate, we’re looking at a full on Miro 2.0 release some time in the next few days. Getting really super close now!

I tagged and built Miro 2.0 rc2 builds and placed them in the sticky section of the nightlies page.

Pre-release release notes are at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/2.0ReleaseNotes.

Changes since rc1:

• updated translations as of today
• bug 11260: hover controls on OSX
• bug 10552: memory leaks in Windows
• bug 10299: re-enabled DailyMotion search (but it downloads 80×60 flv files so it still sucks)
• bug 11269: audio visualisation still present when playing video on Windows
• bug 11178: interface “hangs” when playing audio files
• bug 11272: removing folders dialog didn’t show information about child feeds
• bug 11267: errors when searching on OSX
• bug 11266: videos play on OSX after dragging a video file onto Miro
• bug 11275, 11301: toolbar for watched folders no longer shows irrelevant functionality
• bug 11268: fix the save resume time functionality in regards to videos that have finished playback
• bug 11291: make sure pop in/out label is hidden/shown along with icon
• probably some other things I’m missing

When we release Miro 2.0, we’ll also be releasing a new version of the Miro Guide web-site. Amongst other things, this will remove the second browser bar that you see.

Also, prior to releasing Miro 2.0, I’ll sync translations from Launchpad. If you’re a translator, we sure could use your help! https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy

There are still some outstanding issues that are blocking Miro 2.0, so we’re still working. You can see the existing set of bugs to fix here.

To Ubuntu Hardy and Intrepid users: Some day I’ll get to learning how PPA works. When that happens, we’ll start building release candidate builds for the Ubuntu versions we support. Until then, you’ll have to download the tarball and build it yourself. If someone can spare some time to help us with this, I’d be much obliged.

Almost there!