Will’s Miro dev blog

I’ve been blogging here for about two years. It’s a little hard since I have two blogs: one here for Miro things and one for everything else on a server that I own using blog software that I wrote.

I finally wrote the bits I needed to enable me to migrate from this Wordpress blog over to my blog.

• my blog
• Miro tag at my blog

I’ll leave this blog here, but I’m shutting off comments. I plan to switch the subscription url on Planet Miro shortly.

I finished up a set of Miro 2.0.4 packages for Jaunty for amd64 and i386, pushed them out, and updated our download instructions page.

Two things to clarify:

1. In the Ubuntu universe repository are Miro 2.0.3 packages, but these packages have a backported patch from Miro 2.0.4 so they’re essentially equivalent to the 2.0.4 packages I just built.
2. I put out PCF-built packages because we support Ubuntu and not because Iain and others aren’t doing a fantastic job packaging Miro for Ubuntu.

I’m sorry it took so long, but I was gone most of last week, so I was a bit late to the party.

I’m currently working on getting Miro in trunk to work with Jaunty… there are a few other issues that need to be worked out still.

Instructions for installing the PCF-built Miro 2.0.4 packages are at http://www.getmiro.com/download/for-ubuntu/ .

Going forward I’ll continue to build packages for Hardy, Intrepid and Jaunty. I’m no longer building packages for older versions of Ubuntu.

Me for the next week

I’m going on a service trip for a week to help out rebuilding and such. When I get back, I’ll be spending quality time with Miro on Ubuntu Jaunty, Python 2.6 and a bunch of other support issues that have popped up and I’ll be back on Miro development duty helping Ben and Luc with the changes going into Miro 2.1.

Call for help

Also, if you are technical and use Gentoo, Arch Linux, or OpenSUSE, toss me a line either in the comments below, on #miro-hackers on irc.freenode.net or by email at will.guaraldi at pculture dot org. I’d really like to get help on supporting these three systems better for Miro–I just can’t do it myself.

I’m surprised that Ben’s post didn’t garner any response. I thought there was a significant number of people chomping at the bit for these db changes.

If you’re one of the people that was looking forward to these changes but wasn’t aware they were happening, then definitely take a look at trunk. If there are use-cases you have that you don’t think are going to be handled, let us know as soon as possible.

I spent the greater part of today adding remote control support to the Miro Fullscreen project. I thought I’d do a write up on it because there are a lot of pieces involved and it took me ages to figure it out and I’m paranoid I’ll forget.

Quick caveats:

• I’m doing this on Ubuntu Intrepid (8.10). If you want to translate this to your favorite distribution, feel free to add any notes in the comments.
• If you’re using OSX or Windows and want to know how to get things working there, I have no idea how to do it and that’s not going to be covered here.
• I used a StreamZap remote and didn’t try it with other remotes.
• This is a set of notes; it’s not a good essay and I’m definitely not an expert.

Requirements

I installed three packages: lirc, python-pylirc, and gnome-lirc-properties.

sudo apt-get install lirc python-pylirc gnome-lirc-properties

LIRC

lirc has a web-site at http://lirc.org/. I had no idea what I was looking at while wandering aimlessly through that site. I think the important pages are these:

• http://www.lirc.org/html/configure.html - covers the .lircrc file format
• http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/streamzap/lircd.conf.streamzap - covers the codes for the StreamZap; there are other code pages at http://lirc.sourceforge.net/remotes/

python-pylirc

The only useful site I could find for this project was at http://pylirc.mccabe.nu/. It says that Paul Hummer took over the project and moved it to http://pylirc.ironlionsoftware.com/, but that’s a dead link. I found Paul’s blog at http://theironlion.net/blog/. He uses tagging on his blog, but there’s only one article tagged as pylirc2 at http://theironlion.net/tag/pylirc2/. I couldn’t find anything useful about pylirc, the project, its status, or what’s going on. Paul suggests he was going to add LIRC support to Entertainer, but it doesn’t look like he ever did that.

Anyhow, so I ended up going with the documentation on http://pylirc.mccabe.nu/ and that seemed to work out ok.

gnome-lirc-properties

I don’t know if I really needed gnome-lirc-properties.

The .lircrc file

So you install the three (or two–depending on whether gnome-lirc-properties is really needed) packages and you create a .lircrc file like this:

begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = MUTE
    config = n
end
begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = VOL_UP
    config = Up
end
begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = VOL_DOWN
    config = Down
end
begin
    prog   = mirofullscreen
    button = UP
    config = Up
end
...

where prog is the string you pass to pylirc.init, button comes from the remote control lirc file and config is the string you add handling for in your application.

the Python code

The sample code at http://pylirc.mccabe.nu/?/article/articleview/Documentation/1426&themex=public gave me enough of an idea on how it worked to implement the code in Miro Fullscreen.

In closing

Hope that’s useful to someone at some point.

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 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!

I built and posted Miro 2.0 rc1 builds in the sticky section of the nightlies page (http://pculture.org/nightlies).

We have a set of pre-release 2.0 release notes that still need updating but are pretty up-to-date at https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/2.0ReleaseNotes.

Please post any bugs to http://bugzilla.pculture.org/ with the version as 2.0-rc1. Please include as much information as possible. See GoodBugReports for more details.

To put this in some context, this is a HUGE release for us. We’ve been working hard on Miro 2.0 since May or thereabouts. It’s good to get to the end of the development cycle. At the same time, there are things we’re leaving on the table that we’ll address in future versions.

Last call for translation help–if you’re a translator and familiar with Launchpad, we could use your help! https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy.

I want to send a huge thank you for all the people who have contributed to Miro development thus far especially people I’ve worked with like Alex, Uwe, Keith, Pan, Robbt, Sedat, Lukasz, Arvid, Elmargol, and others.

Also, thank you to my life partner, Sadie, who has put up with me fixing bugs and doing a release candidate on my birthday.

Finally, happy birthday to me! w00t!

I imported translation updates today. Anything done in since the 22nd should be available in tonight’s nightlies.

Since I originally posted this cry for help four days ago, twelve of the languages have been edited.

We now have four completed translations:

• German
• Finnish
• Slovenian
• Norwegian Nynorsk

Bravo!

We’ve got five more that are getting close:

• Norwegian Bokmal
• Polish
• French
• Swedish
• Spanish

The rest of the languages have more than 100 untranslated strings.

If there’s anything I can do to help you out, let me know. If you know anyone else that can help with translations, I sure would appreciate the help!

https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer

We’ve been pushing hard on Miro 2.0 development for a long time now. So far I’ve avoided making release date predictions, but looking at the Bugzilla queue and the rate at which we’re finishing things, we’re probably looking at a Miro 2.0 release in the next 3 or 4 weeks.

One thing that we desperately need help with is translation work. All translation work is done in Launchpad at https://translations.launchpad.net/democracy/trunk/+pots/democracyplayer. You can see the status of translations there, too. Right now it looks something like this:

language    # untranslated strings
--------    ----------------------
German      0 (Go German!)
Slovenian   28
Polish      39
Swedish     58
French      66

The rest of the languages have more than 100 untranslated strings.

I want to thank Lukasz, who’s been working on the Polish translations, for helping an enormous amount in the last few weeks. He’s identified and helped me fix a bunch of problems with the strings and also worked to make the strings easier to translate. Thank you!

If you can translate strings and/or have done Launchpad translations before, we need your help. We’ve got a 3 or 4 week window between now (January 22nd 2009) and a release. It’s not a lot of time, but hopefully it’s enough time for us all to get translations into a better state.

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

Here’s the list of channels I’m currently subscribed to with Miro:

• Timo’s HD movie trailers - feed | subscribe
• What you ought to know - feed | subscribe
• Webbalert - feed | subscribe
• XPlay - feed | subscribe
• Ubuntu Developers - feed | subscribe
• Fedora TV - feed | subscribe
• CSS-Tricks - feed | subscribe
• GitCasts - feed | subscribe
• Google Tech Talks - feed | subscribe

Subscribe to them all!

This is awesome news! Hooray for Mozilla!

I eagerly look forward to the many, many things Mozilla is enabling us to do.

Play OGG!

Edit: Another blog entry espousing the goodness of OGG support in Firefox!

It was a really great day today. Talked with Songbird and Thunderbird people about our projects in relation to contributors and outside contributions.

There’s a lot of interest in a plugin system for Miro–it’s definitely on my list of things to work on in the near future. There’s also a lot of interest in a user interface that’s tv-friendly. That’s something I think about a lot, but it’s not something in my immediate queue.

I talked to Dave Camp on the work he’s doing on the new embedding API for Gecko–it sounds pretty cool.

Met a lot of happy Miro users. There are a lot of people out there rooting us on which is very exciting.

That’s the end of OSCON for me. I’m going to spend Friday hanging out with my sister and then I fly back on Saturday. It’s a pretty incredible conference all things considered. Met a lot of great people doing a lot of really fantastic work. It’s very inspiring.

I spent the day in the Mozilla booth in the Expo hall. I talked to 30 or 40 people, I think–after lunch it was kind of a blur; after dinner it was definitely a blur since the expo hall was serving free beer (or “free beer as in beer” as I said a couple of times which I thought was pretty funny, but went over like a lead balloon). There are a lot of Miro users at OSCON, a handful of people who have never heard of it, one or two people that thought it was still named Democracy Player, and I met Michael Frank who contributed code to Miro at some point before I was with the project!

I also talked with a lot of Mozilla people who came and went over the course of the day. Listening to Ben and Taras talk about static code analysis was really exciting. I talked to Stephen, Peter and Rob from Songbird. We spent some time talking about where Songbird and Miro overlap and what kinds of things we can work together on. The immediate result of this is that I’m going to start hanging out on their IRC channel and probably start looking over their code base. Additionally, Peter is working on a system of identifying media from RSS/Atom data. I’m hoping to help out since this is a problem Miro has, too, for some feeds.

I also go to see Asheesh and Nathan from Creative Commons and we had time to catch up on life and projects.

I went to the BoF session on addons for XUL-based applications. We talked about pain points in the extension-development process. Overall it was really educational both from the standpoint of how to write XUL-based application extensions as well as what kinds of things we need to focus on when we create a Miro plugin system. Songbird has an extension system–we should definitely look at what they’ve done given that they’re very close to us in application space. I also went to the BoF session on the static analysis project Ben and Taras are working on. Less because it’s applicable to anything I’m probably ever going to do, but more because it’s just mind-bogglingly interesting. They call it Dehydra.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow should be interesting, too.

I went to the convention center to check in today and run some errands. I have an Expo pass, so I’m not able to go to the tutorials, sessions, keynotes or some of the other things that were happening Monday and Tuesday. Even so, there seems to be plenty to do.

Amongst other things, I talked to someone about his Eee PC, I did some Miro hacking, I drew a Charlie Brown stripe on my laptop cover (it came out awesome!), I talked to iSneeze on IRC about plugins (I need to write up a post about plugins), and I discovered that there are 5 Starbucks locations on the 8-block walk from the convention center to one of the nearby Kinkos locations.

I was going to help Jay with the Mozilla booth setup, but they finished before I got in contact with them. Instead, I went to the FSF Portland Pizza Party which was really great. I talked with Mako and Asheesh both of whom I’ve known for many years from PyBlosxom. I also met Karen and Aaron from the SFLC and Deborah and Joshua from the FSF. I also met Gerv from Mozilla, too. And John Eckerman and a man named Charlie and a man whose name I think was Craig.

Everyone I talked to fell into one of two groups:

1. Either hadn’t heard of Miro or had, but didn’t use it
2. Avid user of Miro

I didn’t meet anyone who had heard of Miro and didn’t like it. It sounds like people are happy with Miro and look forward to the future of Internet video with open standards without gatekeepers that we envision. Also, several people mentioned that the content on the Channel Guide just keeps getting better.

While at the FSF pizza party, I became an associate member. The work that they’re doing is really beneficial to us all. They’re pushing for open media standards adoption, pushing for fixing the patent system in regards to software, fighting against DRM, and a variety of other causes. It’s important work that needs to be done for video on the Internet to be open to everyone.

I’ll be spending the next two days in the Mozilla booth. If you’re at OSCON, drop by and say hi!

On a side note, one year ago (i.e. the 12th of July, 2007), I started working at PCF. It’s been a really exciting year! Whee!

Following Paul’s lead, here are some cloc stats for Miro in trunk:

willg@mercury:~/pcf/miro/trunk/tv$ perl /home/willg/Desktop/cloc.pl .
    3468 text files.
classified 3457 files
    1644 unique files.
    2763 files ignored.

http://cloc.sourceforge.net v 1.04  T=20.0 s (35.2 files/s, 9438.1 lines/s)
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Language          files     blank   comment      code    scale   3rd gen. equiv
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Python              286      9689     10059     53376 x   4.20 =      224179.20
C/C++ Header        265      7941     14412     31565 x   1.00 =       31565.00
C++                  83      5474      4591     27832 x   1.51 =       42026.32
C                     9      1159       889     13119 x   0.77 =       10101.63
Javascript           17       420       557      2699 x   1.48 =        3994.52
CSS                  11       391       476      2451 x   1.00 =        2451.00
IDL                   7        18         0       486 x   3.80 =        1846.80
XML                  13         2         3       275 x   1.90 =         522.50
Bourne Shell          8       136       319       248 x   3.81 =         944.88
make                  1         7         0        94 x   2.50 =         235.00
HTML                  4         2         2        67 x   1.90 =         127.30
DTD                   1         0         0         3 x   1.90 =           5.70
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
SUM:                705     25239     31308    132215 x   2.41 =      317999.85
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I’m at FUDCON10 right now (Thursday, 6/19/2008). I’m interested in meeting people here and talking about Miro and Fedora TV. If you’re here, come find me. I’m currently hanging out in the main FUDCON room in the corner all by myself.

I was the Q&A person for the June 3rd chat yesterday and I thought I’d post some follow-up and answer some of the questions we didn’t get to.

Follow-up

First off, I thought the chat went well and it was neat to talk to a bunch of people I’d probably never talked to before. It seems that the predominant theme was “when are features landing?” and “what’s coming up?” It’s a little hard to answer those questions because I’ve been pretty focused on the next release that I haven’t been involved in planning beyond that.

Now to answer some questions that we didn’t have time for.

How long have you worked for PCF? What did you do before Miro?

I’ve been working at PCF since August 2007. This is in many ways my dream job with my only issue being that I wished I either earned a bit more money or had a lower cost of living. Other than that, I’m doing what I love doing, I get to hang out with some really great people, and the stuff we’re working on is really important to me.

I’m going to assume “What did you do before Miro?” means “What did you do before working at PCF?” Prior to PCF, I spent 2 years getting a Masters at Northeastern University CCIS in programming language design/theory and software engineering. Prior to that, I worked in the financial services industry at ByAllAccounts, I worked as a contractor for Tallan at Ingram Micro on their international web-site system, and various other software developer positions before that. I’ve been programming for probably 20 years now in various forms, but this is my first FOSS job and the first job where I’ve worked with XULRunner and GNU/Linux-stack components like Gtk+, GStreamer, Xine, Glade, DBus, Glib, GObject, … It’s been great!

shoestring: Video metadata: any plans to see miro actually writing it to the files/being able to edit it?

We’ve talked about making ui changes to allow for changing “metadata” of content, specifically name, filename, tags, … It hasn’t happened yet, though. I think it’s one of many things waiting for the great widget overhaul.

Miro can export feed information to OPML format, but this doesn’t include metadata about content. I don’t know offhand if there are plans to add that or not. There are plans on building an API to allow programs like MythTV and Elisa and other systems like that access to Miro data. That hasn’t happened yet, either. In this case, I think it just needs someone to work on it.

Evan: Is it possible to install miro without bittorrent? I know this question is weird, but in some (many?) companies bittorrent is banned … yet the company is ok with limited internet video usage.

We don’t have builds that don’t have bittorrent in them. It would take some work to decouple Miro from libtorrent and/or disable it and then it sounds like we’d have to provide a separate set of libtorrent-less builds. I don’t think that’s a bad idea, but I don’t think it’s going to happen without a champion who can do the work.

will: (seed question) What do you do when you’re not working on Miro-related things?

A little silly answering my own seed questions, but … so it goes.

Lately all I’ve been doing is Miro-related things. We’re pushing really hard on the next release. We’re really excited about it and we think it’s another big milestone in Miro’s life.

This year, I’m a backup admin for GSoC for the PSF thought I haven’t actually had to do much (yet).

I’ve been trying to finish up work on version 2.0 of PyBlosxom for the last 6 months but haven’t found time and energy to get there. I’ve been able to make some progress, but it seems to be on a permanent back-seat.

I’d really like to help Mozilla on their embedding efforts. I’d also really like to get more involved in gstreamer, Python 3000 and a bunch of other projects.

Epilogue

I think that’s about it. Given that the chat went pretty well all things considered, there will probably be another one in the future and probably more after that.