Will’s Miro dev blog

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.

Back in December and January, I worked on some patches for Firefox 3 that enhanced the feed preview page. I wrote a post about it back then… but I’m updating that post with recent screenshots and a better description of the work. The previous post was mostly about how great FOSS is.

The patches fell into two big features. First, I added enclosure detection to the FeedProcessor and then modified FeedWriter to show enclosures alongside the entries. This has two huge benefits: it allows you to easily tell if the feed has enclosures and it allows you to see what they are, how big, what type of media, …

Second, I modified Firefox so that it allows you to associate video podcasts with an application, audio podcasts with another application, and all other kinds of feeds with a third application. The benefit here is that you can send media podcasts to an application that handles that well (*cough*Miro*cough*) and regular news feeds to a different application that handles that well.

Screenshot of Firefox 2 feed preview page:

Screenshot of Firefox 3 feed preview page:

Of the two features, I hear the most comments about the first one mostly along the lines of, “I’m so glad I don’t have to view source to see the enclosures anymore!” The second feature isn’t as immediately exciting. The implementation of distinguishing feeds is intentionally simple and there are a lot of corner cases where it doesn’t work very well. Also, there aren’t many applications that can really take advantage of it. I expect this second feature to flourish as Firefox development continues and video/audio podcasting evolves.

I updated my AMD64 machine to Hardy today and built a set of Miro 1.2.3 packages for Hardy AMD64. Going forward, I’ll continue to build packages for Gutsy and Hardy for both i386 and AMD64 platforms.

Miro 1.2.3 is the last release I’ll be doing packages for Dapper and Feisty.

If someone could help out by maintaining and testing packages for those two platforms and any others that we don’t cover, that’d be really great. Let me know in the comments, by email, or on IRC.

GStreamer has a lot of momentum behind it now and a lot of work has gone into it over the last year and it’s really paying off. As such, Miro 1.5 (the next version) will be the first version of Miro which defaults to the GStreamer renderer instead of the xine renderer. I’m excited about this change and in the future we’ll be able to drop support for xine which is one less complexity to deal with.

If you’re using the GStreamer renderer in Miro with either trunk or Miro 1.2.3 and discover any problems, let me know. It helps to write up a bug, but if you’re loathe to do that, comment here. Make sure you test with totem-gstreamer or some other GStreamer movie player as well and report those results–that helps us determine whether the problem lies with Miro or possibly elsewhere.

There are probably going to be a few rough edges in the switch and I could use any help I can get with them.

Miro 1.2.3 was supposed to be a minor bug-fix release which also had xulrunner 1.9 support for gtkx11. But then vlc 0.8.6f came out and we updated our Windows build to use that. But then we found a bunch of problems and many of those got fixed. But then I decided I might as well tackle support for YouTube’s mp4 versions. But then… but then… but then… two weeks and a lot of work from a lot of people later and we finally got Miro 1.2.3 out the door.

This is the first release I’ve built Ubuntu Hardy packages for. That’s cool–a lot of work went into that.

This is the last release I’ll be building Ubuntu Dapper and Feisty packages for. If there are still Dapper and Feisty users out there (and I’m sure there are), hopefully a champion will arise from your midst and set up a PPA to support you.

I really want to thank Markus, Uwe, Janet, Ben, Chris, Luc, Paul, Dean, Sedat, all the other people who hang out on #miro-hackers, the bug reporters, the testers, the translators and everyone else involved in the last three weeks of work flurry that resulted in Miro 1.2.3.

Having said that, there were a bunch of bugs that were discovered and triaged to the next release. I wasn’t able to get a Fedora 9 virtual machine working in VirtualBox and wasn’t able to help them out with their Miro packaging problems. I also wasn’t able to spend time with my Debian Lenny virtual machine and help Uwe with his packaging.

In summary, there was a lot of stuff that was done which is great and a bunch of stuff left on the floor until the next version which is a bummer.

Onwards to the next release….

Did a release of Miro 1.2.3 rc0 today. This fixes some problems with Miro on Windows, adds xulrunner 1.9 support for gtkx11, works on Hardy (with Hardy packages, too), fixes a problem with external torrents disappearing, and other things as well. I also did another translation sync today, so it’s got the most up-to-date translations available.

The release candidate is available at http://pculture.org/nightlies/.

Hardy packages available in our Hardy repository. Details at http://getmiro.com/download/ubuntu.php.

If you’re eager to help Miro with code contributions, but don’t know where to start, take a look at bugs marked with the bitesized keyword in Bugzilla.

You can see a list of them here.

This week I fixed some bugs, worked on some bugs that I didn’t get anywhere with, and finally tagged and released Miro 1.2 rc0.

I also did some work with getting Miro on Gutsy to compile against xulrunner 1.9 in the backports repository. I was basing the work on the set of packages the Ubuntu people maintain. There are some changes in there I don’t understand the relevance of and their changelog isn’t very helpful. I pinged Fabien, but haven’t heard anything back from him.

As a side note, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in this feeling, Windows bugs really suck and take gobs and gobs of time to work through.