Will’s Miro dev blog

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.

I installed Hardy Heron alpha 5 in a VM and Miro doesn’t compile on it. Amongst other things, Hardy uses Firefox 3, so it’s likely we’ll have to make some code changes to account for that. I only spent 20 minutes with Hardy and Miro to see where things are at–no clue how much work is going to be involved.

I’d love to get someone(s) to help with working out the issues with Miro on Hardy before Hardy releases. If you’re interested in helping, leave a comment here, send me an email, or find me on IRC.

If no one helps out, then I’ll probably deal with supporting Hardy after Hardy is released.

I really didn’t like the theme I had. Trying out a new one….

I put out Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper builds for i386 for Miro 1.1.1 on Tuesday when we did the Miro 1.1.1 release. But… I’m using new scripts and I goofed up the miro-data package. I didn’t have time to figure out the problem, so I attempted to back out the Gutsy amd64 packages and in the process screwed up something else.

I thought I had it all working by Tuesday night, but there were a couple of users that were still experiencing “size mismatch” errors on the miro-data package. So I took some time today to figure out how to deal with the miro-data package I was building, roll up a set of Miro 1.1.1-3 packages for Gutsy i386 and amd64 and push everything out.

Theoretically there should be good Gutsy i386 and amd64 packages for Miro 1.1.1 in addition to the Feisty and Dapper i386 packages I rolled out Tuesday.

Sorry for the delays. I think things are straightened out now. If you’re still having problems feel free to leave a comment below and/or find me on IRC or by email.

Sedatg pointed out the archos-sync project. It’s a script that syncs the content between his Archos media player and Miro. More information at that link.

If anyone was interested in helping out on a syncing project to sync Miro content with devices, that’s probably a good one to help out with.

Anyone else know of similar projects that are building software to sync Miro content, convert content or port Miro to smaller devices? If so, please add a comment. The more exposure to these projects, the better.