Tricks or Tracebacks? Pitivi 0.94 is here3 min read

Dear werepenguins, we’re thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Pitivi 0.94! This is the fourth release for the new version of our video editor based on GES, the GStreamer Editing Services library. Take a look at my previous blog post to understand in what context 0.94 has been brewing. This is mainly a maintenance release, but it does pack a few interesting improvements & features in addition to the bug fixes.
The first thing you will notice is that the main toolbar, menubar and titlebar have been replaced by a unified GTK HeaderBar, saving a ton of precious vertical space and making better use of the horizontal space. Once you try it, you can’t go back. There is beauty in the equilibrium it has now, compared to the previously clunky and unbalanced layout:

The combined screenshot above allows you to get the “complete picture” of how this change affects the main window, but it’s hard to get a sense of scale and it does not really do justice to the awesomeness of client-side decorations like the GTK HeaderBar. So here’s a simplified version where all the “wasted space” is highlighted in red:

Pretty rad, huh?
Beyond that eye-popping novelty, many distro/setup-dependent startup crashes have been investigated and fixed:

• Various Linux distributions have started shipping a broken version of CoGL in recent months, which led to crashes. Technically this is a bug in the CoGL library/packaging, but we found out that the functions we were calling in that particular case were not needed for Pitivi, so we dropped our use of those broken CoGL APIs. Problem solved.
• People running Pitivi outside of GNOME Shell were seeing crashes due to Clutter GStreamer video output, so we ported the viewer widget to use GStreamer’s new GL video output (glimagesink) instead of the ClutterSink. We had to fix various bugs in GStreamer’s glimagesink to raise it to the quality we needed, and our fixes have been integrated in GStreamer 1.4 (this is why we depend on that version). The GL image sink is expected to be a more future-proof solution.
• We found issues related to gobject introspection or the overrides provided by gst-python. Again, make sure you have version 1.4 for things to work properly.
• On avant-garde Linux distributions, you would get a TypeError traceback (“unsupported operand type(s) for /: ‘int’ and ‘NoneType”) preventing startup, which we investigated as bug 735529. This is now fixed in Pitivi.

We also have a collection of bug fixes to the way we handle the various resizeable & detachable components of the main window:

• The default positioning of UI components (when starting from a fresh install) has been improved to be balanced properly
• Undocked window components do not shift position on startup anymore
• Docked window components do not shift position on startup anymore, when the window is not maximized. When the window is maximized, the issue remains (your help to investigate this problem is very much welcome, see bug 723061)

The title editor’s UI has been simplified and works much more reliably:

Also:

• Undo/redo should be globally working again; please file specific bug reports for the parts that don’t.
• Pitivi has been ported to Python 3
• The user manual is now up to date with the state of the new Pitivi series
• Educational infobars throughout the UI have been tweaked to make their colors less intrusive
• Various other fixes as usual. Testing and providing detailed reports for issues you encounter certainly helps!
• There’s more. Find out in the release notes for 0.94!

This release is meant to be the last release based on our current “buggy stack”; indeed, as I mentioned in my previous status update, the next release (0.95) will run on top of a refined and incredibly more robust backend thanks to the work that Mathieu and Thibault have been doing to replace GNonLin by NLE (the new non-linear engine for GES) and fixing videomixing issues.
We recommend all 0.91/0.92/0.93 users to upgrade to this release. Until this trickles down into distributions, you can download our all-in-one bundle and try out 0.94, right here and now. Enjoy!