An update from the Pitivi 2014 summer battlefront5 min read

Hello gentle readers! You may have been wondering what has been going on since the 0.93 release and the Pitivi fundraising campaign. There are a few reasons why we’ve been quiet on the blogging side this summer:

• Mathieu and Thibault have been working hard to bring us towards “1.0 quality”, improving and stabilizing various parts of GStreamer to make the backend of Pitivi more reliable (more details on this further below). They preferred to write code rather than spending their time doing marketing/fundraising. This is understandable, it is a better use of our scarce specialized resources.
• Personally, I have been juggling with many obligations (my daily business, preparing for the conferences season, serving on the board of the GNOME Foundation, and Life in General), which left me with pretty much no time or energy to do development on marketing-related activities on Pitivi, just enough to participate in some discussions and help with administration/co-mentorship a bit. I did not have time to research blogging material about what others were doing, hence the lack of status updates in recent times.

Now that I finally have a little bit of time on my hands, I will provide you with the overdue high-level status update from the trenches.

GUADEC, status of the 2014 fundraiser

For the curious among you, my account of GUADEC 2014 is here. Among the multiple presentations I gave there, my main talk was about Pitivi. I touched upon the status of the fundraiser in my talk; however, the recordings are not yet available, so I’ll share some select notes on this topic here:

• Personally, I’ve always thought that, to be worth it, we should raise 200 thousand dollars per year, minimum (you’ll be able to hear the explanation for this belief of mine in the economic context I presented in my talk).
• For this fundraiser, we aimed for a “modest” minimum target of 35k and an “optimistic” target of 100k. So, much less than 200k.
• Early on after the campaign launch, we had to scale back on hopes of hitting the “optimistic” target and set 35k as the new “maximum” we could expect, as it became clear from the trend that we would not reach 100k.
• Eventually, the fundraiser reached its plateau, at approximately 19K €, a little bit over half of our base target.

We had a flexible funding scheme, a great website and fundraising approach, we have the reputation and the skills to deliver, we had one of the best run campaigns out there (we actually got praised on that)… and yet, it seems that was not enough. After four months spent preparing and curating our fundraiser, at one point we had to reassess our priorities and focus on “more urgent” things than full-time fundraising: improving code, earning a living, etc. Pushing further would have meant many more months of energy-draining marketing work which, as mentioned in the introduction of this post, was not feasible or productive for us at that point in time. Our friends at MediaGoblin certainly succeeded, in big part through their amazing focus and persistence (Chris Webber spent three months writing substantial motivational blog posts twice a week and applying for grants to achieve his goal. Think about it: fourteen blog articles!).
Okay so now you’re thinking, “But you still got a bit of money, so what have you guys done with that?”. We’ve accomplished some great QA/bugfixing work, just not as fast or as extensively as we’d like to. Pitivi 1.0 will happen but, short of seeing a large amount of donations, it will take more time to reach that goal (unless people step up with patches :).

What Mathieu & Thibault have been up to

For starters, they set up a continuous integration and multi-platform build system for quality assurance.
Then they worked on the GStreamer video mixer, basically doing a complete rework of our mixing stack, and made the beast thread-safe… this is supposed to fix a ton of deadlocks related to videomixing that were killing our user experience by causing frequent freezes. They are preparing a blog post specifically on this topic, but in the meantime you can see some gory details by looking at these commits they landed in GStreamer so far (more are on the way, pending review):

• Add new GstAggregator base class
• Create a new GstVideoAggregator baseclass
• Port glmixer to the GstVideoAggregator baseclass
• Add a new compositor based on the new GstVideoAggregator base class
• Port the audiomixer to GstAggregator (bug report)

Then they pretty much rewrote all of GNonLin with a different, simpler design, and integrated it directly into GES under a new name: “NLE” (Non Linear Engine):

The only part that survived from GNonLin, as far as I know, is the tree data structure generation. So, with “NLE” in GES, deadlocks from GNonLin should be a thing of the past; seeking around should be much more reliable and not cause freezes like it used to. This is still a major chunk of code: it represents around six thousand lines of new code in GES. Work is ongoing in this branch, expected to be completed and merged sometime in October, so I’m waiting to see what comes out of it in practice.
This is in addition to crazy bugs like bug 736896 and our regular bug fixing operations. See also the Pitivi tracker bug for GTK3, introspection and GST1 bugs and the Pitivi tracker bug for Python3 port issues.

The way forward

Now that a big chunk of the hardcore backend work has been done, Thibault and Mathieu will be able to focus on Pitivi (the UI) again. Here is the rough plan for coming months:

1. “Scenarios” in Pitivi: each action from the user would be serialized (saved) as GstValidateScenario actions, allowing us to easily reproduce issues and bugs that you encounter.
2. Go over the list of all reported Pitivi bugs and fix a crapton of them!
3. At some point, we will call upon you to help us with extensive testing (including reporting the bugs and discussing with us to investigate them). We will then continue fixing bugs, release often and make sure we reach the quality you can expect of a 1.0 release.

More news to come