Results from the hackfest3 min read

I had a fantastic week at the PiTiVi+GES hackfest and desktop summit in Berlin. Over the course of the past few days, we polished and merged some more features and bug fixes in your favorite video editor.
Lubosz’s “transformation” branch has now been merged and allows insanely sexy and efficient panning/resizing/cropping of your video clips, as you can see in the video below (or, alternatively, this video):

“Sup dawg, I heard you like cropping and resizing, so I cropped and resized your screencast so you can render a video about the feature you just used to render”

Anyway, please test and abuse this feature, it is certain to have some bugs. I created a new “viewer” category in bugzilla for problems you may encounter with this new part of the user interface. Also:

• The new Mallard user manual has finally been integrated into the application. Now, if you click the Help button, Yelp shows up with my awesome topic-centric and easily searchable user documentation (make sure to use Yelp 3.0 or newer). In case of failure, it shows the user manual on the website.
• Pitivi now properly saves metadata (project title, author, year, etc.) in the project files, thanks to Stéphane Maniaci’s patch.
• Since some distributions (like Ubuntu) prefer to bundle as few libraries/dependencies as possible, I implemented a “soft dependencies manager” feature. If you are missing some packages to get the “full experience” (such as numpy, frei0r, etc.), a button will show up in the Welcome dialog or when you try to use those features. Currently, it only shows a dialog listing the missing dependencies, but there is a provision in depsmanager.py to allow installing the packages directly using PackageKit (or perhaps to allow distributions to send us a patch to support their particular system…).
• Stéphane has started work on porting to PyGI/GTK3, with a hilarious amount of swear words in his commit messages.
• Mathieu, Thibault and Luis have been coding furiously on GES to make it usable for PiTiVi. It should reach feature parity soon.
• Had the wiki migrated to a different server the database repaired. Hopefully I’ll have time to fix up the permissions (lockdown the thing completely to fight spammers) and to do some cleanup of the contents, but this will take some time.
• Discussed a bit the idea of having a donation system for PiTiVi and what to do with the money. I guess I should try to get in touch with the GNOME Foundation and see if they could handle donations for our project…

In addition to that, we did a lot of the following:

• Eat hamburgers and frozen yogurts
• Drink Club-Mate (thanks, Intel)
• Gesture wildly while discussing the architecture of GES
• Curse the flaky conference WiFi
• Draw pretty diagrams on whiteboards:

I took some more pictures (here and here) and 8 GB worth of videos. I’ll try to edit a nice video retrospective of the hackfest+summit and publish it for your enjoyment soon.

For the time being, I must try to catch up on the neverending flood of emails, blog posts, commits to test, and somehow lead a normal life:

I would like to thank the GNOME Foundation for having sponsored me (and so many other open source contributors) to go to the Desktop Summit and PiTiVi+GES hackfest. The time the PiTiVi guys have been able to spend together has been invaluable both in social and programming terms. The discussions and whiteboards we had were the equivalent of six months of IRC conversations.
I should also mention Wonderpots frozen yogurts for being a very hackfest-friendly place with reliable WiFi, coffee, delicious yogurt and flexible business hours. And they play hits from the 80’s. What more could you ask for?