Various performance and usability improvements in PiTiVi1 min read

I have been attending the Desktop Summit since the opening on Saturday, and it’s been a great experience reconnecting with familiar faces and meeting new ones. Tomorrow, the PiTiVi and GES hackfest officially begins, in room “1.308/2” (the building is at 24 Dorotheen Straße). Come join us at any time of the day (and since we’re slightly insane, we might also end up continuing hacking during the evenings too). This lasts until Friday.
Although the hackfest officially starts tomorrow, we obviously could not resist the temptation to get started in the past two days.

So today I merged a couple of branches, bringing the following improvements:

• Fix the infamous performance bug/hang when deleting many clips at once.
• Respect GNOME’s button icons setting (I previously blogged about this, thanks to the commenters who pointed out a better way to achieve this)
• Cleanup the preference dialog’s contents and reorganize some of the settings into a new “Performance” category.
• Significantly improve performance by limiting the amount of thumbnails generated for each video clip in the timeline. This is configurable in the preferences; by default, it is set to one thumbnail per second of video (the best balance between performance and usability, according to my benchmarks). This makes a huge difference when zooming in the timeline.
• Properly attach the label to checkbuttons for dynamic “ToggleWidgets”. This means that the autogenerated checkboxes in PiTiVi’s preferences and codec settings dialogs don’t look like crap anymore.
• Attach tooltips to the various settings in the preferences dialog.
• Various other small fixes.

Almost all pending branches have been merged. When that’s done, we will probably make a new release this week and then start the “heavy roadwork”. Stay tuned for news on what we’ve been working on (and what will come out of this week’s hackfest).