Earlier this month I got to FOSDEM in Brussels for the first time. Below is how I remember it. Overall it has been great.

I quickly learned to look for a different room when there was a queue at the door. But this once I decided to wait in queue, hoping somebody would get out so I can enter. I and the person in front of me got close to the door, but unfortunately we did not get in. Luckily the next speaker and his colleague were also waiting, so we got a 1-1 (or more accurately 2 on 2) on quantum computing. That was quite cool.

In the Pitivi video editor, the viewer is quite important, as it shows the video. Our viewer also shows a discreet frame around a clip selected in the timeline, making it easy to resize and position the video of the clip by dragging. Below is the story of the viewer updates in the past year.

Easy resizing

It was a bit cumbersome to have to drag both the left and bottom margins of the viewer container to resize it. We thought it would be easier to resize the viewer by simply dragging the bottom-left corner of its container. Harish Fulara made time at the end of his GSoC 2018 internship for this, after he finished his main task, and it works great! — 25609f3a

In Pitivi, the ruler is displayed above the timeline to show the times corresponding with the current view. A series of H:MM:SS.XXX timestamps on a ruler might leave the impression that only trained professionals are supposed to use it. I had trouble reading the timestamps and looked for ways to make the ruler more useful. Read below for the story.

Relevant parts

Around the New Year 2013-2014 I thought about highlighting the relevant parts in the timestamp. For example, if you have 0:00:05.000 and then 0:00:10.000, you have to look quite a bit until you notice what changes from one to the other. In this case the “10” should be highlighted because that’s different than the previous timestamp. This way it’s easier to see what an interval represents. Jeff liked the idea and the commit went in.

x264 has a few generic encoding presets you can use when rendering. You can see the list of presets and exactly what encoding options they specify by running x264 --fullhelp. You’ll most probably notice the following presets: ultrafast, superfast, veryfast, faster, fast, medium, slow, slower, veryslow. Ideally you’d always use veryslow when rendering, but you can't always wait for it to finish, so you go for faster ones. The ffmpeg wiki summarizes the difference between these presets:\

Using Bugzilla to manage Pitivi was a bit painful and we were looking for a replacement. Many projects seemed to switch to Phabricator lately, which looked like a very good platform for managing projects. We experimented migrating Bugzilla bugs to Phabricator, and we are pretty content with the result. The UI is nicer, we have a better search function, and the Git integration (with the code review component works great.

We decided to make the switch official, so we updated the documentation on the wiki and website to link to Phabricator, closed the Pitivi Bugzilla “product” and closed the remaining bugs in Bugzilla with a custom made script. The script also linked each bug to the proper task in Phabricator.

Read the first part on Jeff’s blog: The War Against Deadlocks, part 1: The story of our new thread-safe mixing elements implementation

GNonLin has served our cause well for a number of years, but was left with indelible marks from the Old World. We grew increasingly worried with GNonLin’s common affiliation with Deadlocks, to the point where it was known as “the Baron of Deadlocks” by our battalion. We tried correcting it, tried reasoning with it, but alas—we only got “not-negotiated” caps errors.

Supybot is an IRC bot, an application which can connect to a specific IRC channel and do stuff there. For example, with the Bugzilla plugin, Supybot can report on the channel whenever a new bug is filed, or if somebody mentions “bug 1234” in the conversation, it will print details about bug 1234.

Install supybot

First, you have to install Supybot. If you are using Arch Linux, get supybot from AUR, otherwise read the INSTALL file.