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.

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. Pitivi ruler, Dec 2013 Relevant parts Around the New Year 2013-2014 I thought about highlighting the relevant parts in the timestamp.

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.

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.