Hi peeps,
I've been having some problems getting the development branch of moovida
set-up and running according to the instructions at
http://www.moovida.com/documentation/tutorials/ubuntu-8.04.html. Before
I spend an age hacking at this is there anything significant that has
changed (or been omitted) from those instructions (I'm on ubuntu 9.04)?
I DID at one point find a different command to get the development tree
(compared to that in that document and in the hack page on the main
site) using a different path but I can't seem to find that page again so
I'm also wondering if I'm indeed looking at the development branch....
I should also ask, if I am running from a remote shell with the display
exported, should I be expecting a blank screen (the splash displays but
moovida doesn't) when I start the development version of moovida from
that shell? I've no problems doing this with the live version.....
The above notwithstanding, I've spent a few days hacking the
video_parser.py in-order to get my library recognised. It's an
assortment of anime, TV and movies coming from various sources and
**probably** typical of most users content. I've gone from the 1.05
version having 10-20% of the content being recognised and added to the
movie/tv show libraries (with 80% uncategorised), to @90% being
categorised with most of the content that is being problematic being so
for understandable reasons. I'd like to submit a patch at some point (I
need to tidy my code and I wouldn't mind knocking a few of the outlying
cases on the head first) - is it acceptable to submit patches to this
list rather than going the bzr route?
Lastly, the single biggest problem I have with using moovida as my main
HTPC "platform" is the lack of video controls. On my main display there
are a few problems with the video coming out of gstreamer:
1) It's too dark. I'm comparing this to the video that
mplayer will output with the default settings and there is a definite
loss of video quality. I'm really noticing this because I bought a
Panasonic 50" G10 a few weeks ago and have been constantly playing with
the settings to get the "best" quality picture out of it.
2) Lack of aspect/zoom controls. I HATE black bars with
a vengeance (I know, I'm a philistine) so I will usually zoom or change
the aspect ratio until I'm happy.
Now I've been looking at how moovida handles video playback and finally
found some examples of how to add additional filters into the playbin
pipeline (http://pygstdocs.berlios.de/pygst-tutorial/playbin.html - this
is my first time working with gstreamer) and I was thinking that I would
try adding the videobalance plugin and just hooking in some keys to
increase or decrease each value. If this worked I could also look at
zooming/aspect control with the videobox/videocrop plugins.
Alternatively, I had a quick look at how totem implements their
brightness, contrast etc controls and presumed I could adopt a similar
strategy of using gstcolorbalance. I also found an example with pigment
(https://code.fluendo.com/pigment/trac/browser/branches/pigment-tests/pi
gment-python/examples/colormatrix.py) and I was wondering if there was
anything else in pigment which might "do the trick" for changing basic
settings.
The point of the above is to ask a) is there anyone working on this sort
of features at the moment and if not b) would it NOT be a waste of my
time to work on it? I've only a few hours each week to work on personal
projects so it will take me a while to hack this and I don't want to
have something working in a few months only to find that the core
developers managed to add something in a few hours of their time ;) And
if it is worth me working on this can anyone suggest which would be the
best strategy of the above or suggest an alternate approach?
So, sorry , longer than I thought and I hope that I can at least
contribute something of a little use to this project since I want it as
my main HTPC platform. I really love the front end, absolutely brilliant
work, and the code behind it also looks wonderful (so nice to read code
and understand what's going on).
Regards
Lee
