Edward Hervey (unregistered) wrote:

what a depressing post (in some aspects). I’ll answer the various questions/comments/rants all the same.

* PiTiVi doesn’t support DV/mpeg4/whatever-format
Where did you get that idea from ? PiTiVi doesn’t come shipped with codecs, it relies on GStreamer to provide the needed plugins/decoders/etc… If you load a DV file in pitivi and you don’t have the plugins, the application missing-plugin system should appear proposing you to download the needed plugin.

* Collabora pushed PiTiVi aggresively into ubuntu
That’s 100% totally wrong. I personally had chats with Jono and Rick Spencer about having PiTiVi shipped as a default application, and canonical were interested by the idea of having a video editor shipped by default. All of this was far from being enforced, or us (Collabora) going out of our way to have PiTiVi shipped by default. And nothing’s engraved in stone at this point. If we (pitivi development team) get feedback/help on improving what’s bothering people by the Lucid release date and people deem it good enough to be shipped by default, great ! If we get no help… well.. PiTiVi won’t die and people will still be able to use it via PPAs.

* Why ship PiTiVi as default app and not another video editor
I’d say the main reason is that all the dependencies (except for goocanvas, which is pretty slim) are already shipped by default : GStreamer, GTK, python. All the other editors would require bringing in more dependencies. I’ll let Canonical/Ubuntu confirm that or not.

* lack of features …
On this part we have always taken the stand of making sure features are as solid as possible before adding new features. In terms of video editing, that means you do need to have input/output format support rock solid, trimming/cutting rock solid. Check out how many clips/movies/documentaries/… out there and see how much of them make use of video effects, for how long, and how many don’t.
The two features we find critically missing are : video transitions and overlaying. I just merged yesterday the videomixing branch yesterday to master which enables setting transparency on every video streams (like Sony Vegas does). It still has some issues, but having it in master will force/speedup the bugfixing process.
Video effects are not a top-priority. Getting those… without being able to do the features above are pointless. We won’t diverge from that point of view. Helping us get the above rock solid as fast as possible … will mean you will see video effects faster.

* To people throwing generic rants about sucking
Write a video editor (or any non-trivial multimedia applicatoin), then come back and rant about other people’s application sucking. Then we might have a proper discussion. In the meantime… you’re not improving the situation.

* PiTiVi is dead or no longer maintained
The 3 main developers (who also happen to be hired by Collabora and that includes myself) have been working on some other company work in the meantime. Keeping Collabora hiring those 3 developers, means ensuring they have time to be paid to work on it also. (I’d personnaly love to have people working 100% of the time on PiTiVi … but you need to take into account the reality of running a business).
We’re progressively getting more company time for PiTiVi (Brandon has been back on it full time for the past frew weeks for example). It’s far from being abandoned/dead, just that we do it at our own pace. It’s freely available (LGPL, no copryight attributions required) and will always stay that way. We always welcome contributions and are pretty fast to review/commit patches.

Drop in on #pitivi on irc.freenode.net or send us a mail on pitivi-pitivi@lists.sourceforget.net and come and give your feedback, what can be improved, what’s good and should be kept and … who knows … be part of the pitivi team :)

Edward Hervey: PiTiVi creator/maintainer, GStreamer hacker, Collabora Multimedia co-director

Link to comment: http://disq.us/43ri7

* PiTiVi doesn’t support DV/mpeg4/whatever-format
Where did you get that idea from ? PiTiVi doesn’t come shipped with codecs, it relies on GStreamer to provide the needed plugins/decoders/etc… If you load a DV file in pitivi and you don’t have the plugins, the application missing-plugin system should appear proposing you to download the needed plugin.

* Collabora pushed PiTiVi aggresively into ubuntu
That’s 100% totally wrong. I personally had chats with Jono and Rick Spencer about having PiTiVi shipped as a default application, and canonical were interested by the idea of having a video editor shipped by default. All of this was far from being enforced, or us (Collabora) going out of our way to have PiTiVi shipped by default. And nothing’s engraved in stone at this point. If we (pitivi development team) get feedback/help on improving what’s bothering people by the Lucid release date and people deem it good enough to be shipped by default, great ! If we get no help… well.. PiTiVi won’t die and people will still be able to use it via PPAs.

* Why ship PiTiVi as default app and not another video editor
I’d say the main reason is that all the dependencies (except for goocanvas, which is pretty slim) are already shipped by default : GStreamer, GTK, python. All the other editors would require bringing in more dependencies. I’ll let Canonical/Ubuntu confirm that or not.

* lack of features …
On this part we have always taken the stand of making sure features are as solid as possible before adding new features. In terms of video editing, that means you do need to have input/output format support rock solid, trimming/cutting rock solid. Check out how many clips/movies/documentaries/… out there and see how much of them make use of video effects, for how long, and how many don’t.
The two features we find critically missing are : video transitions and overlaying. I just merged yesterday the videomixing branch yesterday to master which enables setting transparency on every video streams (like Sony Vegas does). It still has some issues, but having it in master will force/speedup the bugfixing process.
Video effects are not a top-priority. Getting those… without being able to do the features above are pointless. We won’t diverge from that point of view. Helping us get the above rock solid as fast as possible … will mean you will see video effects faster.

* To people throwing generic rants about sucking
Write a video editor (or any non-trivial multimedia applicatoin), then come back and rant about other people’s application sucking. Then we might have a proper discussion. In the meantime… you’re not improving the situation.

* PiTiVi is dead or no longer maintained
The 3 main developers (who also happen to be hired by Collabora and that includes myself) have been working on some other company work in the meantime. Keeping Collabora hiring those 3 developers, means ensuring they have time to be paid to work on it also. (I’d personnaly love to have people working 100% of the time on PiTiVi … but you need to take into account the reality of running a business).
We’re progressively getting more company time for PiTiVi (Brandon has been back on it full time for the past frew weeks for example). It’s far from being abandoned/dead, just that we do it at our own pace. It’s freely available (LGPL, no copryight attributions required) and will always stay that way. We always welcome contributions and are pretty fast to review/commit patches.

Drop in on #pitivi on irc.freenode.net or send us a mail on pitivi-pitivi@lists.sourceforget.net and come and give your feedback, what can be improved, what’s good and should be kept and … who knows … be part of the pitivi team :)

Edward Hervey: PiTiVi creator/maintainer, GStreamer hacker, Collabora Multimedia co-director

Latest pitivi is completely broken in git, and nobody has time to work on it.

And I just tried using it again after a couple of months of no-go, and it seems to be working for me, at least for now. Not sure what changed, but if I could freeze everything as-is, I would! It’s the on-again, off-again that makes me nervous.

https://launchpad.net/~jonoomph/+archive/openshot-edge

“WARNING: Our PPA uses a special version of FFmpeg, which does not work with VLC & Totem, and a few other movie players. This is due to how we are packaging FFmpeg in our PPA. We are working to fix this, but if you install via the PPA, you will not be able to run VLC at this time”

Thanks, but no thanks. I need VLC.

A passionate team of developers that put their hearts in their projects, sometimes or most of the times, make better projects. And they really listen to their communities, that counts!

But downloading the debs have worked fine for me!

To think PiTiVi has two paid developers and OpenShot has none yet look at which is better…

By the looks on the screenshot Pitivi is the one with a bad UI, OpenShot looks more modern and sleeker.