News

Auto alignment and precise waveforms.

Object tracking, beat detection and Clip Properties enhancements.

Media Library clips tagging.

Bug fixes.

Lots of new features.

Welcome to Abhishek, Ayush and Vivek who join Pitivi as part of the Google Summer of Code.

The Pitivi video editor is based on the GStreamer Editing Services library (GES). Various projects use GES to manage audio or video projects and export the project to a new file to be distributed. Pitivi is developed in very close contact with GES. Both Pitivi and GES would benefit a lot from better documentation. We’re applying to the Season of Docs program, where Google pays technical writers to contribute to open-source projects.

Pitivi 1.0 is scheduled to be released on Monday, May 20th. All the important bugs we were aware of have been fixed. To fix one of the last issues, Thibault very recently rewrote the timeline/layers/clips management in GES, and this might have introduced new bugs. While we have lots of tests which all pass, they don’t cover everything. We ask you to test the 1.0 RC! Grab a bunch of video files shot with your phone or camera and make some video out of them, trying various features.

The Pitivi video editor is based on the GStreamer Editing Services library. GES makes it easy to manage the timeline of a video project and export it to a new video file, and is carefully built to be reusable by other projects, not only Pitivi. Since a few years ago, while not mentoring students for GSoC, we’ve been busy working on Pitivi 1.0, about to be released. A large part of this was spent on fixing and improving the GES library.

Emerging from the long history of the video broadcast industry, there are legacy standards which specify rectangular pixels instead of square pixels. Yes, really! According to Wikipedia, non-square pixels originate in early digital TV standards: The term pixel aspect ratio was first coined when ITU-R BT.601 (commonly known as “Rec. 601”) specified that standard-definition television pictures are made of lines of exactly 720 non-square pixels. Today, we’re announcing that we will no longer support rendering non-square pixels.

Three years ago we switched our bug tracker from Bugzilla to Freedesktop’s Phabricator instance. As very few projects were using it, the maintenance cost was too high for the gain, so the current plan is to obsolete it. Phabricator worked well for us, but now we say bye. Luckily for us, GNOME hosts a GitLab instance since last year. We just migrated the Phabricator tasks to it and now we’re at https://gitlab.

We’re proud to release the first Pitivi 1.0 release candidate “Ocean Big Chair” (0.99). This release has many bug fixes and performance improvements, and is a release candidate for 1.0. Our test suite grew considerably, from 164 to 191 meaningful unit tests. You can install it right away using Flatpak. GSoC Early on this year, we got caught up in the Google Summer of Code. A lot of students hacked on Pitivi this spring, to get to know Pitivi better.

We’re excited to have three students that will contribute to Pitivi this summer. Congratulations, Fabián Orccón, Suhas Nayak and Ștefan-Adrian Popa! Fabián already had an internship with us two years ago. He’ll focus on a plugin system with great documentation for video hackers, and a first plugin for inspecting the timeline of the currently opened project in a Python console (T3193). Suhas will focus on a modern color correction UI for the corresponding GStreamer plugin, and lay the path for similar changes to other effects (T2372).

This is another release focused on fixing bugs and improving stability. Improved timeline We switched our official build to use GTK 3.22 and the framework did not like how we were using it, spamming us with warnings in the console. We fixed those and improved the timeline in the process and added more unit tests. It was quite a journey. Initially, the GTK Inspector was useful to figure out which widgets the widget IDs in the warnings identified.

Distributing apps as packages (deb, rpm, etc) is problematic. For example, the Pitivi package depends on the GTK package and Pitivi 0.95 broke in the distributions which updated to GTK version 3.20, because of the incorrect way we were using a virtual method. This is not the first time something like this happens. To avoid the slippery dependencies problem, two years ago we started making universal daily builds.They allowed everybody to run the latest Pitivi easily by downloading a large binary containing the app and all the dependencies.

Besides the usual cleanup and bug squashing, this release brings a fundamental feature which greatly improves the edit experience. Now you can edit and render a video project with any video files with great accuracy, thanks to proxy files. Proxy editing: fast and accurate editing with any video format The harsh reality of this world is that there is only a limited set of formats that really work well for video editing.

Good news everyone ! This is the first blog post of a series of updates about our latest development efforts in GStreamer / gst-editing-services / Pitivi. This post’s focus will be on MPEG transport stream, a format now nearly twenty years old, originally developed and still widely used for and by the broadcasting industry. In the mid-2000s, some people decided it would be a great idea to use this format in camcorders, stuffed a rather useless timestamp in there for good measure and started to ship AVCHD camcorders like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

The Pitivi community is very happy to announce the availability of easy to use, distro-independent Linux bundles to test latest version of the application. This eliminates dependency problems and allows quicker testing cycles. Our entire stack is bundled, so the only requirement is glibc ≥ 2.13. Simply Download the bundle and run it! This is the first delivery of the Pitivi Fundraiser—as you can see, we are already well on our way to deliver what has been promised in our detailed planning.

Last week-end, part of the Pitivi Team went to the GStreamer Hackfest in Google’s offices in Munich to work with twenty other GStreamer hackers on various important technical issues. A big thanks to Google and Stefan Sauer for hosting the event! Keep your eyes peeled: we will soon blog the results of the work the Pitivi team has accomplished during the hackfest. During the hackfest a very important milestone has been reached: the first GStreamer Editing Services, GNonLin and gst-python stable versions in the 1.

Greetings Pitivi supporters! We hope everyone had a great week! We’ve had a rather hectic one, and hopefully that’s just the beginning. This is the first update for our fundraising campaign, be sure to check our blog weekly for more ;) Announcement! We are happy to announce that the GStreamer maintainers decided to show us their faith and support, by allocating 2 500 € to our project from GStreamer funds! This is great news for several reasons:

This is a very good example of what our developers can do! There has been some preliminary work on bringing slow and fast motion to GStreamer and Pitivi, and a plugin has been created to allow for frame interpolation, which means you and I with our regular 24 frames per second cameras will be able to get smooth slowmotion from Pitivi in the future! All that work has not yet been merged and thoroughly tested, and we need your help to make it happen!

During the creation of the campaign, we debated what kind of perks we should offer. The thing is, we are not t-shirt creators, we are software developers and UI designers. We believe people who give us money do so in order for us to develop a good software, and thus we tried to focus on perks that made real sense. What could we offer to the community that would help us in making the software that they truly want?

Today we’re thrilled to announce a crowdfunding campaign to support the development of Pitivi! We have made the choice not to use one of the major crowdfunding platforms such as kickstarter for multiple reasons, and instead partner with the GNOME foundation, which is ideologically aligned with us and will support our financial infrastructure. We are proud of that partnership, as we share their objective of “creating a free software computing platform for the general public”, and the foundation is excited as well: