PCF Testing

* Updated links for Miro 3.0 – Release Candidate 3

Miro 3.0 Release Candidate 3 is now available on the nightly builds page for testing:

• windows,
• mac,
• source.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the new features and how they work.

Subtitles

Whether embedded or external, subtitles display be enabled and disabled during playback. The feature is implemented for all operating systems and more technical details are available.

To display embedded or sidecar subtitle files:

1. Start playback on a video file.
2. Click the Playback -> Subtitles menu, or the Subtitles icon on the playbar.
3. Available languages or tracks are displayed for selection.
4. Choose the file and subtitles will display.

To choose a subtitle file from a location on your system:

1. Start playback on a video file.
2. Click the Playback -> Subtitles menu, or the Subtitles icon on the playbar.
3. Choose the Select a Subtitles Files… option and browse to the subtitle file.
4. While you are looking for the file, playback will pause, and resume when the selection is made.

There is also a global preference available to automatically display or disable subtitle files.

Edit Cataloged Items

Users are now provided with greater control over how items are displayed in the Library. This is useful to change titles, provide better descriptions or change the audio or video classification. To edit an item:

1. Select the item
2. From the File (Video) menu, select Edit Item, or right-click and select Edit Item from the context menu.
3. In the Edit item dialog, you can modify title, description, and whether it should be treated as video, audio or other for playback purposes.
4. The full path to the item on your system is displayed in the dialog.
5. Lastly, files can be dragged and dropped between the Video, Audio and Other sections of the library. This will automatically change it’s setting for playback purposes.

Play file with an external player

This long requested feature, useful for advanced users and people who prefer an additional playback option was implemented by a contributor. Special thanks go to Jason Woofenden. To use an external player:

1. Right-click on an item, and select Play Externally from the context menu.
2. The item will be opened with the system default player for that file type.

There is also a global preference available under the Playback settings to always use an external player.

Few updates about what’s come and gone in miro testing lately.

Souce and Nightly Build testing:
Source repositories: a few week ago we migrated from using subversion to git.  If you’d like to keep track of the code checkins, you can view the changes here: https://git.participatoryculture.org/miro/log/?showmsg=1 .  It’s useful to see  the regular changes if you are actively using nightly builds.

In Litmus there a new group under the nightly build test run, for weekly recommended tests.  In that group there will be a selection of test cases relevant to the recent code changes of the past week.  I’d really like to focus on improving the time gap between when a bug was injected, to the time it was detected.  I think focused testing will help that.

Miro 2.5.3: we’d like to push out a 2.5.3 release soon.  In 2.5 there are issues where users will get an unknown error on startup.  There have been some changes to how we handle and log errors that occur during database transactions.  Another different error that looks the same on Windows has also been corrected for the 2.5.3 release.

Additionally, vlc (for windows playback) has been updated to 1.0.1, libtorrent has been updated to 0.14.5. Perian Quicktime components (for os x playback) have also been updated.

Miro 2.6: Work is underway for the next major release.  The most notable enhancement is subtitle support  Luc is working on adding subtitle support to allow for more translations as well as assist the hearing impaired.  To help finance it, we’ve posted the project on Kickstart.

We have also had some code contributions.  There is now a context menu for items: Play Externally.  This implements part of bug #9350, which is a long-requested feature.  We have Jason Woofendon to thank for that patch.

Leading up to the 1.2.3 release, I was really happy to see that some new people signed up and helped us with the regression testing.

New testers like jan.s,  fixitguy, fox.box, tbutterfoss and strash joined some of our regular testers like i_therain, sedatg and elmargol to help get this release out.  I also received some emails from a few people who didn’t get a chance this time, but would still like to in the future.

Right now is a really exciting time to be part of the Miro QA team.  As a Webware 100 winner, it is official:  We ARE are one of the coolest apps in town.   If you would like to be part of the Miro QA team you should do these three things:

1. Go to the QA wiki to browse our to do list.
2. Sign up for the tester mailing list to stay up to date on our activities.
3. Join us for a global chat on the Miro chat channel  (or join irc.freenode.org #miro) this Friday at 7:00 PM GMT.  This is 9:00 PM CEST, 8:00 PM BST,  3:00 PM EST, 12:00 PM PST.

I can’t really buy anyone a beer from here, but you can BYO.  I’d love to meet you, answer any questions you might have and share ideas about how we can continue to improve Miro QA.

I’d like to believe that we did the update releases for 1.2 just so that we could say that a few times… but we didn’t.

As I explained in an email to the mailing list, we really need to get more people involved in the testing so that we get more systems variation.

So I am hoping that some up you can help out by picking up the rc build, for your respective os and run the Quicktest for 1.2.3 rc0.

If you have time to help – drop a line here, send me an email jed [at] pculture [dot] org, or just find me on the irc (irc.freenode.org #miro).

In the works, we have another short-cycle planned with a few key fixes. You can expect a call for help with the rc testing in a week or two. However, there are also some major changes going in the development background. Most recently Ben has done a bunch of frontend / backend separation work.

When I dive into the latest nightly build testing, I take a pretty mechanical approach. Does it work? Download? Search? After that I start working on the regression testing either the litmus tests or the Test Cases from the wiki page. Repetitious at times, but I am the QA and it’s my job to get to those hard to reach places.

One of our volunteers, sedatg, mainly a mac user, is also a pretty reliable nightly build tester. However, he has a different approach. He is a truly engaged user and seemingly a vapid consumer of online video. He also seems to suffer from bandwidth limitation.

So his focus when testing is about his experience using Miro to download and watch videos. He uses the irc (irc.freenode.org #miro) to communicate and troubleshoot issues with the developers and other users. He is also active in bugzilla to vote on the tickets that most concern him and communicate ideas and solutions. He claims it’s all self-interest, but whatever, it makes Miro better for all.

Another of our volunteer testers, fluteman also appears download a lot of video. I have imported his OPML channel list, and it is long and well organized. He is more of a conservative tester, usually waiting for a release candidate before moving beyond the stable release. But because of his huge channel list, he regularly manages to push Miro to it’s limits. He finds bugs that maybe not everyone would experience which keeps us on our toes and lets us know what’s lurking.

Over the next few months – we will be implementing changes to improve performance and presentation. And testing will be all about regression, regression, regression.

Biodiversity can be used to measure the health of biological systems. So whether you are a dragojevic, a sedatg, a fluteman or some other unidentified species type. Your unique approach can help maintain the health of Miro.

Please use the links in the previous post to get the latest release candidate for testing. Or you can just go to the Nightlies page.

Will has posted RC1 and this is what he has to say:

Differences between rc0 and rc1: r5953 - fixed #9414: adds the r number in the About box on GTKX11

r5957 - some OSX fixes

r5961 - fixed #9375: fixed keyboard shortcut so cmd-D stops video in fullscreen r5963, r5968, r5969 - NullSoft installer changes to install iHeartMiro extension

All Miro 1.1 rc1 files are in the sticky section on the nightlies page.

It'd be cool if we could get some serious testing with rc1, identify

 issues quickly, and then fix fix fix...

So please grab the build and check it out. If you can take the time to run some our litmus tests it will give a good sense of how the build is looking.

We are ready for Miro 1.1 RC testing to begin. You can run the tests in litmus – I recommend the 1.1 pre-Release testing, test run. Start with the Quicktest then move to the New Feature and Bug Fixes section.

• Windows 1.1 rc
• OS X 1.1 rc
• Source 1.1 rc

The biggest change for 1.1 relates to torrent downloads. We have switched over to using libtorrent, and have implemented some long asked for options. You can now control both the upload and the download rates or torrents. We also display the total number of seeders and leechers.

Other changes include updates to the navigation buttons on the Guide so that the forward, back and home will work for any additional guides added to Miro. We have also implemented a combined search feature.

You can check out the weekly testing page for a more complete summary of changes.

If anyone wants to help out with the creation of more tests, please let me know. You can reply here.

Hey Testers….

As you likely know 1.0 was released today. Here is a quick summary of the bug fixes:

• Fixed the delete while a video is playing.
• Fixed thumbs.db files so it is not discovered and added to New list.
• Fixed a unicode error that was causing crashes.
• Fixed a Keyerror that was causing crashes.
• Fixed playlist folders not being updated.
• Fixed clearing search text in chrome.
• A fix for the play/pause menu item display on os x.
• Fixed the Send to a Friend menu item.
• Reworked thumbnail generation on Windows to prevent failures from crashing the main application.

A summary of these bugs with the ticket number is found on the release notes page.

Download 1.0!

The big news for this week is the test of release candidate testing. Looks like we are getting some good download numbers and people running some of the litmus tests.

It would be great if we could get a lot of participation in this round of testing, and we are off to a good start. I will post updates here as new tests are created and available to run.

Weeks end: Summary for October 8, 2007

There was a fair amount of changes implemented this week. The main area that could use your attention is testing the migration of file storage.

Previously there were some errors with migration that would occur when a user would elect to change the storage location while playing a video. Ben has fixed this up and requested that it be tested on all platforms. There are some recommended tests for this in the weekly testing wiki page.

There were also some cosmetic changes implemented. If you are using a testing build you’ll see that new channels added now appear at the top of the list. This is also true for new playlists. A side effect of this has been some buggy behavior in the display of channels and channel folders.

Other visual changes include placing the auto download menu in a more prominent location. On Windows the length of the playing video is displayed on the right side of the progress bar.

For linux users, Nick implemented a way to change the xine driver via a command line option. That should be helpful to users who have issues with specific driver.

Please check out the complete list of changes on the weekly testing wiki page and say hello in the chatroom tomorrow and let us know what you think. If you are new to testing it is a great place to meet people and ask questions.