Will's Miro dev blog

Back in December and January, I worked on some patches for Firefox 3 that enhanced the feed preview page. I wrote a post about it back then… but I’m updating that post with recent screenshots and a better description of the work. The previous post was mostly about how great FOSS is.

The patches fell into two big features. First, I added enclosure detection to the FeedProcessor and then modified FeedWriter to show enclosures alongside the entries. This has two huge benefits: it allows you to easily tell if the feed has enclosures and it allows you to see what they are, how big, what type of media, …

Second, I modified Firefox so that it allows you to associate video podcasts with an application, audio podcasts with another application, and all other kinds of feeds with a third application. The benefit here is that you can send media podcasts to an application that handles that well (*cough*Miro*cough*) and regular news feeds to a different application that handles that well.

Screenshot of Firefox 2 feed preview page:

Screenshot of Firefox 3 feed preview page:

Of the two features, I hear the most comments about the first one mostly along the lines of, “I’m so glad I don’t have to view source to see the enclosures anymore!” The second feature isn’t as immediately exciting. The implementation of distinguishing feeds is intentionally simple and there are a lot of corner cases where it doesn’t work very well. Also, there aren’t many applications that can really take advantage of it. I expect this second feature to flourish as Firefox development continues and video/audio podcasting evolves.

I updated my AMD64 machine to Hardy today and built a set of Miro 1.2.3 packages for Hardy AMD64. Going forward, I’ll continue to build packages for Gutsy and Hardy for both i386 and AMD64 platforms.

Miro 1.2.3 is the last release I’ll be doing packages for Dapper and Feisty.

If someone could help out by maintaining and testing packages for those two platforms and any others that we don’t cover, that’d be really great. Let me know in the comments, by email, or on IRC.

GStreamer has a lot of momentum behind it now and a lot of work has gone into it over the last year and it’s really paying off. As such, Miro 1.5 (the next version) will be the first version of Miro which defaults to the GStreamer renderer instead of the xine renderer. I’m excited about this change and in the future we’ll be able to drop support for xine which is one less complexity to deal with.

If you’re using the GStreamer renderer in Miro with either trunk or Miro 1.2.3 and discover any problems, let me know. It helps to write up a bug, but if you’re loathe to do that, comment here. Make sure you test with totem-gstreamer or some other GStreamer movie player as well and report those results–that helps us determine whether the problem lies with Miro or possibly elsewhere.

There are probably going to be a few rough edges in the switch and I could use any help I can get with them.

Miro 1.2.3 was supposed to be a minor bug-fix release which also had xulrunner 1.9 support for gtkx11. But then vlc 0.8.6f came out and we updated our Windows build to use that. But then we found a bunch of problems and many of those got fixed. But then I decided I might as well tackle support for YouTube’s mp4 versions. But then… but then… but then… two weeks and a lot of work from a lot of people later and we finally got Miro 1.2.3 out the door.

This is the first release I’ve built Ubuntu Hardy packages for. That’s cool–a lot of work went into that.

This is the last release I’ll be building Ubuntu Dapper and Feisty packages for. If there are still Dapper and Feisty users out there (and I’m sure there are), hopefully a champion will arise from your midst and set up a PPA to support you.

I really want to thank Markus, Uwe, Janet, Ben, Chris, Luc, Paul, Dean, Sedat, all the other people who hang out on #miro-hackers, the bug reporters, the testers, the translators and everyone else involved in the last three weeks of work flurry that resulted in Miro 1.2.3.

Having said that, there were a bunch of bugs that were discovered and triaged to the next release. I wasn’t able to get a Fedora 9 virtual machine working in VirtualBox and wasn’t able to help them out with their Miro packaging problems. I also wasn’t able to spend time with my Debian Lenny virtual machine and help Uwe with his packaging.

In summary, there was a lot of stuff that was done which is great and a bunch of stuff left on the floor until the next version which is a bummer.

Onwards to the next release….

Did a release of Miro 1.2.3 rc0 today. This fixes some problems with Miro on Windows, adds xulrunner 1.9 support for gtkx11, works on Hardy (with Hardy packages, too), fixes a problem with external torrents disappearing, and other things as well. I also did another translation sync today, so it’s got the most up-to-date translations available.

The release candidate is available at http://pculture.org/nightlies/.

Hardy packages available in our Hardy repository. Details at http://getmiro.com/download/ubuntu.php.

If you’re eager to help Miro with code contributions, but don’t know where to start, take a look at bugs marked with the bitesized keyword in Bugzilla.

You can see a list of them here.

This week I fixed some bugs, worked on some bugs that I didn’t get anywhere with, and finally tagged and released Miro 1.2 rc0.

I also did some work with getting Miro on Gutsy to compile against xulrunner 1.9 in the backports repository. I was basing the work on the set of packages the Ubuntu people maintain. There are some changes in there I don’t understand the relevance of and their changelog isn’t very helpful. I pinged Fabien, but haven’t heard anything back from him.

As a side note, and I can’t imagine I’m alone in this feeling, Windows bugs really suck and take gobs and gobs of time to work through.

I installed Hardy Heron alpha 5 in a VM and Miro doesn’t compile on it. Amongst other things, Hardy uses Firefox 3, so it’s likely we’ll have to make some code changes to account for that. I only spent 20 minutes with Hardy and Miro to see where things are at–no clue how much work is going to be involved.

I’d love to get someone(s) to help with working out the issues with Miro on Hardy before Hardy releases. If you’re interested in helping, leave a comment here, send me an email, or find me on IRC.

If no one helps out, then I’ll probably deal with supporting Hardy after Hardy is released.

I really didn’t like the theme I had. Trying out a new one….

I put out Gutsy, Feisty and Dapper builds for i386 for Miro 1.1.1 on Tuesday when we did the Miro 1.1.1 release. But… I’m using new scripts and I goofed up the miro-data package. I didn’t have time to figure out the problem, so I attempted to back out the Gutsy amd64 packages and in the process screwed up something else.

I thought I had it all working by Tuesday night, but there were a couple of users that were still experiencing “size mismatch” errors on the miro-data package. So I took some time today to figure out how to deal with the miro-data package I was building, roll up a set of Miro 1.1.1-3 packages for Gutsy i386 and amd64 and push everything out.

Theoretically there should be good Gutsy i386 and amd64 packages for Miro 1.1.1 in addition to the Feisty and Dapper i386 packages I rolled out Tuesday.

Sorry for the delays. I think things are straightened out now. If you’re still having problems feel free to leave a comment below and/or find me on IRC or by email.

Sedatg pointed out the archos-sync project. It’s a script that syncs the content between his Archos media player and Miro. More information at that link.

If anyone was interested in helping out on a syncing project to sync Miro content with devices, that’s probably a good one to help out with.

Anyone else know of similar projects that are building software to sync Miro content, convert content or port Miro to smaller devices? If so, please add a comment. The more exposure to these projects, the better.

One of the things I keep reading in comments of various Miro-related reviews is something along the lines of “there’s no good content”. I think that’s utter bunk. There’s a lot of good content listed in the Miro Guide. The channel starter packs that we added to the first page when you start up Miro 1.0 make this painfully clear. This doesn’t even include all the content that’s not even listed in the Miro Guide.

I don’t have cable tv anymore because it doesn’t make sense to waste my money on it.

I also don’t watch a ton of shows with Miro. However, here’s the list of shows I do watch (some of them while testing):

• Ask a Ninja (Add to Miro) – Occasionally there’s an annoying show, but mostly I think it’s pretty funny. I saw the Recipe For Disaster episode just before a family reunion–couldn’t have had better timing. I first discovered Ask a Ninja when one of the NPR programs I listen to periodically (I forget which one it was) had their movie critic off for the week and they played the audio from the Ask a Ninja episode reviewing Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl. (Disclaimer: I have ninjas on my business card.)
• Make Zing :: Blog MAKE Podcast (Add to Miro) – I love this channel. The projects are really interesting and it covers a very wide variety of topics. Dean, my brother and I met Bre at PodCamp Boston 2 and my brother secretly thinks that the t-shirt cannon project was influenced by his story of kids launching potatoes at a river from a cannon in their chimney (long story–very odd).
• Galacticast (Add to Miro) – I met Casey at PodCamp Boston 2 and after hearing about Galacticast decided to look it up. It’s a great show!
• What you ought to know (Add to Miro) – The shows are almost all under 3 minutes long and they cover a variety of topics. It’s thoroughly educational in tiny bite-sized chunks.
• Wired Science | PBS (Add to Miro) – This is a great general science channel.
• WebbAlert (Add to Miro) – Morgan Webb and her crew do a really good job of distilling “tech news” down to a 5 to 6 minute program Monday through Thursday. I find watching this saves me the trouble of flipping through the series of blogs I used to flip through.
• Google Tech Talks (Add to Miro) – Some of the Google Tech Talks aren’t wildly interesting to me, but I’ve learned a lot from the ones I have watched. This channel is based on a Google Video search and so you’re going to want to set the Auto-download to OFF. Otherwise it’s likely you’ll pick up old videos you’ve already seen.
• Onion News Network (Add to Miro) – I usually test with ONN because it’s fantastic. The “Ninja parade slips through town unnoticed again” episode got a lot of play time on my systems–it makes me smile every time. (Disclaimer: I have ninjas on my business card.)

I think there’s a lot of other great content out there both to watch and to participate in.

So to people who shrug Miro and Internet video off because “there’s no good content” I say, “Buddy–this is 2007 and you’re missing the boat”.

What shows do you like and why? Toss your thoughts in the comments.

Update 11/16/2007: Fixed a grammar issue and somehow I managed to misspell Galacticast.

Got my first spam comment on the blog. The current tally (as of this writing) is 1 real comment, 1 reply from me to the real comment, 1 trackback, and 1 spam. I think that qualifies as a full count.

Wired has an article today, Entrepeneur Aims to Overthrow TV, Not Get Rich. PCF’s mission is a huge reason of why I’m working here–it really appealed to me and I really believe in it.

The GNOME folks are meeting in Boston for the Boston GNOME Summit 2007. I met up with Asheesh (who turned out to be a PyBlosxom user I’ve known for a while) last night and talked with Stefan from Nokia about Miro, gstreamer, and the possibilities of porting Miro to the Nokia Internet tablets.

Tonight, Dean, Chris and I met up with Asheesh (Creative Commons) and SJ (OLPC) and talked about Miro in relation to Creative Commons and OLPC. After that, we headed over to Flat Top Johnny’s and talked with more of the people who were here for the GNOME Summit.

Most of the people I talked to knew about Miro–that was neat. There’s a lot of interest in Miro and its future directions. In many ways it’s really exciting, but in some ways it’s really daunting. How do you choose between the myriad of interesting future directions? We’ve got a limited number of people working on Miro, so we can’t choose them all–at least, not for the next version after 1.0. It’s a good spot to be in, but at the same time, a little depressing since it would be a lot of fun to do everything.

Many many thanks to Jay (contarc) for putting together a new look for Planet Miro. It looks much better now–it feels like a Miro-related web-site now.

Now… if we could only get someone to help us with Bugzilla ….

If you know of other blogs that would be appropriate for Planet Miro, send an email to will dot guaraldi at pculture dot org and let me know.

The loose goal for the planet is to aggregate Miro-related blogs: developer status, testing, news, … If at some point the planet gets too big, we can split it up into focused planets.

I’d like to see some blogs from the rest of the community: users, TeamMiro, etc.

I thought I had Planet Miro set up correctly, but turns out I had a one-character error in the crontab and so the planet wasn’t updating. It’s fixed now–the planet should be updating every hour.

I’ve been doing Firefox extension development and it’s been going pretty slowly because it’s hard for me to figure out what’s going on when things are running (and I’m not wildly familiar with the things I’m working with).

After whining about how I wish there was a REPL for JavaScript, I did a Google search and came across MozRepl. It’s helping a lot so far. I’m not spending hours hunting for object documentation anymore.

On an interesting note, you connect to MozRepl with telnet and it has a line-mode interface. Turns out that Lyntin (a mud client I worked on years ago) works fantastically for this. I would assume most mud clients would because at heart they’re line-mode telnet clients with a bunch of features designed to remove repetition in common tasks and make it easier to skim large amounts of output quickly without having to read through all of it.

I threw together a Planet using Venus for Miro-related blogs (and other feeds). Like other Miro-related sites, the configuration and templates are stored in SVN. It’s currently set to update every 8 hours, but we can change that if need be.

The mission of these dev blogs and planet miro is to keep everyone in the loop on progress of Miro. Previously if you wanted to track progress, you could hang out on IRC (#miro-hackers on irc.freenode.net), follow the Trac timeline, and/or watch bugs change status in Bugzilla through searches. These methods are good, but they don’t follow the progress of a person or groups of people, they’re following the status changes of development artifacts–the two things aren’t necessarily the same. When I started in July, I mentioned starting development blogs and a planet because I think this has been wildly successful for other projects, but then … I never really got around to implementing the dream. Kudos to Dean for getting the devblogs set up!

As a side note, when putting together the planet, I skimmed the Miro Testing blog and I thought the entry from the 26th on how do we grow the community was both poignant and important. It’s worth reading if you haven’t already.

Update 9/29/2007: Upon Dean’s request, I changed the frequency of planet miro updates to once an hour.