Re: video support

[Michael Wayne Goodman <goodmami uw edu>]

Hi all,

On Thu, 15 Apr 2010, Jan Girlich wrote:

> Hi David!
>
> Am Donnerstag, den 15.04.2010, 10:39 +0200 schrieb David
> Poetzsch-Heffter:
> > I was hoping for video support in f-spot for some time now. As there are
> > no "official" statements about it I'd like to ask, if there is probably
> > someone working on it right now or if this feature is still only on the
> > wishlist?

As far as I know, none of the regular devs worked on it, though sde
reviewed my patch once. So it is very much a wishlist item that other
contributors need to address.

> > I found the following discussion that seems to be 5 years old now:
> >
> > https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=166038
> >
> > If there is nobody working on it I'd probably try to do some work or
> > something by myself.

I created the original patch (with Polvi) and Silvano later took the
reigns, but I don't think any of us have touched it in a while. I'm in
the middle of my doctoral studies and don't really have the time to
finish the patch. If you can, I'd be happy to explain more of how our
patch(es) work.

> I would love to see video support as well and would like to help you.
> unfortunately the earliest time I could help would be begin of June.
> Very busy at the moment.
>
> My first idea about this was: Create an "media" object, replace all
> photo object occurrences by this new media object. Then make photo and
> movie inherit from media and add movie handling in the GUI where
> appropriate.

This is pretty much the approach I took. One comment on my original
patch was that my MediaFile.cs file did not maintain the SVN history of
the original ImageFile.cs, but I'm not sure that matters as much in git.
Anyway, MediaFile became the base class, and ImageFile and VideoFile
inherited from it (bug 166038 originally described attaching audio to
pictures, so if you do that as well you might create an AudioFile,
though F-Spot is not in the business of handling standalone audio data,
so it might be more appropriate to make it a member of the ImageFile
class). My patch did not have video playback in F-Spot, but rather
opened the preferred app for it (same for editing). I used
gnome-thumbnailer to generate the thumbnails.

> Videos post quite some questions: what is the time of a video? Since a
> video is over a time span but photos are handled as if they're taken
> instantaneously you have to rethink how to put it in a timely order with
> photos taken while the video was recorded.

I think the simple solution is best: use the time the video started. You
will only have overlapping time in videos/photos if you are importing
from two or more cameras, and it's not worth the trouble to determine
time span (even if you did, I can't see how anything other than
start-of-video would be a good metric to sort by).

> I'd love to discuss this topic some more!

I'd be happy to tell what I know, but it's been so long since I've seen
the code that I'm not sure if it's still relevant. I heard that the main
devs were going to overhaul the importing code, but I don't know if that
ever happened. Good luck!

> Just my 2¢
> Jan