[PiTiVI] Progress report

[Brandon Lewis <brandon_lewis berkeley edu>]

Again, PiTiVi is a video editor which is designed to offer Simple, 
Intermediate, and Advanced UI views. Last week I did some work on the 
SimpleSourceWidgets, GTK+ widgets which represent clips in the timeline. 
This week I focused on the editing widget view, the widget which allows 
the user to trim the length of the clip in the timeline.

After finally getting my SVN account straightened out, I uploaded last 
week's changes. Then I set to work on the SimpleEditingWidget.

Laying out the editing widget was as easy as laying out any other GTK+ 
container. Making it work was another matter. As I began to read the 
code, I realized that it would be too complicated to just start hacking, 
so I wrote a design document which I submitted to Edward Hervey for 
review explaining what changes I was planning to make, and hilighting 
areas that I was having trouble understanding.

Edward responded promptly, and as it turned out there were some features 
missing from the back end. Essentially, we had no way to extract 
thumbnails from clips in the timeline. Edward quickly implemented a 
GStreamer sink element which provided thumbnails back in the form of 
gtk.gdk.pixbuf objects. I have been spending some time with the code 
trying to understand that and some of the other recent changes to 
PiTiVi. We've got some gremlins that we are trying to shake out which 
are causing PiTiVi to hang at inopportune moments. I've spent the last 
few days traveling to San Digeo, so work on my end has been a bit slow. 
For the remainder of this week, I'll be trying to clean up the editing 
widget and get usable so that we can make a preview release.