Improve Shotwell Slideshow - Weekly Report #6

[Alexandre Rosenfeld <alexandre rosenfeld gmail com>]

This week wasn't as productive as last week. I did ported some GStreamer code from the background music feature, not to use some functionality that is only present in newer Ubuntu versions (not present in Ubuntu Maverick), since my mentor commented we have to support Ubuntu Maverick. I still prefer to use the new functionality since it might handle corner cases better, so I did it in a way that can be easily switched in the future.

But supporting Ubuntu Maverick means I cannot use the OffscreenEffects from newer versions of Clutter (1.4 and above) and it would be quite important for transition effects. I think I can disable transitions that require this in Maverick, but I'm not sure how best handle this case yet.

I also spent the weekend trying to get some sample code that can export Clutter scenes to video using Gstreamer. In the end I got the GStreamer part working and found some very good code, some from Gnome Shell recorder and a blog post (I need to remember to post these links in the wiki) which helped me a lot. But Clutter is not playing nice with me and is giving me errors when I try to read the pixels from the stage. Even trying to get them directly from OpenGL is not working. I also found a few drawbacks from this approach, since I cannot get a offscreen stage from Clutter (it tells me it's not implemented), I would need to show the video while it is being exported. Not a big issue, but not optimal.

Maybe if I could implement the transitions with Cairo, it would be easier to export them to a video. So a few things I need to investigate this week.

Alexandre Rosenfeld