Integrating Cheese with Empathy[Weekly Report 06+07]

[Raluca-Elena Podiuc <ralucaelena1985 gmail com>]

These past two weeks, my non-gsoc life was a bit hecktic:

- I changed countries (left France, now I'm back home in Romania)

- I missed a flight :D

- I defended my master's thesis (first in my class, yey!)

I changed empathy-video-widget to use ClutterTexture. Emilio Pozuelo Monfort was working on something similar, but from another angle. His patch is going in as it works towards a better UI (the video preview from the user's camera is now displayed on top of the video from the other participant in the video chat). At list I helped a bit by find out how to make the ClutterTexture scale the video stream while maintaining aspect ratio.

As a preliminary step in bringing video effects to Empathy, I fixed a problem in Cheese's gstreamer effect bins: video previews had a fixed size and would mess up the UI in some situations. The new approach makes the CPU usage of Cheese a bit bigger when effect previews are displayed. I'm still working on this (I've been asking on #gstreamer about a solution to my problem, and I have 4 branches of WIP with different approaches on http://github.com/raluca-elena/cheese -- branches that start with scalable-video-preview -- but nothing that works ok).

I've talked with my Cheese mentor about cheese-camera as a video source + video effects + video effects previewer for Empathy. As Cheese is going to change to camerabin2, we decided to put this part of the work on pause, and go ahead and bring webcamera detection to Empathy first. I'm now going to talk with Emilio and Guillaume about this as there is some work in progress touching this here: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=629902

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Raluca-Elena