Improve Shotwell Slideshow - Weekly Report #7

[Alexandre Rosenfeld <alexandre rosenfeld gmail com>]

Hey everyone,

Sorry for the late report.

This week I got a bit stuck in the problems I had trying to get Clutter to export a video (the problem was that clutter_stage_read_pixels is not working and crashing the application). I tried looking into the Clutter code to find a solution and I found where the error is being raised, but I don't know enough about Clutter to know why it happens and what should I do differently to avoid it. Sending an email to the Clutter mailing list didnt help so far.

My experiments with timelines and animations seems to tell me it will be possible to export a Clutter stage to a GStreamer pipeline just by advancing the timelines in Clutter and exporting the stage. This means that using Clutter for the animations would make everything easier, which makes these errors I'm getting exporting the Clutter stage even more annoying. One option I'm thinking is to add the code for exporting the video, together with the interface, but don't enable it by default until it actually works (and I hope it will work soon).

General report

We just got to the mid-term evaluations, so this is a report of my work so far. You can check my project wiki for more information: http://live.gnome.org/AlexandreRosenfeld_Shotwell_Slideshow

I started out implementing a Clutter based slideshow, which meant integrating Clutter into Shotwell and creating the slideshow controls using Clutter. This already allows some cool transition effects without too much trouble (Clutter handle a lot of the details of the animations). That doesn't mean I've finished my first item in the features list, because even if basic effects are easily done, I want to experiment with more advanced transitions. However, this dependes on the Export Slideshow as Videos features, since the transitions must also be exported. Right now, which I indicate above, I'm having troubles with the Export feature.

The Background Music feature was completed, aside from a few minor features still missing. I really like the end result, which integrates with Banshee to select a playlist while showing your pictures and is flexible enough to be easily extended to support other sources of music in the future.

I would say the project is about half-completed, since one of the three big features is complete and the other two are about half-completed, so it brings the poject to be more or less on schedule.

Alexandre Rosenfeld