I wanted to clear some bits up.

1. Tretle–I’d be interested in knowing what we’re not listening to. I’m pretty sure we respond to all bugs within a couple of days of them getting filed. I know Janet and I watch Bugzilla like hawks. Toss me an email and we can discuss it: will.guaraldi at pculture.org . That’s true for anyone else feeling ignored here, too.

2. Miro has had gstreamer support in gtkx11 for a long time. In versions prior to 1.2, Miro defaults to xine and you had to fiddle with things to get gstreamer working. Miro 1.2 added a preference to make it trivial to switch between the two renderers. The next version of Miro (1.3 or 1.5–whatever is next) will use gstreamer by default on gtkx11. That change is already in trunk.

3. Livio–We appreciate the fact that you’re filing bug reports and I’ve done my best to work with them. It’s been difficult to understand what you’re getting at, but I’m definitely not ignoring you. Please continue filing bug reports and helping us/me understand what it is you’re getting at.

I don’t think anyone is saying that Miro is perfect, but we’re moving along, we’re learning how users are using Miro, we’re making changes and it’s getting better with every release. In that way, we’re like any other Free Software/Open Source project. Because it’s Free Software/Open Source, you and everyone else in the world can participate in its growth.

I think there will be more convergence in the Internet video player domain as content producers and publishers are getting smarter about Internet distribution. That’s a good thing. That means our mission of building the distribution model on top of existing open standards is working. That helps everyone–it’s not our mission to be a monopoly in the Internet video player domain.

If any of you are in the Cambridge, MA area, toss me an email–I’d love to grab a cup of coffee and maybe do some Miro hacking.

However I find it strange for MoFo people to get wild about “free content” and “video” when Firefox font bugs are usually answered with “works with Microsoft fonts, will look at it later”.

Most people will care about text content first, but having text content depend on proprietary fonts (either because the FLOSS fonts are not there, or because the browser people don’t feel fixing problems exposed by non-MS fonts is high priority) is acceptable?

I’ve already filed bugs.

> I’m not sure how they feel about it, but I know at Mozilla we’ve been happy to take Tango icons and our Linux builds look really good as a result.

I saw WONTFIX in bugzilla…

> The best I can suggest is that if there’s something you want to dive in and fix then do it!

I have to learn Python…

> They are always looking for motivated people @ Miro to hack on stuff.

I appreciate, that you’re motivating me, but currently I can only haunt for bus ;) .

You should talk to the developers. I’m not sure how they feel about it, but I know at Mozilla we’ve been happy to take Tango icons and our Linux builds look really good as a result. The best I can suggest is that if there’s something you want to dive in and fix then do it! They are always looking for motivated people @ Miro to hack on stuff.

* XULRunner-build works only on Windows with 1.2 release.
* they used GtkMozEmbed instead of GtkTreeView for the sidebar.
* Miro is exteremely slow piece of software
* doesn’t have tangoish icon (; .

I noticed your name in the list of donors today — was going to write you a nice e.mail, but instead I’ll say it here. THANKS! The combination of a very generous donation and a blog post encouraging others to join in is FAR more than we could ever ask for. You rock.

Tretle,

Just noticed your comment as I was writing this. You’re right about the management of videos — we’ve got some big interface improvements in the pipeline. That said, our resources are very thin. We do our best to focus on all 3 platforms, and have always hoped that we could build more of a community on the Linux side.

As for community suggestions being ignored, I don’t think that’s true — again, it’s a matter of having enough resources to address suggestions that come in. I personally put a lot of energy into listening to users, responding to questions, and relaying concerns to developers. We’re not perfect, but we’re working hard.

Finally, if I remember correctly, we’re working on moving both Windows and Linux to use gstreamer by default. You may already be able to switch to gstreamer: http://www.getmiro.com/documentation/index.php/Change_Video_Playback_from_xine_to_gstreamer

–Dean (outreach for PFC/Miro)

The python should go? No idea what the real root reason is, but something should be seriously done about that.

On top of that… Now as Banshee gained video support too, I’d re-implement Miro as Banshee plugin. Higher integration level would be a killer feature. All that is required is to add rss / torrent support and some sort of browser that uses eg. web service api to access the directory or something like that… And you don’t have to have different applications for Miro’ed content and the rest.