Alex Polvi, friend of Miro and a community marketer for Mozilla, has won a Vidoop contest called How do you identify? with a very cute video (see below). Vidoop is a company that takes a cool approach to internet logins, with an OpenID service that gives you one universal login and an option for image grid based identification (take a look). Alex is donating his $1000 prize to Miro and Vidoop is matching that. Thanks so much guys!
Here’s Alex’s winning video (with a shout-out to Miro):
This week I mostly spent adding support for custom buttons and sliders to the widget branches. It went along well enough, right now there’s playback buttons and a progress slider. I think the volume slider will be trivial to add, I might have it before the dev call. The system seems like it’s working pretty nice and it’s easy to customize.
Once I get the first pass done, I’m going to take a bit to make sure that they are accessible. This mostly means making sure they accept focus and respond to keyboard input. I think this will be very easy on GTK, but I don’t really know how it works on OS X, so that might take a bit of time.
After that I think I’ll work on dialog boxes for a bit, which shouldn’t take long, then move on to the left-hand tab bar.
Overall the widgets port seems to be moving steadily but surely every week. It’s really satisfying to click on the play button and see my debugging printout. Also, the new UI looks really nice, I can’t wait to release it to the world.
An excellent speech by Clay Shirky about participation with culture: Gin, Television, and Social Surplus. He begins with the point that the amount of effort that goes into Wikipedia is tiny compared to the surplus of free time people have.
“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.”
“And television watching? Two hundred billion hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way, now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects a year spent watching television. Or put still another way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every weekend, just watching the ads. This is a pretty big surplus. People asking, “Where do they find the time?” when they’re looking at things like Wikipedia don’t understand how tiny that entire project is, as a carve-out of this asset that’s finally being dragged into what Tim calls an architecture of participation.”
…
“I was having dinner with a group of friends about a month ago, and one of them was talking about sitting with his four-year-old daughter watching a DVD. And in the middle of the movie, apropos nothing, she jumps up off the couch and runs around behind the screen. That seems like a cute moment. Maybe she’s going back there to see if Dora is really back there or whatever. But that wasn’t what she was doing. She started rooting around in the cables. And her dad said, “What you doing?” And she stuck her head out from behind the screen and said, “Looking for the mouse.”
“Here’s something four-year-olds know: A screen that ships without a mouse ships broken. Here’s something four-year-olds know: Media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you may not be worth sitting still for.”
This week I kept chugging along at the widgets branch. The begining of the week I spent trying to get the windows port to build since I was basically replacing the entire build process. I also needed to rewrite my GTK/XULRunner focus fixing code in C++. I’m not sure exactly what went wrong, but when I added a second thread to the mix subclassing windows procedures gave me segfaults. I think it has to do with the python GIL, but I don’t really know why.
Right now I have code working on all platforms that displays a window with a web browser inside. Now I’m working on layout code, which mostly means coding vboxes/hboxes/alignments on cocoa.
Also this week I talked with you all and several people on IRC about different ways to make background tasks less noticable. I’m pretty excited to get that stuff into 1.5, seems like it’s not too much work and it could have a nice payoff in terms of user experience.
I’m heading to Hong Kong next week, and I’d love to meet with anyone who has an interest in Miro or is working on related projects. I’ll be in Hong Kong from Friday, May 9th through Wednesday May 14. Please let me know if you’d like to meet up or send me email intros to relevant people. My plan thus far: conduct business, meet people, eat dim sum.
My email is jessep [at] pculture.org.
We have a great Summer Team in the works, and are excited to announce that we have space for 1-2 additional marketing / outreach interns. These are unpaid positions, but offer great experience with one of the most popular open-source programs in the world and a unique, fast-growing non-profit.
PCF has an office in Worcester, MA, but most of our staff works from home around the world and we expect the same will be true of our interns– you don’t have to live in Worcester. We will expect you to work 30 hours a week for at least 9 weeks and to file a weekly progress report. Following your internship, we will happily serve as job references and provide written recommendations.
Members of the summer team will focus on some of the following:
TO APPLY: If you are driven, self-motivated, and want to sharpen your marketing and outreach skills, please email jobs (at) pculture.org. Include a resume and a brief note about why you would like to work for us.
p.s. If your school gives credit for internships, we’re happy to work with you to make this count for credit.
This week I continued my work on the widgets work. I checked in code to the widgets branch to handle basic startup/shutdown and open a window. It’s very simple, but it’s pretty cool to see that window pop up and miroguide.com show up.
At the begining of the week I implemented it in portable and on OS X. The GTK/X11 implementation was about 2 hours or so. The windows implementation on the other hand is going to be a real pain and requires basically trashing setup.py and rewriting it from the bottom up.
That brings me to one thing I want to talk about on the call. If I’m going to be basically starting over with our setup script, I’d like to talk about using mingw as our main C compiler. I’ve been thinking about how much of a pain it was to add support for the vista function calls and how it would have been a ton easier if we were using mingw. I’m pretty sure mingw has supported the calls for quite a while, and if it hadn’t it’s so much easier to upgrade it’s win32api package than it is to install a new microsoft SDK. It’s been especially on my mind because I tried to install visual c++ 2008 express and it completely ruined my build environment. I’d love so much to get rid of microsoft tools and just use free ones.
The main reason that we’re not using it is that the python docs say you should use the visual c++ 2003 to build python extensions. I’ve done a ton of reading about it and it seems like the reason is complications from using a different C runtime DLL. Python uses msvcr71.dll, but things compiled from mingw use msvcrt.dll. Using different C runtimes can cause problems in a couple of ways. The main one is trying to share data (for example a FILE pointer) from one runtime to another will cause very bad things to happen. Then there’s more subtle errors, for example atexit() callbacks will only fire from one runtime. However, all of the errors don’t seem to happen in practice so often. It seems like the main reason that people try not to mix compilers for peace of mind. But the gtk DLLs are linked to msvcrt.dll, so it seems like we can’t get total peace of mind in any case.
Anyways, I’m not really sure of the ramifications, I’d love to talk on the call about what people think about this.
A lot of the anti-DRM discussion tends to focus on how much of a pain in the ass DRM is when customers buy content and want to use it on different computers or other devices. But an even bigger problem hits when a company inevitably decides to switch to a different DRM system, goes out of business, or discontinues a service. last100 has a great post about 5 Companies that Sold Customers Down the DRM River. It’s a word of warning to anyone considering buying content with DRM.
I updated my AMD64 machine to Hardy today and built a set of Miro 1.2.3 packages for Hardy AMD64. Going forward, I’ll continue to build packages for Gutsy and Hardy for both i386 and AMD64 platforms.
Miro 1.2.3 is the last release I’ll be doing packages for Dapper and Feisty.
If someone could help out by maintaining and testing packages for those two platforms and any others that we don’t cover, that’d be really great. Let me know in the comments, by email, or on IRC.
GStreamer has a lot of momentum behind it now and a lot of work has gone into it over the last year and it’s really paying off. As such, Miro 1.5 (the next version) will be the first version of Miro which defaults to the GStreamer renderer instead of the xine renderer. I’m excited about this change and in the future we’ll be able to drop support for xine which is one less complexity to deal with.
If you’re using the GStreamer renderer in Miro with either trunk or Miro 1.2.3 and discover any problems, let me know. It helps to write up a bug, but if you’re loathe to do that, comment here. Make sure you test with totem-gstreamer or some other GStreamer movie player as well and report those results–that helps us determine whether the problem lies with Miro or possibly elsewhere.
There are probably going to be a few rough edges in the switch and I could use any help I can get with them.
I think many people are hesitant to jump into testing because everyone knows that the nightly builds are by definition, unstable, and people already have their channels set up just as they like them.
There are two ways you can preserve and restore your data prior to starting a test run, OPML export, or by copying off your database.
This option is built into miro and can be accomplished as easily as going to the Channels menu and selecting Export Channels (OPML)… . This will create a list of your channels and channel folders that you save off to your system. You can then import the list at any time using the Channels menu and selecting Import Channels (OPML)… .
Using this, will only save off your channel list. If you delete your database, and start over with a clean system, Importing the channels via OPML will not preserve the downloaded, watched or unwatched status of videos in each channel.
Currently database backup is still a manual process and the location varies with your operating system.
Just copy your sqlitedb file to a safe location on your system. If something goes wrong during testing - you can do a fresh install, copy your database back to the original location, restart Miro and be back up and running.
* Note: If you migrated your movie storage - restoring the old db would cause it to lose track of those items.
I hope these two options make you feel a little more comfortable about diving in to some of the testing builds. If anyone out there wants to help make the backup / restore process a little less manual - reply to this post.
Leading up to the 1.2.3 release, I was really happy to see that some new people signed up and helped us with the regression testing.
New testers like jan.s, fixitguy, fox.box, tbutterfoss and strash joined some of our regular testers like i_therain, sedatg and elmargol to help get this release out. I also received some emails from a few people who didn’t get a chance this time, but would still like to in the future.
Right now is a really exciting time to be part of the Miro QA team. As a Webware 100 winner, it is official: We ARE are one of the coolest apps in town. If you would like to be part of the Miro QA team you should do these three things:
I can’t really buy anyone a beer from here, but you can BYO. I’d love to meet you, answer any questions you might have and share ideas about how we can continue to improve Miro QA.
We launched the Miro customization and co-branding program earlier this year in order to give video producers a tool for simple, integrated distribution of many podcasts. We’ve had interest from lots of non-profits looking for simple ways to distribute video content online and we’ve always wanted to offer the co-branding service to them for free. These have included both public broadcasters and organizations that do independent media and activism.
Unfortunately, we’ve been unable to serve all of these non-profits because we haven’t had enough people to work with them. Rather than throwing up our hands, we’ve built a simplified, externally facing version of our co-branding tool especially for non-profit organizations. Now, any non-profit can get a co-branded version of Miro for free that will automatically update to include the latest Miro features.
If you are a non-profit and would like to have a custom version of Miro for your organization - “Miro - MyGroup Edition” - you can make it now. It will come pre-subscribed to your channels and with your own startuppage. It’s a great way to turn visitors to your website into subscribers.
This is one of the things I love about working for Miro: we’re able to do projects like this that are focused directly on serving our mission and helping non-commercial broadcasters reach an audience. It’s exactly why we’re here.
As usual, for-profit companies should contact us about co-branding opportunities. Email jessep@pculture.org for more info. Revision3, TED Conference, Deutsche Welle, and other companies and organizations are already offering custom versions of Miro with great results.
Update: Worcester, MA public access station WCCA has already used the custom Miro generator to make a “Public Access TV” version of Miro with feeds from stations around the country. Download the player or just those station feeds here.
Mostly this week was bug fixes:
I did add a couple new features to the Guide and its API. The Guide now
displays “Subscribe in Miro” buttons if you’re visiting in a browser,
and the API allows one to rate channels and get recommendations. I
haven’t added the documentation about that to the wiki page yet, but
I’ll be doing it soon.
This week I spent most of my coding time trying to wrap my brain around Cocoa and pyobjc. I figured it was going to be at least somewhat similar to GTK, but actually it’s completely different. I’ve just been trying to get a window to pop up that displays miroguide.com, but there’s still quite a bit over my head. Hopefully I’ll get it working in a few days, I think this first step is going to be the hardest.
In addition to coding, I’ve been spending tons of time trying to figure out how we’re going to make native widgets work. Mostly it’s been pretty exciting for me though, since I realized that NSOutline/GTKTreeView work on very similar models and are actually much more flexible than I though. I think they could work great for the item lists and tab lists and be super-snappy.
Lastly, I’ve been working on getting my unaccepted bugs down. I think I’m finally in single digits now, this week is the week I finally get bugzilla to stop pestering me!
We’ve just released version 1.2.3 of Miro. Download it here.
What’s new:
* When you download videos from YouTube (whether by search or in a YouTube feed), we get an MP4 rather than a FLV, if it’s available. The video quality of the MP4s is much higher.
* Updated translations in lots of languages.
* We’ve updated the linux version to Mozilla 1.9.
* We’ve updated VLC on Windows to 0.8.6f (security fix).
Miro 1.2.3 was supposed to be a minor bug-fix release which also had xulrunner 1.9 support for gtkx11. But then vlc 0.8.6f came out and we updated our Windows build to use that. But then we found a bunch of problems and many of those got fixed. But then I decided I might as well tackle support for YouTube’s mp4 versions. But then… but then… but then… two weeks and a lot of work from a lot of people later and we finally got Miro 1.2.3 out the door.
This is the first release I’ve built Ubuntu Hardy packages for. That’s cool–a lot of work went into that.
This is the last release I’ll be building Ubuntu Dapper and Feisty packages for. If there are still Dapper and Feisty users out there (and I’m sure there are), hopefully a champion will arise from your midst and set up a PPA to support you.
I really want to thank Markus, Uwe, Janet, Ben, Chris, Luc, Paul, Dean, Sedat, all the other people who hang out on #miro-hackers, the bug reporters, the testers, the translators and everyone else involved in the last three weeks of work flurry that resulted in Miro 1.2.3.
Having said that, there were a bunch of bugs that were discovered and triaged to the next release. I wasn’t able to get a Fedora 9 virtual machine working in VirtualBox and wasn’t able to help them out with their Miro packaging problems. I also wasn’t able to spend time with my Debian Lenny virtual machine and help Uwe with his packaging.
In summary, there was a lot of stuff that was done which is great and a bunch of stuff left on the floor until the next version which is a bummer.
Onwards to the next release….
CNET has announced that Miro is a Webware 100 winner! Thanks to all of you for your votes.
Here’s Miro’s official victory page and the Webware announcement which lists Miro in Editor Rafe Needleman’s personal Top 10.
They write:
Poised to become the ultimate desktop video app, Miro is across between a media player and a Bittorrent client. It handles every major video format including MPEG, QuickTime, AVI, H.264, DivX, Windows Media, Flash Video, 3GP, and others. It downloads torrent files and has a wealth of settings geared for user customization. You can e-mail videos, autodelete, autodownload, set favorites, organize your video collection, and more.
Miro arranges content feeds into “channels,” showing that there’s no need to reinvent television terminology when it’s useful. And unlike other software-based Web video viewers, Miro’s double duty as a Bittorrent client makes it a worthy addition to your desktop.
We’ve had a couple odd, but major bugs reported by single people and I want to make sure they are not widespread. Are you experiencing either of the following:
a. You can’t load to getmiro.com in a browser (sounds like a trick question).
b. When you start miro, the Miro Guide never loads, but you can download videos from feeds.
If you do see either of these bugs, please write to jed - at - pculture.org and let us know so we can track them down. As usual, any other bugs should go here Miro bug report. Lots of bugs will be resolved today, in fact, with the release of Miro 1.2.3 in a couple hours.
I’d like to believe that we did the update releases for 1.2 just so that we could say that a few times… but we didn’t.
As I explained in an email to the mailing list, we really need to get more people involved in the testing so that we get more systems variation.
So I am hoping that some up you can help out by picking up the rc build, for your respective os and run the Quicktest for 1.2.3 rc0.
If you have time to help - drop a line here, send me an email jed [at] pculture [dot] org, or just find me on the irc (irc.freenode.org #miro).
This week I’ve been up to my neck in web browser code. XULRunner, WebKit, gtkmozembed, you name it.
My main goal was to get an embedded web browser working on windows, so that we can move forward with the widgets program. The only one I could get working was XULRunner. I thought XULRunner was a dead end for a long time, because I couldn’t understand the focus issues, but now I finally do and I’m able to get it working pretty much 100%.
When I had given up on XULRunner, I spent a while trying to get WebKit for windows to work, but I was never able to get it working. I had a couple talks with folks on #webkit, and it seems to me that the windows port is not quite ready for prime time at this point.
There was a time when I was really worried that neither embedded XULRunner, nor webkit was going to work so I started thinking of alternatives. The main ones I came up with were 100% XULRunner or embedded XULRunner using MFC. I’m not really interested in either of those, but I guess it’s good to keep in mind.
The other timesink this week was another browser ploblem. Drag and Drop stopped working on linux with xulrunner 1.9, mostly because they started doing error checking for the bogus values we passed in. I spent a ton of time trying to get a good workaround, but in the end I ended up just checking in a patch that made our bogus values just a little less bogus.
Last week I was working on getting the installer to pretend that an installed theme was attached (for https://develop.participatoryculture.org/trac/democracy/wiki/OpenCobrand) and #9866 (Uninstall doesn’t remove themes). I also fixed a bug in the Effortless Good update.rdf file which was preventing it from being upgraded. I added a bit of new UI to the Guide around the recommendations code so that people without ratings aren’t left out to dry. I also worked with Dean finishing up the cobrander. Hopefully we’ll release that soon.
This week I’ve been working on getting Flash to work in Miro on GTK. I’ve had no real progress, though. That’s what I’ll be working on this week as well.
Cory Doctorow (PCF board member) has canceled his internet account with Virgin in response to comments by their CEO that net neutrality is “a load of bollocks” and that they will be slowing down traffic from sources that don’t pay extra. These companies need to hear from the public and this is the language they understand.
Cory writes: “Theoretically, I’m locked into a Virgin plan for another six months, but as far as I’m concerned, they’ve just announced that they’re violating the agreement by announcing that the services I can reach will be systematically slowed down unless they pay Virgin extra. That means that we’re now null and void. I’ll be calling to cancel today. Who’s with me?”
Got Virgin for internet? Cancel it and tell them why.
At our Worcester office, we have a Charter cable internet connection. We’ve been noticing that they appear to be restricting BitTorrent traffic and we’re canceling our service this month. Miro, of course, supports evasionary encryption to get around such blocking, but a technology arms race is no substitute for real public protections.
Update: Folks have been asking what Cory is going to switch to. He tells me:”I’ve got two lines at home, BT and Virgin, so when I manage to kill Virgin, I’ll keep BT for the rest of the year, then have a look around… I’m not fond of BT (they’re participants in Phorm), but I’m locked into them, too.”
At the PCF office, we have both Charter and Verizon. We’ll be using our Verizon account for now, as they seem to be more neutrality positive so far.
Did a release of Miro 1.2.3 rc0 today. This fixes some problems with Miro on Windows, adds xulrunner 1.9 support for gtkx11, works on Hardy (with Hardy packages, too), fixes a problem with external torrents disappearing, and other things as well. I also did another translation sync today, so it’s got the most up-to-date translations available.
The release candidate is available at http://pculture.org/nightlies/.
Hardy packages available in our Hardy repository. Details at http://getmiro.com/download/ubuntu.php.
Video creators often choose to go wherever the largest audience is, and right now a lot of the audience is at YouTube, whose dominance has been steadily growing for a long time.
According to Comscore, YouTube serves a mammoth 34% of all internet videos. 34% may not sound too impressive, until you compare it to their closest competitor, Myspace, who serves a paltry 6% of all internet video. One effect of this massive market share is that hardware manufacturers and 3rd parties are making deals with YouTube, but aren’t interested in supporting other platforms. Another is that viewers go directly to YouTube to conduct searches and watch videos.
This means that independent creators like Glenn Wolsey are forced to move their programs onto YouTube, lest they be left without an audience. Although this post is rather old, it clearly illustrates my point:
Putting it in perspective, if you were to publish a video to the web, would you prefer to upload it to YouTube where you have millions of potential viewers from all over the world, via computers, the Apple TV, the iPod touch, and the iPhone within minutes uploading it, or alternatively, would you prefer to upload it to a smaller video site to retain a somewhat ‘better’ community feeling?
Glenn is just one of so many creators who has been forced to make this difficult decision: retain control over the presentation and format of the video, or reach the largest viewing audience in the world.
I think there’s a growing awareness of what “Open Video” means; however, there are still a lot of folks that assume the internet is universally open, democratic, and completely decentralized. While in many cases the internet is all of these things, with video it’s clearly not the case — the risk of a monopoly is clear and present.
Here at PCF we’re going to be co-organizing a campaign to help frame these important issues and arm people with information and tools to help mitigate the monopolistic effects of YouTube. We’ll be working to spread the meme of truly open and democratic web video, helping everyone to see where we’re at and to push for something much better.
Dave Glassco, a longtime Miro supporter and incredibly generous donor, recently shot and edited this short video. You may have already seen it, as it was featured in our latest funding drive.
Dave talks about why open source is such a worthwhile investment for high net-worth individuals and foundations. Although he’s talking specifically about Miro, his arguments translate well to many FOSS projects.
If you happen to know anyone who might be in a position to make a large contribution, please share this video with them. And of course, if you are in a position to contribute (large or small), we really appreciate your help! And finally thanks so much to everyone who has contributed.
Nitot just posted this awesome photo on his flickrstream:
I spent last week working.on bugs. I got through:
This week I’ve been working on OpenCobrand which is a system for making cobranded builds a little more independent
of me and Dean and Jesse. The public builder works pretty well but I’m running into some
trouble with making the installer pick up the new theme.
At the moment, I’m try to use this Locate NSIS plugin to find the themes that are
installed. It’s working in my small tests, but not in the actual Miro
installer. I’m not confident that I’ll be able to get it fixed for a
1.2.3 release, but because it only affects cobranded builds NPR and I
were thinking we’d make a 1.2.3.1 “release” to the cobrander but not
publicize it.
This week I kept working on embedding xulrunner on windows with PyGTK. I thought it was only going to take a couple days, and in fact I was almost there after two days, but then I ran into a huge tangle of focus problems. Basically the focus is totally broken on my tests, it takes some random amount of clicking on the window to get the focus right, and I have no idea why.
I looked at the gtkmozembed source and remembered that they have a ton of hacks to get focus right. Then I checked the moz-dev-embedding lists, and found out that most of those hacks don’t work on windows. I’m trying to get in contact with some mozilla people, but in the meantime I’m pretty much stuck on the focus issues.
I think I’m going to just forge ahead and ignore this problem for now. Hopefully I’ll get a good response and have a straightforward fix. Otherwise, I can look into more radical measures like webkit, or just using XULRunner for all the UI stuff. I don’t know, but right now I’m sick of trying to get those clicks working, so I need to move on.
It turns out that 22% of Miro users are in Germany. So to those of you reading from Deutschland, please join us in crafting a custom version of Miro just for you!
You can help in three ways:
Please comment on this post if you want to be a German moderator or if you have recommendations for German channels. Thanks! If you aren’t primarily a German or English speaker, don’t worry — this is just the first of many community efforts to come.
Also, Holmes and I were in Berlin last week at Re:publica and had a fantastic time. Thanks to Markus Beckedahl for bringing us into the German participatory media scene!
Update: Please join the DeutschMiro Mailing List!
I’m happy to say that we just hit the 4,000 channel mark in the Miro Guide.
Of course this is also a perfect time to thank our volunteer guide moderators. I’ve got to begin by thanking robbt, who has really led the charge for quite a while now! More big thanks go to: RyuhoKudo, phillramey, wvermeir, contarc, lsblakk, sumanah, sedatg. This is our active team, and there have been many amazing and dedicated folks before them. Thanks to all of you!
If you’re interested in getting involved in the Miro community, check out our this section of our site and/or send me a message at: dean a pculture.org.
On April 17th (Thursday of next week), the second public FCC hearing on net neutrality is slated to take place at Stanford University. In the mean time, read up on the Chronicles of Comcast.
8/17/07 Comcast throttles and blocks bittorrent traffic, claims TorrentFreak:
ISPs have been throttling BitTorrent traffic for almost two years now. Most ISPs simply limit the available bandwidth for BitTorrent traffic, but Comcast takes it one step further, and prevents their customers from seeding.
8/21/07 Comcast denies allegations of throttling, as reported by CNET:
Comcast on Tuesday denied rumors that the company is filtering BitTorrent traffic running over its network.
10/19/07 AP tests confirm that Comcast does block traffic, as reported by the AP:
Comcast Corp. actively interferes with attempts by some of its high-speed Internet subscribers to share files online, a move that runs counter to the tradition of treating all types of Net traffic equally.
11/28/08 Test results are corroborated by the EFF.
2/25/08 FCC hearing on net neutrality in Boston, coordinated by Free Press.
2/26/08 Comcast pays to fill seats at FCC hearing, as reported by us:
Yesterday’s public FCC hearing on net neutrality was so packed that many activists, concerned citizens, and reporters were turned away at the door. It turns out that Comcast secretly paid people to “hold seats.”
3/27/08 Comcast and BitTorrent Inc. make a deal, as reported by Fortune:
Something remarkable happened on Thursday - an Internet service provider and a peer-to-peer software company announced a collaboration and agreed to work together.
3/27/08 BitTorrent/Comcast deal is no substitute for net neutrality, says Free Press:
This agreement does nothing to protect the many other peer-to-peer companies from blocking, nor does it protect future innovative applications and services. Finally, it does nothing to prevent other phone and cable companies from blocking… The Internet has always been a level playing field, and we need to keep it that way.
3/28/08 Comcast denies any wrongdoing, as reported by Ars Technica:
Each paragraph of [Comcast Vice President, Dan Cohen’s] response to [the FCC Chariman, Kevin Martin] opened with, “Contrary to your press statement…” Comcast has not “‘admitted’ anything,” Cohen insisted. The company has provided a “full and honest accounting” of its network management practices.
If you’re anywhere near Stanford on April 17th, I urge you to go and show your support. Just be sure to show up early or your spot may be taken by one of Comcast’s human seat warmers!
I’m hoping to do a Miro 1.2.3 release in the next 7 days or so. This release will include support for xulrunner 1.9 on gtkx11, support for Ubuntu Hardy, updated translations, vlc 0.8.6f, and a bunch of bug fixes for bugs found in Miro 1.2.2 and previous releases including some more “Miro crashes on startup” type issues.
There are three things you can do to help:
Also, we’ll definitely need help testing the Miro 1.2.3 rc0 build which will be out in a few days–hopefully before Thursday.
I’ll be on #miro-hackers on irc.freenode.net. Also, if you have problems, submit a bug report at bugzilla.pculture.org or find someone to do it for you on #miro or the forums.
I got a bug report report from Nils Maier about I ? Miro breaking other extensions because of how it detected HTTP redirects. Nils also helped me out by showing me what I should be doing, which made the fix easy. I’ve released I ? Miro 1.3.7 and Effortless Good 1.1.6 which fixes the problem.
ROFLCon is a crazy event that I’ve been planning with some of my friends at Harvard. It’ll be happening on the 25th and 26th of this month, on the MIT campus in Cambridge, MA.
I lined up a PCF/ROFLCon partnership, and we’ll be sponsoring the Screening Room.
The Premise:
Mix up a bunch of super famous internet memes, some brainy academics, a big audience, dump them in Cambridge, MA and you’ve got ROFLCon.
It’s a group dissection of internet culture. What makes it work, why it works, how it works. We’ll talk about where internet culture has been and where we think it’s going.
Guests include: XKCD, Homestar Runner, Tron Guy, Dinosaur Comics, I Can Has Cheezburger, Chuck Norris Facts, Brad Neely, Leeroy Jenkins, Rocketboom, JibJab, and so many more.
Unfortunately, the whole thing has been sold out for a while now… but, as a sponsor, PCF does have access to a couple of free passes. We still haven’t decided what to do with them, but are considering a contest/giveaway if people are sufficiently interested (please comment, if you are!).
NewTeeVee wrote this awesome article that describes 5 ways to know if your internet provider throttles P2P.
NewTeeVee has an interesting write-up on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s (CBC) recent foray into the world of legitimate bittorrent distribution.
The CBC released a full episode of their show, Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister, with no DRM, in full-resolution, via bittorrent. As soon as it was made available, Canadian viewers began complaining about extremely slow download times. The amazing thing is that Bell Canada (one of the huge Canadian ISP’s) just came right out and said, yep, we’re throttling.
This type of throttling —where most users are totally unaware of it— has a very negative impact on people’s overall perception of the targeted technology. When a person’s first bittorrent experience is slow and unsatisfying, they assume the technology itself is broken or lame (even when it’s certainly not the case).
This is a crystal clear example of why net-neutrality is so important. The situation would be better if there were competitive markets for internet service everywhere in the world AND customers were well informed on the traffic shaping habits of their local providers. However, at this point it appears that legislation might be the best way to ensure a neutral and non-discriminatory network.
I encourage everyone to get involved.
I uploaded a new .pot to Launchpad just now (first time for me!).
If you’re a translator for the Miro application, please take a look at the languages you translate for and update them accordingly.
We’re planning to do a Miro 1.2.3 release in a week or so. The changes since Miro 1.2 are minimal, so this allows existing translations to improve for the 1.2.3 release.
So this week I mostly worked on experiments with getting Miro to work with native widgets. Mainly I looked at if what I was planning to do was possible on windows. This meant getting pygtk to work (simple), and trying to get xulrunner embedded in a gtk window on windows (a completely pain in the butt). I’ve got xulrunner starting up and running, but I need a bunch of code to make embedding work. Hopefully I can get that done in the next couple days.
I thought briefly about just using IE for the embedding, but it completely messes up the rendering of the miroguide.com, and I don’t think we want to have to support whatever version of IE people have installed on their machines. I also thought briefly about sticking with xulrunner for the widget code, and it’s not totally out of the question, but I’m leaning towards using pygtk for most of the work and only using xulrunner for the actual HTML rendering.
At the beginning of the week I worked on a couple other things. I made an emergency fix for 1.2.1 because the fix I added for that didn’t work for versions of windows without a newer service pack. I’m getting really sick of the way that our app is packaged at this point, which is one of the reasons I’d like to switch to pygtk.
Also I worked on the sql database changes for a few days, basically it gave me something to work on while the widget stuff stewed in my mind. I have code that’s close to checking in there, but I’ve stopped working on it for the moment.
I’m eager to get this widget stuff started, it’s going to be a very long-term project but hopefully we’ll have a fast, native feeling, and (even more) beautiful UI when it’s all done.
You may have seen this video — it’s featured in our latest funding drive.
Andy is super articulate in explaining why open media matters and how Miro makes video more decentralized and accessible. It’s a worthwhile watch:
If you’re wondering about our funding drive, we’ve had a really strong showing so far; however, the contributions coming in now are some of the most important. We have two major donors who have committed substantial funding to PCF, but the extent of their donations hinges on the support they see from our community (BIG THANKS to those who have already contributed!).
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please consider making a contribution. And remember, PCF is a 501-3c non-profit organization, so all US based contributions are tax-deductible:
Today we are launching a major fundraising campaign to support Miro. If you believe, like we do, that an open video distribution system is vital to the free speech and innovation online, please show us your support.
Now is a crucial time for us and we urgently need your support. Please read our pitch and, if you can, make a donation.
And please help us reach new donors– pass along this page to anyone you know who may be interested in helping build truly open media online.
We’re front and center today at Download.com (I believe this is only viewable to folks using Windows). Sweet.
Edit: After publishing this post, it looks like they made us the front page for Mac and Linux users too (check the comments)!
What landed in trunk recently?
Am I missing anything? Let me know in the comments.
I’m starting a new category of my devblog where I’ll mention what’s just landed in trunk. This does two things:
I’ll start blogging interesting things landing in trunk with their revision numbers and probably break it down into bug fixes, enhancements, and misc stuff.
Any thoughts, suggestions, et al–toss them in the comments.
If you’re eager to help Miro with code contributions, but don’t know where to start, take a look at bugs marked with the bitesized keyword in Bugzilla.
You can see a list of them here.
I merged the changes into the Miro-1.2 branch and cut a tarball. You can get the tarball at http://pculture.org/nightlies/Miro-1.2.2-test.tar.gz.
This code needs testing from distributions that are only using xulrunner 1.9. It “works for me” with Ubuntu Hardy Beta 1 today (but didn’t work yesterday) and it works with Ubuntu Gutsy (where it compiles against Firefox). I haven’t tested it on other distributions.
For the most part, I fixed things that were obvious compile/runtime issues. I didn’t delve into the API differences between xulrunner 1.8 and 1.9 and fix deprecation problems and things of that nature. The changes I made are mediocre, but they seem to work for me. They’re loosely based on changes in the Ubuntu packages. I talked about that in a previous blog entry.
I need help testing this with other distributions. I also need help making sure that no other changes are required. Reply in the comments below, toss a comment in bug 9692, ping me on IRC, and/or send me an email to my pculture.org email address.
The more help and the more eyes we get, the more likely that the code will work where you need it to work.
If no one helps out, then I’ll probably just release it and see what happens.
Note: The changes in the above linked tarball are NOT in the Miro 1.2 or 1.2.1 releases. This is not a final release. This is for testing purposes only.
This week was pretty much all working on bug 9756. On Friday I tried to figure out what caused it, but without any luck. However, on Monday I asked some questions in the bug report and was able to figure out the cause. I spent basically all of today working on a fix.
The other main task I worked on was trying to implement switching between the different views that are in the new interface mockup with our HTML system. Eventually I just gave up on it though after talking a bunch with NPR and Andrew. As far as I can tell, it’s not possible without changing a bunch of things so I’d rather just wait for us to have widgets before we implement it.
Other than that I made the first baby steps towards the new database code, but I got pulled off of that pretty early on to work on other things.
I guess I’m going to be working on widgets now instead of Nassar. I’d like to talk a little bit on the call about how folks think we should go about this and especially if I should work on that first or the database stuff. Right now I’m leaning towards working on the database stuff first, because it’s a smaller project and I hope that the work will create a more flexible system which may help when I’m working on the widgets. Also, I was thinking that maybe I would just do the first step of the database work myself - changing it so that we use SQLite columns and tables - but hand off the work of actually switching our views to someone else.
I’m pretty happy that the 9756 seems to be fixed though, I would love to release 1.2.1 as soon as possible.
Adobe is making room for old business models in new technology; they recently announced Digital Rights Management (DRM) integration with their server software. This will allow publishers to dictate users’ every interaction with media and will be integrated across Adobe’s platforms. This is horrible news for consumers and free speech — in addition to creating false scarcity, it limits our ability to effectively comment on mainstream media.
Aside from being anti-free speech and bad for consumers, the added DRM is even more damaging to the open web than Flash video currently is. Right now, putting video inside Flash Player makes it difficult and sometimes impossible for search engines, aggregators, and feed services to index and parse. Adding DRM will exaggerate these difficulties and will also make each of these practices illegal, without explicit permission from the originating website.
Imagine a web where Google had to get permission from each website to add its contents to their search results. The legal issues are because of a US law, called the DMCA, which makes it illegal to tamper with encryption, even when you’re making fair use of the underlying media.
This story is particularly alarming because of our growing dependence on Adobe products for web video publishing and playback. However, there is a bright side to the story — just look at the history of DRM. Consumers have been rejecting it for as long as it has been produced, because it interferes with their ability to use media in ways they normally expect. As a result, major record labels have realized that DRM hurts their businesses and have mostly given up on it.
Revision3 has launched their co-branded Miro Player! As if that wasn’t nice enough of them, they’ve put it all over their front page too, www.revision3.com. Here’s the official press release.
All I have to say is that Revision3 is a great group. They’ve been a blast to work with and they are psyched about Miro. Their co-branded player allows anyone who wants to get Revision3 content delivered directly to their desktop in high def (or low def for that matter) to just download the app and be instantly subscribed. It’s available on both Mac and Windows. If you’ve already got Miro, but want to check out Revision3’s shows, you can browse and subscribe to all of them right now by clicking this button:
As far as we’re concerned, this is just gravy. We’re looking forward to working with Revision3 on an ongoing basis, as we continually improve the co-branded player’s capabilities to give users a more interactive and immersive experience.
This is just another example of Miro increasingly becoming a tool that empowers both publishers and their audiences. Our co-branded players give publishers power over their own content while maintaining the user’s flexibility. Someone who downloads the Revision3 player sees Revision3 content front and center every time they start the application. That’s good, because they love Revision3 content. They can also, however, use the same application to browse and grab video channels from all over the web, and subscribe to anything they please from anywhere.
The Miro team is really excited about this, and we’re really happy to have had a chance to work with the great folks over at Revision3.
After that lunch on Wednesday where I talked about how much I really love the numbers and pretty graphs that are on planet.mozilla.org regularly, I wanted to do stats on Miro.
There are two things I’m interested in measuring. The first is measurements related to release cycles and development process. The second is measurements related to contributions.
Anyhow, here are some rough tables:
tag tv/ released cycle
------ ----- ---------- -------
Miro 1.0 151 MB 53 MB 11/13/2007 N/A
Miro 1.1 169 MB 58 MB 1/10/2008 58 days
Miro 1.2 253 MB 63 MB 3/20/2008 70 days
We’re still doing tight release cycles. I’m hoping we’ll trend towards longer release cycles. Something in the 3 month range would be easier on the devs and probably other people, too.
bugs fixed all gtk mac win bugs created all gtk mac win
---------- --- --- --- --- ------------ --- --- --- ---
Miro 1.0 65 18 17 15 15 85 20 17 17 31
Miro 1.1 40 16 6 10 8 106 44 21 20 21
Miro 1.2 82 26 14 13 29 --
I’ll let you interpret the data as you like. I think the “bugs fixed” column is indicative of our priorities between the releases: 1.0 was a stability-focused release, 1.1 put out libtorrent, and 1.2 involved a code overhaul which caused a lot of regressions.
languages
---------
Miro 1.0 63
Miro 1.1 66
Miro 1.2 70
I’d like to figure out how to get a rough measure of quality of translations, but I’m not really sure how to go about doing that. I threw together a script to count the number of instances where msgid differs from msgstr, but the results don’t seem very indicative of a correctness or completeness figure.
Launchpad has statistics, but there’s no way to look “back in time” at previous releases that I can find. Are there any ideas for how to do that by looking at the .po files?
patches from contributors applied
---------------------------------
Miro 1.0 4
Miro 1.1 2
Miro 1.2 1
What this table shows is that almost all development is being done by PCF. This table troubles me the most–more about that at the end.
On to stats from Bugzilla…. First off, our Bugzilla data before October is probably mediocre, so I’m not really even looking at that. After that, the data has been getting better as more people are helping to triage and annotate bugs. Also, some bugs never make it to Bugzilla. I know that sedatg and some other people mention issues to us on IRC semi-regularly which get fixed, but aren’t tied back to Bugzilla bugs. It’s probably fair to say these stats are indicative of things but aren’t 100% accurate.
Miro 1.2 stats
==============
length of cycle: 70 days
bugs fixed: 82 total
By Operating System:
all: 26
gtkx11: 14
osx: 13
win: 29
By Severity:
blocker: 1
critical: 12
major: 5
normal: 58
minor: 2
enhancement: 4
By Component:
Channels 11
Download 4
Feeds 1
Guides 3
Install 5
Library - New 3
Menu - Shortcut 3
Min - Max 1
Playback 14
Playlists 2
Search 6
Startup 10
Storage 1
System settings 2
User interface 5
main 11
bug reporters: 24 total
pcf people: 7
community: 17
Miro is benefiting greatly from the community with testing and translations–that’s really great and it’s helping a ton!
However, Miro is not getting much help from the community with code and PCF is pretty much funding all development. This is troubling. Miro is getting bigger over time and the complexity is growing, too. There are a lot of moving pieces in the stack of external components that Miro relies upon. There are two ways for Miro development to scale well:
If you can contribute code, please let me know if there’s something blocking your path.
If you can’t contribute code and/or you’re interested in Miro getting better, then install iHeartMiro (there are versions for Firefox and IE) and/or donate money and help PCF fund developers.
I just ran into this post from Joe Solomon about I ? Miro. It’s a quick overview about what I ? M is and gives some good ideas about the future: http://www.netsquared.org/blog/joesolomon/iheartmiro-com-and-future-affiliate-program-fundraising
The Guide was just accepted into Launchpad, so now I need your help. I’m mono-lingual in human languages, so I can’t translate the strings we use into the 34 different languages for which we have videos.
That’s where you come in! Help out by translating some of the Guide over on the Miro Guide Launchpad page, and be the first on your block to see all the cool phrases that are used behind the scenes.
Twenty minutes ago or so we released Miro 1.2. I was talking to Chris, Bryan, and John about Miro 1.2 yesterday at lunch (mid-release) because while there was a lot of work done on Miro 1.2, not a whole lot of it is immediately obvious to the typical Miro user. That got me thinking about writing a post that better explains what did happen and why it’s important.
The Miro 1.2 release post has a list of things we worked on for Miro 1.2. Most of that list consists of things we did in a week or so. The majority of the release cycle work hours were spent on two items: switching to xulrunner 1.9 on Windows and re-architecting to further separate the “frontend” from the “backend”. I want to talk a bit about those two items and why they’re important.
Let’s start with the xulrunner 1.9 change. Firefox 3 is based on xulrunner 1.9. Switching to xulrunner 1.9 even though it’s not released yet was important because the Mozilla crew have done awesome work on improving performance in their current release cycle. Many of the performance improvements are memory-related. It definitely doesn’t make Miro the most optimized thing ever, but it helps. Additionally, Nassar (who did the work) spent some time refactoring bits to make sure events were happening in the correct thread of execution and reducing some of the layers of abstraction and indirection involved. This work will make Miro on Windows more stable than it was previously.
The re-architecture work that Ben did is also really important. Previous versions of Miro had a backend and frontend that were tied together. Creating new platforms was arduous and it hampered any efforts towards building a daemonized platform or a platform that talked to MythTV or Elisa…. He made the split between the two much cleaner and at the end wrote a sample command line interface. In the process of doing that work, he did a bunch of other things that affected the entire code base: he fixed the namespace issues we had with Miro Python modules and he did some refactoring.
This opens up a lot of possibilities. It will be easier to write a daemon Miro platform that has an XMLRPC interface. It will be easier to write a slimmed down version of Miro for smaller computers like the Nokia n810. It’s a good direction to be heading in.
In an effort to increase the number of people who are using I ? Miro, I just released a version that works with Internet Explorer 7. It’s a bit more difficult to install than the Firefox extension, but it helps us just as much.
Check it out at http://www.iheartmiro.org/
We’ve just released a major update to Miro, version 1.2.
Grab it now: Download Miro
This version adds lots of tweaks and bug fixes that make Miro smoother and slicker. It also lays the groundwork for some big improvements that are coming soon. Version 1.2 is the best Miro yet.
Some of What’s New in Miro 1.2
What’s New in the Miro Guide
The Miro Guide is an integral part of the Miro experience. The Guide has had a couple big updates since the last release of Miro.
Got 3 seconds to spare? Digg Miro 1.2
This is really exciting. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) will be posting the next episode of “Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister” with BitTorrent (here’s the announcement). That in itself is cool, but there’s more: they say that the inspiration for the project came from reading Cory Doctorow’s (a Miro board member) post about how the NRK in Norway was having great success this way and saving thousands of dollars a month. NRK recommends Miro and does most of their BitTorrent distribution through Miro, since it’s the easiest way for folks to download and watch BitTorrent videos.
This is the first trickle of what could be a rush of video publishers, tv stations, and public broadcasters using BitTorrent to save money and reach a wide audience with high quality video. This is exactly the kind of thing Miro was created to enable! We believe every publisher should be able to reach thousands and even millions of people with HD video and low bandwidth costs.
Here’s more about TV shows distributing video with BitTorrent and Miro:
I continued working on getting Miro 1.2 released. One thing we need to do better is coordinate translations. I’ll be working on fixing that part of the release process for the next release cycle.
I also worked on getting Miro trunk to compile and work with xulrunner 1.9 and on Ubuntu Hardy. I finished this today and checked it in. It seems ok, but definitely needs peer review from someone who’s more familiar with XPCOM.
I had a cup of coffee with Nathan from Creative Commons. He was out here doing work somewhere at MIT and I live nearby so we got together. For Miro 1.0, he implemented license extraction from RSS feeds. You can see the end result of this when you see the “license” item in the feed item details. When the publisher has license information in the feed, this links to the license. When you watch video content on the Internet, think about what roles you play in that content… Are you merely a passive consumer? Can you take the content and remix it into new content with new meaning? Can you share it with your friends? Can you post it elsewhere? The license information answers these questions and more. Thank you Nathan!
He and I talked about other areas where Miro and Creative Commons intersect and then we talked about PyBlosxom–another project I work on.
Once Miro 1.2 is out, I’m going to go back to work on Mediabar. I’ll probably be working on that for the next week or two.
Some of my favorite internet videos ever are now one of the best demonstrations of what’s wrong with having a single big corporation control internet video. YouTube has yanked the StSanders videos of bad guitar playing overdubbed on famous guitar players in concert. It’s impossible to explain with words what makes these videos so incredibly well done and hilarious. But it’s easy to explain what YouTube is doing: censorship. Any claim that this is a copyright violation is baloney: this is a textbook case of fair use and they know this.
Instead, Google / YouTube has pulled these videos down because it’s the safer corporate decision. Since YouTube is still the absolutely dominant online video host (four times more popular than the closest competition), this action largely removes these videos from public view. This is how free speech slowly slips away online. And this is why we’re trying to build a decentralized platform for online video.
Last week we started the release candidate testing for Miro 1.2. We got some good feedback with the regression testing , made some more important fixes and posted rc1 last night.
We are hoping that rc1 will be the last testing build before release and we could really use your help.
If you take a look at the latest post on the miro testing blog, it will give you some extra information about the fixes and enhancements that are in this release.
Thanks.
Miro Planet (this page) Miro News Blog
Miro Testing Blog
Paul Swartz’s PCF Devblog
Team Miro
Will's blog
bdk
clahey
Last updated:
May 14, 2008 07:10 PM
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