Release

Auto alignment and precise waveforms.

Object tracking, beat detection and Clip Properties enhancements.

Media Library clips tagging.

Bug fixes.

Lots of new features.

We’re proud to release the first Pitivi 1.0 release candidate “Ocean Big Chair” (0.99). This release has many bug fixes and performance improvements, and is a release candidate for 1.0. Our test suite grew considerably, from 164 to 191 meaningful unit tests.

You can install it right away using Flatpak.

GSoC

Early on this year, we got caught up in the Google Summer of Code. A lot of students hacked on Pitivi this spring, to get to know Pitivi better. As a result quite a few important fixes and improvements have been made. A big thank you to all of the students who contributed!

This is another release focused on fixing bugs and improving stability.

Improved timeline

We switched our official build to use GTK 3.22 and the framework did not like how we were using it, spamming us with warnings in the console. We fixed those and improved the timeline in the process and added more unit tests.

It was quite a journey. Initially, the GTK Inspector was useful to figure out which widgets the widget IDs in the warnings identified. Then we had to go back between the GTK documentation and the #gtk+ IRC channel until we figured out we were changing the size of some containers in their do_draw methods, which was not good.

Besides the usual cleanup and bug squashing, this release brings a fundamental feature which greatly improves the edit experience. Now you can edit and render a video project with any video files with great accuracy, thanks to proxy files.

Proxy editing: fast and accurate editing with any video format

The harsh reality of this world is that there is only a limited set of formats that really work well for video editing. Without those, rendering a project could have been inaccurate at times*. The user experience degrades when using container formats not designed for fast & accurate seeking. For example, seeking a video format where the keyframes are followed by one or more inter-frames (such as in VP8, H.264) is often slow.

Last week-end, part of the Pitivi Team went to the GStreamer Hackfest in Google’s offices in Munich to work with twenty other GStreamer hackers on various important technical issues. A big thanks to Google and Stefan Sauer for hosting the event! Keep your eyes peeled: we will soon blog the results of the work the Pitivi team has accomplished during the hackfest.

During the hackfest a very important milestone has been reached: the first GStreamer Editing Services, GNonLin and gst-python stable versions in the 1.X branch have been released. That means that these very central components of the Pitivi project are now considered stable.