Hi everyone, please read this if you are a Freebo user, even if you are no developer at all. I have been thinking about the future of Freevo 2.0 and need all your help to get it going somehow.
I tried XBMC some days ago and while it looks very nice, it forces me to organize my media collection in a way I don't want to and has some usability issues (IMHO). Therefore, I still need Freevo. :) The main problem with Freevo 2.0 is my and Jason's lack of time the last year. Development was not only slow, it wasn't existant. I now have one Freevo-hacking day in my calender each week which may be dropped if the weather is too good but it is there and I plan to use it. There are some minor issues I will fix no matter what happens. But I do not have the time to finish Freevo 2.0 to make it look and feel like I want. If you want to help in any way, please answer to this mail and we can discuss it. If you need help to start (like kaa.base help), feel free to ask. Jason and I can both answer your questions. Jason: I assign your name to some smaller stuff here, I hope it is OK. ;) Freevo Core: 1. kaa.base is done and has all the cool stuff I want. If there is a bug, Jason and I will take care of it. But it shouldn't be much. 2. kaa.metadata is also done. Maybe add or change a parser, but that is not important right now. Patches are always welcome. 3. kaa.imlib2 is also working as it should and it does not play a big role in the Freevo 2.0 core. 4. The Freevo core directory is also mostly done. There are some minor bugs in the playlist stuff but it should be easy to fix. The menu reload also has some problems I need to investigate. To summarize: the core is mostly done and the remaining points are on my TODO list and I will fix them. Now the bigger problems: GUI. The clutter-based GUI can do nice stuff but needs some more work. 5. kaa.candy has the basics, but may need some nice effects like mirror-effect, better animations, etc. It has everything we need to make Freevo 2.0 work but it could be nicer. If you know C (Python not needed) and want to play with clutter or if you now Python and want to dive into kaa.candy, drop me a note. You only need to know kaa.base and clutter as dependency. 6. XBMC looks soooo cool. The big background images, the animations. Nice! We do have the code in Freevo 2.0 to do the same (even support to grab TV show or movie specific wallpapers and images). I need help from a designer to make look Freevo even better. Can someone make a fake screenshot how Freevo should look like? Can someone provide nice wallpapers (CC licence)? This is one of the things I can not do myself. The GUI stuff needs help from you. C programmers, Python programmers and artists. Or if you cannot help with that, tell us what you want to have. Let's dive into the media plugins: 7. kaa.beacon is mostly done. I have some minor things on my list I will do the next weeks. The big problem is a better network support. Jason: we talked about distributed beacon servers. Do you still plan to do this? Do you still have time for it? 8. kaa.popcorn (or video player) needs clutter support to write on a texture. This would enable us to draw on top of the video and put it on the background. Again: help needed here. we could either put the mplayer output on a texture or use gstreamer. Jason played with the first option but the code is not finished yet. Jason: do you think you can finish it? Others: do you want to help here? You need to understand kaa.base and kaa.popcorn (which you could change to your needs). Besides that, mplayer and/or gstreamer. The mplayer integration would also require C and clutter knowledge. The gstreamer integration needs pygstreamer. And we need to figure out how to integrate it with kaa.candy and the Freevo core. That would be my task. 9. The image viewer could look nicer. If you want to help on this smaller part of Freevo, feel free to tell me. 10. I have no time to work on TV support. I need help on working on the TV server, the TV devices (e.g. dvbstreamer), the EPG, etc. This is one of the major tasks I want to assign a new maintainer. And something different: 11. There is not webserver for Freevo 2.0. Anyone willing to take over this part? You have complete control what you want to do. I guess you have to know your HTML/CSS/JS-fu. 12. Android / iPhone support? Not needed but nice to have 13. Port plugins from Freevo 1.9 to 2.0 And last but not least: 14. It has been 2 or 3 years since I last asked for donations and I am paying for the server and the domain on my own since the money run out. It is only 11 EUR/month but it would be nice if some of you would help me out here. You can use paypal and dis...@freevo.org for donations. Thank you. Long mail and I hope to get some feedback. Who is willing to help? Code C or Python? Clutter knowledge? Gstreamer? Web-stuff? Or a designer without coding? It would be a shame if Freevo dies, but I cannot do this alone. Regards, Dischi ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ AppSumo Presents a FREE Video for the SourceForge Community by Eric Ries, the creator of the Lean Startup Methodology on "Lean Startup Secrets Revealed." This video shows you how to validate your ideas, optimize your ideas and identify your business strategy. http://p.sf.net/sfu/appsumosfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Freevo-devel mailing list Freevo-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-devel
