“Videos” de-clutter-ification

(I nearly went with clutterectomy, but that would be doing our old servant project a disservice.)

Yesterday, I finally merged the work-in-progress branch porting totem to GStreamer's GTK GL sink widget, undoing a lot of the work done in 2011 and 2014 to port the video widget and then to finally make use of its features.

But GTK has been modernised (in GTK3 but in GTK4 even more so), GStreamer grew a collection of GL plugins, Wayland and VA-API matured and clutter (and its siblings clutter-gtk, and clutter-gst) didn't get the resources they needed to follow.

A screenshot with practically no changes, as expected

The list of bug fixes and enhancements is substantial:

• Makes some files that threw shaders warnings playable
• Fixes resize lag for the widgets embedded in the video widget
• Fixes interactions with widgets on some HDR capable systems, or even widgets disappearing sometimes (!)
  
• Gets rid of the floating blank windows under Wayland
• Should help with tearing, although that's highly dependent on the system
• Hi-DPI support
• Hardware acceleration (through libva)

Until the port to GTK4, we expect a overall drop in performance on systems where there's no VA-API support, and the GTK4 port should bring it to par with the fastest of players available for GNOME.

You can install a Preview version right now by running:

$ flatpak install --user https://flathub.org/beta-repo/appstream/org.gnome.Totem.Devel.flatpakref

and filing bug in the GNOME GitLab.

Next stop, a GTK4 port!

System Settings shell changes

 While Jon McCann made changes to the System Settings UI, I was busy implementing an animated notebook, to make the switch between panels, overview and search less jarring.

Video on YouTube.

Here's a list of what we fixed:

• Avoid scrollbars at all costs on startup (made possible by some GTK+ sizing bug fixes)
• Make the default window bigger, while supporting small displays (800x600 displays should now be usable)
• Bigger icons to match the Shell's overview
• Better layout of search results
• Animated transitions between panels, overview and search results

Before

After

There will most likely be more tweaks of the UI between now and the GNOME 3.6 release, which I'll make sure to let you know about.

PS: Before you ask, we cannot animate window size changes. Hopefully this will be possible in the future.

Update: Fixed a double-negative. Also note that there are some differences between my screenshots and reality, like the separators, as my system wasn't fully updated.

Totem in GNOME 3.0, plans for 3.2

Totem for GNOME 3 is available in the GNOME FTP servers. And now onto GNOME 3.2.

There's a couple of major UI changes planned for Totem 3.2, with designs from the GNOME Design team (and Hylke in particular). These include the removal of the status bar, better fullscreen controls, more contrast when playing movies, etc.

New colours

The changes for contrast are already in Totem itself, and you can grab a 3.2 version of gnome-themes-standard to see the "dark" variant of Totem (or enjoy the screenshot below).

Black Swan, go see it.

New video widget

For the rest of the changes, we needed a video widget that was more flexible than the X-based one we were using. So from Totem 3.2, we'll start using clutter, and clutter-gst.

This means that we'll be able to implement things like OSDs for more than just the fullscreen version, use an indicator in the video directly when buffering for live streams instead of the status bar. It would also allow other useful features, like rotating videos with animations, to preview movies from your phone or camera in landscape mode.

Performance-wise, if you were already using an OpenGL-accelerated desktop, the difference should be minimal, comparing clutter-gst's video sink to an Xv overlay using OpenGL, the major difference being the addition of the videobalance element to the pipeline.

If you don't have OpenGL drivers for your machine, Totem 3.0 will still be maintained, with important bug fixes being backported.

Misc changes

We expect a Grilo plugin making its appearance, which will allow us to focus our bug fixing on the interface parts, rather than having to maintain the code to access various video resources.

We also made changes to the nautilus properties tab, which should make it faster, using Edward's GstDiscoverer.

Colophon

You can start testing the clutter-based Totem, the dark variant, and the faster nautilus properties right now, in the master branch of Totem in GNOME git.