Videos in GNOME 3.38

This is going to be a short post, as changes to Videos have been few and far between in the past couple of releases.

The major change to the latest release is that we've gained Tracker 3 support through a grilo plugin (which meant very few changes to our own code). But the Tracker 3 libraries are incompatible with the Tracker 2 daemon that's usually shipped in distributions, including on this author's development system.

So we made use of the ability of Tracker to run inside a Flatpak sandbox along with the video player, removing the need to have Tracker installed by the distribution, on the host. This should also make it easier to give users control of the directories they want to use to store their movies, in the future.

The release candidate for GNOME 3.38 is available right now as the stable version on Flathub.

Videos and Books in GNOME 3.32

GNOME 3.32 will very soon be released, so I thought I'd go back on a few of the things that happened with some of our content applications.

Videos

First, many thanks to Marta Bogdanowicz, Baptiste Mille-Mathias, Ekaterina Gerasimova and Andre Klapper who toiled away at updating Videos' user documentation since 2012, when it was still called “Totem”, and then again in 2014 when “Videos” appeared.

The other major change is that Videos is available, fully featured, from Flathub. It should play your Windows Movie Maker films, your circular wafers of polycarbonate plastic and aluminium, and your Devolver indie films. No more hunting codecs or libraries!

In the process, we also fixed a large number of outstanding issues, such as accommodating for the app menu's planned disappearance, moving the audio/video properties tab to nautilus proper, making the thumbnailer available as an independent module, making the MPRIS plugin work better and loads, loads mo.

Books

As Documents was removed from the core release, we felt it was time for Books to become independent. And rather than creating a new package inside a distribution, the Flathub version was updated. We also fixed a bunch of bugs, so that's cool :)

Weather

I didn't work directly on Weather, but I made some changes to libgweather which means it should be easier to contribute to its location database.

Adding new cities doesn't require adding a weather station by hand, it would just pick the closest one, and weather stations also don't need to be attached to cities either. They were usually attached to villages, sometimes hamlets!

The automatic tests are also more stringent, and test for more things, which should hopefully mean less bugs.

And even more Flatpaks

On Flathub, you'll also find some applications I packaged up in the last 6 months. First is Teo Thomson emulator, GBE+, a Game Boy emulator focused on accessories emulation, and a way to run your old Flash games offline.