A lot of work is going on for the Ubuntu TV project. This weekly update aims to be a place to receive information on what has changed in the different areas of the project. It also hopes to engage the community and show in what areas anyone can get involved. Check back each week for an update on the project’s status.

Changes since last week

• Unity 2D has been removed. Unity 3D is the future, and it is now. What this means for Ubuntu TV is that the foundation is in place. There are aspects of the TV UI that still need to be ported to Unity 3D.
• The TV team is hard at work helping to implement the Unity Previews user experience for 12.10 which will directly benefit the TV UI.
  • http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2012/08/say-hello-to-unitys-newest-feature-previews
  • Give the latest Unity Previews code a try (requires Unity 6.2 and Ubuntu 12.10): https://launchpad.net/~unity-team/+archive/staging

Current Status

• Nux – a widget/graphics library created by Canonical
• Unity 3D transition status
  • Since Unity 2D was depreciated for Ubuntu 12.10, much work is being done to port Ubuntu TV to Unity 3D
  • Standalone mode is working which is necessary for the TV form factor. Force into standalone mode by specifying –force-tv on the command line when starting Unity
  • For TV’s Unity, launchers no longer track the status of applications, nor will the associated lenses be loaded
  • Continued progress removing Qt and replacing with Nux
• Lenses/scopes
  • Undecided, but likely: Video, Music, DVR, Pictures
  • Accepting recommendations on scopes from the community
• Metadata
  • Will use Grilo framework to get metadata into Ubuntu TV as well as provide a consistent API to query and retrieve metadata
  • Transitioning away from .nfo files (and the XBMC dependency) to keeping metadata in an indexed database

• Grilo plugin for TMDB has been written. Commit to Grilo upstream is waiting upstream approval
• Use the Grilo test GUI to experiment with the plugin
• Community members can use the TMDB as a template to contribute other metadata provider plugins (such as TTVDB)
• Community member contributions
  • Thomas Mashos has made Ubuntu TV Testcard available via a deb. Please provide feedback on the Ubuntu TV mailing list.
  • bobweaver has been hacking away at code and adding some cool new features

• We’ve started to see work done by the community on regular Unity lenses and scopes that seem like they would work well in Ubuntu TV and should require little or no modification for Ubuntu TV. We look forward to seeing more awesome community contributions.

• Jim is working on an example application that demonstrates live metadata searching using Nux to render the UI
  • This is the beginning of the place to experiment with metadata retrieval from Unity which will set the stage for what Ubuntu TV metadata retrieval will look like for the product in general
  • The basic app is working and can go public once an internal library that it uses is publicly released
• Michał continues work on remote control integration
  • The current plan is to have remote button presses appear like regular keystrokes
• A development team within Canonical continues to work on the Unity 3D transition

Help wanted

If you want to get involved, please leave us a comment below so multiple people aren’t working independently on the same things.

• Accepting any Grilo plugins to retrieve online metadata (see Writing plugins for Grilo)
• Advanced: accepting a C++ binding for Grilo
• Look at grilomm for a start of a C++ binding. Needing someone to complete this work.
• Please join #ubuntu-tv on irc.freenode.net to discuss if you’re interested in either of these two areas of help

Get involved

• On irc.freenode.net in #ubuntu-tv
• Our mailing list at ubuntu-tv@lists.launchpad.net

Jim Hodapp (Canonical) and Thomas Mashos (Community/Mythbuntu) work together each week to get this information out. If you have any questions/comments/suggestions about the format or content in these weekly updates feel free to email Thomas Mashos.