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.

New: Changes since last week are in bold.

Current Status (subject to change)

• General
  • Since the 12.10 cycle is past feature freeze, most teams have switched to bug fixing as new features are no longer accepted this cycle.
• Nux
  • An OpenGL toolkit used by Unity (including Ubuntu TV) to draw and render the launcher, Dash and HUD.
• Unity 3D transition status
  • Since Unity 2D is deprecated for Ubuntu 12.10, much work is being done to port Ubuntu TV to Unity 3D. Much of this work is included in the 12.10 Ubuntu desktop. Currently the transition is approximately 60% complete.
  • For TV’s Unity, launchers no longer track the status of applications, nor will the associated lenses be loaded
• Lenses/scopes
  • Undecided, but probably what you would expect from a media center: Video, Music, DVR, Pictures
  • Work on lenses/scopes benefits all Unity (that’s the joy of Unity), so improvements for one area are seen across all form factors.
  • Accepting recommendations on scopes from the community

• 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
  • Jim Hodapp has committed (revision 57) his video preview work to the remote-videos trunk branch for unity-lens-video

• Metadata
  • Metadata (from videos, music files, images, etc) will be read into a fully indexed backend which is continually updated based on monitored file system changes.
  • Will use Grilo framework to get metadata into Ubuntu TV as well as provide a consistent API to query and retrieve metadata

• Grilo plugin for TMDBhas 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
  • Ubuntu TV Testcard (Thomas Mashos) is awaiting review to get into the official repos. To try it out now, a deb is available for install. Please provide feedback on the Ubuntu TV mailing list.

• Community lenses and scopes made for Unity 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
• Remote controls
  • Michał continues work on remote control integration
  • The current plan is to have remote button presses appear like regular keystrokes
• UDS-R – 13.04 (Copenhagen, Denmark)
  • October 29th – November 1st
  • Ubuntu TV sessions being planned (check the client track) and will be publicly posted before UDS begins (most likely in the next few weeks)
  • Ubuntu TV work expected to ramp up during this cycle as Unity 3D transition should be finished

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.
• We’ve already seen some awesome things done with Previews (such as the Wikipedia and Photos Previews by David Callé). Would really like to see what people can do to take advantage of the new Previews framework, specifically in a TV context.
• 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 (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.