[GSoC 2018] Welcome Window Integration in Pitivi – Conclusion

In my last post (link), I talked about integrating “Search” and “Remove” feature in Pitivi’s welcome window. Search feature allowed for easy browsing of recent projects and remove feature allowed removing project(s) from recent projects list.

In this post, I want to introduce “Project Thumbnails”. I have successfully integrated project thumbnails in recent projects list. This is the last task under issue 1302.

The main idea behind thumbnails is to give the user a hint what a certain project is about. This can be seen as information in addition to project name and uri which helps to identify the desired project faster and more easily.

Project thumbnails integrated in recent projects list

We display our project thumbnails in a dark grayish container of size 96×54 (16:9). We preserve the aspect ratio of our project thumbnails while displaying them in the container, for example, aspect ratio of thumbnail of project “demo3” in the above screenshot is 21:9 while projects “demo7” and “demo1” have 16:9 aspect ratio thumbnails. If a project has no thumbnail, such as an empty project, we show “video-x-generic” theme icon as project thumbnail, for example, project “demo4” in the above screenshot.

We create a thumbnail for a project if and only if:

• the project doesn’t have a thumbnail, or
• user imported/deleted asset(s) while working on the project.

Our project thumbnail generation approach is as follows:

1. We go through all the assets in the project and fetch their thumbnails from the XDG cache.
2. Out of all the fetched thumbnails, we pick the one with maximum file size as our project thumbnail (Why?).
3. If we are not able to get any thumbnail from the XDG cache, we pick the preview thumbnail of the first asset that has a thumbnail cache** as our project thumbnail.

** This is the cache maintained by Pitivi for the assets imported in a project. This is different from XDG cache. XDG cache is a system wide cache for thumbnails.

So, finally after 10 weeks, I conclude the issue 1302. To give a brief idea of what I did in these 10 weeks, this is how welcome dialog in Pitivi looked 10 weeks back…

And this is how it looks now…

I would also like to express my gratitude to my mentor Alexandru Băluț (aleb) for helping and guiding me throughout these 10 weeks.

Next, I will be working on the issue 1816. My aim is to complete it in the next 2 weeks.

I will keep posting my progress on this blog. Until next time.

Stay tuned 🙂