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
- Thomas Guest has joined Jim Hodapp and Michał Sawicz on the Ubuntu TV team working for Canonical
- 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
- A development team within Canonical continues to work on the Unity 3D transition
- Michał continues work on remote control integration
- 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.
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 probably: 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
Help wanted
- Accepting any Grilo plugins to retrieve online metadata (see Writing plugins for Grilo)
- Advanced: accepting a C++ binding for Grilo
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/suggests about the format or content in these weekly updates feel free to email Thomas Mashos.
