Hacking on christine

Back in february, I met Markuz in Mexico city, and he showed me his pet project Christine. I really liked the idea of a multimedia player which can handle audio and/or video including all the goodies the other players have (playlists, queues, internet radio, etc) and I joined christine’s development group.

Since february, my contributions have been… well, insignificant. I wrote some patches, fixed some typos, but nothing else, so I thought it was about time to start getting my hands dirty in the guts of the beast.

Last week, watching the feature requests on sourceforge, I noticed PCero requested a round volume control, and I thought: “heck, there is no linux media player I’ve seen with a rounded volume control, much like in winamp’s fashion… why not?”. So I started learning cairo, and 2 days later, now christine has a round volume control :D

Yesterday, markuz was hacking on the “importing files” bug, in which christine freezes or crashes while importing media, and when it works, well… let’s just say that is not what you may call fast… There was this idea floating in the air, about using mutagen to import files and get the media tags, so I got my hands dirty again, and created a mockup of what mutagen can do for christine. In whole numbers, now is about 3 times faster, and it doesn’t crash anymore! yay!

If you haven’t tried christine yet, wait for the next release. It’s gonna be a wild ride, I tell ya!

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Published:
05.17.07 / 7pm
Category:
Christine, Programacion