Videos is here!

It's been some time in the making, with the redesign work started a couple of release cycles ago, but we finally reached a state where it's usable, and leaps and bounds easier to use than the previous versions.

I should note that I use Totem and Videos interchangeably, Totem is still the name of the project, code repository, but the user-visible name is Videos (or GNOME Videos if differentiation is necessary).

Discovery

The old UI made it particularly hard to consume media from various web sites, as you can see from the screenshot below. It's cramped, we had separate sidebars for search and browse, we didn't show icons for browse, etc.

And here's the new UI, browsing the same source (Apple Trailers).

This is definitely easier to find media. Totem also had a number of specific plugins to find media sources, usually from third-party developers. We don't support those anymore, and if you have been writing such a plugin, you should port them to grilo, now a hard-dependency.

I've also spent some time working on Grilo and its plugins, creating a few new sources along the process.

Amongst the new ones are the Freebox TV plugin, the under-powered Guardian Videos source, and the not-yet-fully-integrated Pocket videos list. Don't forget to check for blocker bugs if you're trying to test those!

Playback

This is also a pretty big upgrade. We now have video-specific menu item, the gear menu, and better looking pop-ups. This matches the design used in GNOME Documents for sliders. It's also better suited for touch: a mouse move will show the OSD for a short time, but a touchscreen tap will show the OSD until you tap it again.

The older version had some features only available in windowed, such as rotation, or zoom, and some we tried to cram into the context menu (subtitle or sound track selection for example). Here, there's no loss of accessibility for features, they're all in the same gear menu, whether fullscreen or windowed.

Bugs, bugs, bugs

With a few valiant testers and designers, we tried to fix a number of bugs. This release doesn't mean Videos is bug-free, far from it, but it's certainly robust and usable enough to make this development release.

There's some theming bugs, as can be seen in that last screenshot's previous/next buttons, there's bugs in grilo and grilo-plugins, and there's bugs in Videos itself.

Do file bugs when you see something amiss, it'll help designers and myself move items from our own TODO lists :)

What's next

A lot :)

You can see some of those in the design wireframes.

"Make available offline" is something I have a great interest in, especially coupled with the Pocket source. Selecting a bunch of items to watch later, on the train, or on the plane.

Better metadata, especially for films and series. This isn't just for films you snarfed from Usenet and torrent sites either. The already existing Rai.tv source has a number of films, and a BBC iPlayer source is planned.

Finally, remote playback, to "throw" videos from your laptop to the TV. Controls should still work, and we'll want to allow browsing through sources when playback is remote.

Notes on development

Half notes, half thanks. As mentioned in the introduction, this release has been some time in the making, but it also comes at a time when we've had the necessary plumbing to make all this possible.

To name but a few, we've made good use of gnome-documents' widgets to list videos, the GtkStack, GtkRevealer and GtkPopover. The GtkSearchBar and GtkSearchEntry widgets are also examples of widgets that moved to GTK+ for Videos' development.

Getting it

Soon in your development distributions, in totem's master git branch, and in GNOME's FTP server.