This is such a great news! I tried but I really cannot convey what I feel in English words, so I’ll try with an image. Here’s a cheesy picture of me in 2007 after reaching Sardinia’s highest peak, proudly wearing a self-made Kubuntu shirt!

These videos are streamed using the RTMP Adobe proprietary protocol, with the obvious aim to make them harder to save and stream outside of their Flash thing. This means that Minitube won’t be able play them until its multimedia engines implement this protocol. The Free Software community is working on reverse engineering and implementing the protocol, withstanding legal threats from Adobe. It will take time before working code lands in GStreamer or Xine. On the Mac, Quicktime may never be able to handle RTMP, maybe requiring a switch to another Phonon backend (VLC).

So this is the current state of VEVO things as I understand them. If I’m missing something please let me know or if you feel you can help to get those video play in Minitube, please do.

UPDATE 2010-01-11: It looks like VEVO videos now correctly play in Minitube. Great!

I spent the last few nights setting up a virtualized Windows XP and trying to finally get a working Minitube on Windows. First of all, Windows sucks, as you may already know. By contrast Qt 4.6 is so awesome that it can build cleanly with Mingw, the Windows GCC port, and this gave me hope. The DirectShow Phonon Backend used to require Visual C++, fortunately this is no longer the case. So it is very easy to have Minitube use DirectShow. It has problems with YouTube video streams. Maybe they can be worked around but, even if that was the case, users would have to install codecs separately. I tried to install FFDShow, ffmpeg ported as DirectShow codecs, but miserably failed both on XP and Vista. I can barely imagine what would happen if I release Minitube that way. Thousands of angry Windows users, with zero respect and knowledge of what Free Software is, would flood with the comments, emails and negative reviews.

Plan B: the Phonon VLC Backend. Lucky enough KDE people are actively working on a VLC backend for Phonon. I spent a few days trying to compile it using their CMake-based build system. I may be an idiot, a Windows noob or a KDE noob or the three together, but I couldn’t build that DLL. So I decided to replace the build system altogether and use QMake. Ten minutes and I had my phonon_vlc.dll.

So does this mean Minitube for Windows is ready? No way. From what I can understand VLC has problems decoding the video stream, especially the AAC audio. It stops playing the video, not even randomly but always in the same place. Sometimes it recovers, sometimes it skips to the next video. But in general VLC feels like the more solid solution. I’ll try to get in touch with VLC people and get help.

To be continued…

• Remembers volume level and mute status across sessions.
• Includes new Croatian, Latvian, Galician, Hungarian and French translations.
• Removes cheesy icons in menus on Linux.

Thanks to Eduardo Suarez-Santana, Srecko Belaic, Inga Muste, Miguel Anxo Bouzada, Krisztián Horváth and Guillaume Betous for contributing to this release!