I just upgraded my home fanless PC to the Karmic Koala. After reinstalling phonon-backend-gstreamer, that was left out by the update process, I was able to run Minitube 0.7 without problems. I was shocked when I found that video seeking now works. Not only it is working, but it can seek beyond the buffered part of the video. This means that you can immediately seek to the end of a video. This is just awesome.
A new version of Minitube is out, sporting minor fixes and an important enhancement. Many users will have noticed the dreaded “Embedding disabled by request” message. It happens when a YouTube user explicitly disables “embedding” of his/her video on webpages. Often these are videos from major labels and other evil entities. Now Minitube can happily play these too. Enjoy.
You may have noticed that your beloved Minitube is not working anymore. Don’t panic! Version 0.6.1 is here to help you. Many thanks to Guillaume Girard for reporting the problem and suggesting a fix. Mac builds will arrive in a few hours Mac builds are up.
Minitube has been reported to work on the brand new Nokia N900. This phone sports the Maemo 5 Linux-based operating system. Cool!
Version 0.6 is out now! This cycle has seen an increase of contributions from various people around the world. In particular Kiwamu Okabe, from Japan, magically appeared on Gitorious and added HTTP proxy support and a Japanese translation.
I think I’m going to take a break and slow down development a bit. I have a couple ideas for two new projects and I’d like to take the time needed to experiment. It is always Qt stuff. After years of server-side programming and Web development I guess I found my real interest: I just love to design the UI of native applications.
Marcel Hilzinger wrote a very positive review about Minitube. Thank you!
Minitube landed in the FreeBSD ports. Yeah!
In other news, among various blogs talking about Minitube, Tony Iliakostas wrote an outstanding (Mac-oriented) review of Minitube.
And now for the bad news, Google banned the Minitube project page from their search results, maybe because lots of people are linking to it. Way to go, Google!
I just discovered that the (quite obscure) PLD Linux distribution and has been quietly packaging Minitube since the very beginning. Also SourceMage Linux has a Minitube 0.3 “spell” available. These add up to Gentoo, Fink, ArchLinux and Pardus. Very nice!
PS. My secret dream is having Minitube in Debian. /me crosses fingers
I just finished to add Google suggest support into Minitube. It was quick since there is a Qt example available that does just that. I guess everybody knows what I’m talking about. When you type a keyword a little popup appears under the search box with the most popular keywords matching what you have typed.
The implementation is a bit buggy but already usable, the code is available on Gitorious. I’m not sure if additionally showing the user’s own previous searches would be a good idea… maybe not. Both from a privacy and performance point of view.
In the meantime, Stefan Brueck has been working on building Minitube on Windows. He has an experimental build, that basically does everything apart playing videos 
Not a bad start for this development cycle! Once the completion stuff is really perfect, I think I’ll work on some minor polishing and release 0.5 right away.
Comments to my photos
