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I just released Minitube 0.9 with some minor enhancements and bug fixes. It is not a mind-blowing release, but still adds what I consider the most important feature: polish. I somewhat rushed the release in the hope that Christian, an Ubuntu packager, manages to get Minitube into Lucid Lynx. So everybody cross your fingers!

A user notified me about some music videos not playing in Minitube. After a quick search I noticed they all come from YouTube users ending in *VEVO. Here’s an explanation of what this evil VEVO thing actually is.

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!

Once upon a time Stefan Brück built Minitube with Visual C++ and the DirectShow Phonon backend. Alas the DirectShow backend had problems streaming YouTube videos. Then came Marco di Antonio and built Minitube with the Mplayer backend, he did a great work but mplayer was incredibly unstable and crashed all the time. Weeks passed and still no Minitube for Windows.

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…

Unfortunately a critical bug popped up in the 0.8 release. When HD mode is enabled, non-HD videos fail to play. A “Network error” is reported and Minitube skips to the next video. It’s not 100% clear to me what triggered the bug, anyway it should be fixed in 0.8.1.

High Definition video is coming to a Minitube near you! As if it wasn’t enough, version 0.8 also:

• 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!

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.

I’m starting a new ambitious Free Software project. Yes, that’s it, Yet Another Music Player™. I’ve got a few innovative UI concepts in mind that I hope will justify the incredible duplication of effort already present in this area. But the real reason I’m doing this is that my living room lacks a decent music player. You read it right. The gazillion Linux players around are all unusable, for a reason or another. I used to be an enthusiastic Amarok 1.x user a few years ago, then came KDE4 and Amarok2. I guess all good things must come to an end… Mac people are in an even worse position.

After the positive Minitube experience and since the new player will inherit part of its codebase, I’d like to call the new player Minitunes (hope I don’t get sued because of the last 5 letters). In the picture, a detail of the Collection view, showing the artists in my collection… Get ready for the brand new iTunes killer. No less. -.-

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!