Linux Movies Group

Linux Movies Group Meeting Highlights

Wednesday, October 8, 2002, 7pm
Barnes & Noble Bookstore Cafe
El Cerrito (Berkeley), California

This is our first meeting at B&N. We didn't have a big turnout and haven't been growing as we should. We're going to get the word out better to the studios and switching the meeting night to the first Thursday to better accommodate some people's schedules.

Drew talked about pour and toss, his Python-based DV editor in development. He uses mini-dom rather than Python's built-in PyXML that has problems with pretty-print escaping that corrupts files. He not4e he uses the W3-recommenced ISO 8601 date format that looks odd to everyone because it is a little different from UNIX. He used google sets and wordnet to help find like names. He had used that before at work where machine names have a salmon motif, but his boss didn't like his suggestion of chum (shark bait)!

Robin and Drew discussed the design of timestamp change annotations in XML. Robin said version tags should be child tags (modal) so they have the same format and may hang off anything. That would make it easy to ignore them in naive XML readers.

Drew mentioned the PyGTK IRC channel, and how that he had been able to talk with the original designer there to get undocumented APIs he needed. Drew uses the dictionary widget.

Drew said Karl had offered a roto tool. Drew is interested in interface design for that, so that if rotoscoping a flowing robe for instance, extra points may be added only to frames that need them. The RAYZ approach of adding points to the entire roto set is wasteful and the extra points often go the wrong way when moved. Drew talked about a graph-label layout manager he is working on, which Robin suggested could work quite well in the 80% solution case. Robin said he discovered in working in natural language parsing that much can be done with a few good rules, that such problems can get bogged down seeking an idealistic solution.

Drew mentioned he had looked at Audacity, an audio tool whose GUI was "not an embarrassment", this is, pretty good.

Thanks to everyone who came and helped make the meeting a success! Headcount was 5: Robin R., Gabrielle P., Kelsi H., Drew P., and newcomer Jaun G.