Helix media activity

Helix "Watch & Listen" Media Activity Release Notes

These release notes relate to the "Watch & Listen-1.xo" release of the activity. Currently, the activity is bundled with the Helix media engine all in one package for easy installation. Eventually this engine, and they python bindings providing access to it will be moved to a location allowing easy access from any activity.

Helix "Watch & Listen" Media Activity Version 1 Release Notes

1. Small GUI elements. This is due to Sugar using a hippo canvas to render activities, and our activity being out of date. This should be fixed in the near future, thus making all of the widgets fit into the Sugar theme much better.

2. Media not resuming correctly. There are a few spots where if the video gets paused, it won't resume correctly. These are due to bad logic in the GUI. Some examples of these include pressing the stop button while a video is playing and pressing play again, and you will find the video won't play again. Another example is opening a dialog(open location, open a file) while the video is playing, pressing cancel, and the video won't resume.

3. No error feedback. In the current activity, there is no feedback of when errors occur. Errors include not being able to load a file(plugin/codec issues), or not being able to connect to a stream(can't be found, no network connectivity). Currently, the activity just won't do anything when there is an error.

4. Not enough status feedback. Currently, the only feedback we give the users is media playback, and the progress bar. This needs to be improved with numerical output including: time elapsed, time remaining, and possibly messages for buffering streams and such.

5. Need better Ogg support. There is a few bugs in the ogg theora codec written for helix. These include a resizing issue where the size of the player isn't being reported to the codec properly, thusly causing it not to display correctly in the media player. There also seems to be a streaming issue with the Ogg format with the engine. We are working with some theora/vorbis people from xiph to get these issues taken care of.

6. X overlay color issue. Since we are using x overlays, when we try to display color video, the rest of the screen gets a green tint. This is a hardware issue as noted in the hardware release notes, and should be resolved in the next revision of the hardware.