tovid needs a new owner

[Eric Pierce]

I think the time has come to pass the torch of tovid ownership to
someone else--someone more interested and dedicated than I have been
during the last few years.

My reasons are several, but it boils down to the fact that I am simply
tired of maintaining tovid. I don't really use it anymore, and my
programming interests have steadily drifted away from video encoding
and DVD authoring. I may have created tovid, but I am no longer the
right person to continue maintaining it.

Our good friend Robert (grepper) has been a fantastic contributor over
the years, and would be my first choice of someone to transfer
ownership to, but he feels much the same way I do, and is ready to
move on to other things.

Are you the right person to maintain tovid? If you think you might be,
please speak up! This isn't a job offer, but simply an opportunity to
take responsibility for an established (if somewhat languishing) open
source project. There are no strict qualifications, but it helps if
you:

* Regularly use tovid
* Are comfortable with bash and/or python
* Have previous development and bugfixing experience

I plan to continue having some development role in tovid, but with the
bugs piling up and new features stagnating, I think someone (anyone)
with more desire and motivation should take over the leadership role.

Please reply to this thread or visit the #tovid IRC channel on
irc.freenode.net if you are interested!

[aerik...@fastmail.fm]

wapca...@gmail.com said:
> I think the time has come to pass the torch of tovid ownership to someone
> else--someone more interested and dedicated than I have been during the last
> few years.

That's sad. It's been very useful to me as I could throw any random file at it
and get a DVD out of it. Many friends of mine are non-greeks and are very
happy to receive a physical DVD with whatever I want to give them

What's the competition like? I much prefer something 100% command line
oriented as it requires no authoring time etc. I also do all my video stuff on
my htpc box, to which I need to ssh, so, non-GUIs are preferred all around.
Last time I checked, tovid was about the only thing commandline oriented i
could find.

-Anders

[grepper]

On Sunday January 2 2011, Eric Pierce wrote:
> I think the time has come to pass the torch of tovid ownership to
> someone else--someone more interested and dedicated than I have been
> during the last few years.

I just wanted to clear up a possible source of misunderstanding from
those reading this thread re-directed from the wiki. The wording of
'bugs pile up' is misleading and I'm sure unintended - I have been
steadily fixing bugs in tovid's scripts for a long while now, especially
those caused by changes in the api and syntax of backends like ffmpeg
(addressed in tovid 0.34). And for a project with the number of lines
of code as this one, the 'bug count' is pretty reasonable I think,
especially after I retired very old bugs about code from 4 years and
over 1,000 commits ago :)

There are a few glitches and quirks in the GUI that I can not fix but
none of them 'show stopping'. Hopefully a python dev will step forward
at some point and be able to maintain the high standard of coding set by
Eric ("wapcaplet") and move forward. Even though I have made a fair
number of python contributions I know that dev is not me :) 'Metagui',
which the 'tovid gui' is based on is worth doing more work on as I can
attest to it being a fantastic RAD tool for tkinter. Hopefully someone
can continue with refining Eric’s fine GUI libraries. Ditto for his
other libtovid code (much of it unused as yet): hopefully someone
interested will step forward and continue to develop the python based
side of the project which is stalled.

all the best,
Robert (aka grepper)