The May 2013 Project of the Month is Filebot. Filebot is “The ultimate TV and Movie Renamer / Subtitle Downloader”.
I spoke with Reinhard Pointner via email last week (since he’s 13 time zones over from me!) about the project and his involvement in it.
Rich: What is Filebot? What does it do?
Reinhard: It’s really just about renaming and organising episode and movie files. It’s gonna make sense of pretty much any kind of filename and match it against online databases for additional metadata like episode titles, movie genres etc. Next to that it’ll allow you to download subtitles for your files and create or check SFV files.
Rich: What’s the technology stack?
Reinhard: Java for most of the application base, Swing for the GUI and then Groovy as scripting engine for user scripts. FileBot uses quite a few 3rd party libraries like miglayout, nekohtml, ehcache, jna, mediainfo, 7zip-jbindings etc
Rich: What led you to start the Filebot project?
Reinhard: To scratch a personal itch, as they say. Also there weren’t any proper tools for renaming episodes, downloading subtitle or checking SFV files, just loads of half-baked projects. Someone just had to fix that.
Rich: How is it that six years later there’s still more to do? What’s coming in future versions of Filebot?
There’s always corner-cases with the filename-based auto-detection logic but it’s pretty mature now.
At some point it’d be cool I could build a big database of hashes and metadata so files can be matched to episode or movie data with perfect accuracy.
Subtitle upload has been on the list as well for a long time.
Rich: How can other folks get involved in your project?
Reinhard: Quite easily. Just write tutorials. There’s not a lot information out there, especially not good tutorial for various use-cases.
Also the format expressions for episode/movie naming and user scripts for automation can be written easily by advanced users and provided for other people to just copy and paste.
Again, we need tutorials tutorials tutorials and more tutorials.
Rich: Congratulations again, and good luck with your project!
The April Project of the Month is SuperTuxKart. But there’s never a moment to rest. It’s time to start voting for the May project of the month. The candidates are below. Look over them, and then GO VOTE.
Screenshot tool optimized for productivity. Save a screenshot or a part of the screen to a file within a second. Apply text and shapes to the screenshot. Offers capture of window, region or full screenshot. Supports several image formats. Imprint: http://getgreenshot.org/imprint/
ZenTaoPMS is an open source project management system with product management, project management, bug management, testcase management, doc management, todo management and many other features in one application. ZenTaoPMS is also a scrum tool.
TeXstudio is a fully featured LaTeX editor. Our goal is to make writing LaTeX documents as easy and comfortable as possible. Some of the outstanding features of TeXstudio are an integrated pdf viewer with (almost) word-level synchronization, live inline preview, advanced syntax-highlighting, live checking of references, citations, latex commands, spelling and grammar. Find out more at our website.
The Battle for Wesnoth is a n open-source turn-based tactical strategy game with a high fantasy theme, featuring both single-player, and online/hotseat multiplayer combat. Fight a desperate battle to reclaim the throne of Wesnoth, or take hand in any number of other adventures.
FileBot is the ultimate tool for renaming your movies, tv shows or anime and downloading subtitles. It’s smart, streamlined for simplicity and just works. FileBot supports Windows, Linux and Mac, plus there’s a full-featured command-line interface for all sorts of automation.
A slick, intuitive web based photo gallery. Gallery is easy to install, configure and use. Gallery photo management includes automatic thumbnails, resizing, rotation, and more. Authenticated users and privileged albums make this great for communities
As you know, a picture is better than a thousand words, and a video is even better! So we’ll start with a video demo of SuperTuxKart 0.8:
Rich: Congratulations on winning the POTM for April, 2013.
Joerg: Thank you! And thanks a lot for having us here
Rich: Tell us about STK. What is it?
Joerg: STK is a kart racing game. It’s mostly a kids friendly game, but a lot of adults are playing it. Its focus is fun game play, not realism.
Rich: How long have you been doing this?
Joerg: I restarted the project around 6 years ago. At this time the original project was basically dead, left in a better looking, but unplayable state. I started to fix things here and there, and suddenly I had restarted the project. Another developer joined me, and we were able to do a very first release. Since then auria has joined the project, and we have made some huge progress with the game.
Rich: How many people are actively involved in the development of this project?
Joerg: At this stage, there are two people doing the actual coding of STK, one person who is implementing and managing our addon server. Then one artist who works mostly on tracks. On top of that there are some coders who submit a patch or two if they find something that they think needs to be improved, and several people from the community doing textures, icons, tracks and karts.
Auria and myself are managing the project now, and doing the actual coding. Stephen is our addon-expert, and samuncle the artist. Additionally we have Arthur doing the blog posts, and helping with the community. And there are translators who make the game available in different languages.
Rich: I’ve noticed, in game projects, that there’s a much broader set of talents involved than in many other projects. Coders, certainly, but also musicians, artists, and usability people. Who else am I missing?
Joerg: Yes, a game needs people with a variety of backgrounds. We heavily rely on testers, but also have people doing the blog posts, tweets (which we only started recently), and helping people getting started. We have a very friendly community, so new comer who want to help out with a thing or two will easily find help there.
Besides musician we also need sound effects, and generally people coming up with ideas. We do a lot of brainstorming in our forums, discussing ideas backwards and forwards till we get something that will really enhance the game.
Rich: What sorts of things do you typically put on Twitter? Tips? Release information?
Joerg: We have only recently started to use twitter, mainly because of the potm voting. We try to keep people up-to-date with development on STK, show off new features before they are available in a release. Artists use it to show tracks they are working on, and coders might inform about other new features that they are working on. ATM it’s a little bit quiet, since the core team is working on the GSoC application, but once this is done, we will keep it more up-to-date.
Rich: So, GSoC? What are you going to have a student work on?
Joerg: GSoC is a project funded by google, in which student are being paid to work on open source project. It’s the first time that we are trying to apply, and if we are accepted, we will have a interesting list of projects to work on. Our overview page is at http:/supertuxkart.sourceforge.net/GSoC_overview, which links to the list of ideas. We are mostly focusing on getting started with network multiplayer, one of the most requested features of STK.
Rich: Sweet
Joerg: There are nine suggested projects in there, and while the full network multiplayer is too much for a GSoC project, important blocks will hopefully be implemented in two projects (if we get selected for GSoC that is). We have a very experienced team of mentors, all of which are professionally working in the IT area, and we even have a professional game engine developer available.
Hopefully this will be very good for the students participating, in that they get some real life coding experience, but also for STK.
Rich: The way that you talk about the project, it sounds almost like a professional venture. How do you find time to have this much passion about it?
Joerg: I do nearly all of my work on the train to and back from work, which is nearly 2 hours a day. Then I’ll add some time in the evening and/or weekend. It is certainly very encouraging to receive acknowledgement, be it in form of POTM, or seeing that STK is used in research projects like Microsoft’s IllumiRoom and others, or even to see that STK was used in a TV show
Many parents are happy to have STK, since it’s free and kids friendly, and allows them play togehter with their kids.
Rich: TV show? Do tell. Joerg: Around 4.5 years ago we were approached by the producers of “Friday Night Lights“. They needed a video game to be shown in one episode, and the professional companies didn’t want their games to be used (it was in the context of underage drinking).
So they came to us, and we were happy to get STK on TV this way
Rich: That’s so cool.
Joerg: Yes, it’s those little success stories that make work on STK so rewarding.
STK has been ported to a ‘one switch’ version which can be played by people suffering from motion impairment, which, imho, shows the strength of open source development
Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in this project, other than playing it, what opportunities are there?
Auria: we can get help from people from a variety of backgrounds. Non-coders can first help with translations, and documentation. Then we have a great need of modellers who know Blender well to help improve or make new tracks Auria: programmers are also of course very much welcome. We have a good list of much-requested features to code, that we could certainly get help with
Rich: What language(s) is the project developed in?
Auria: The core of the game is developped in C++. Some libraries used include Bullet for physics, Irrlicht for graphics, and OpenAL for audio. Beyond C++ there are also blender extensions written in python, and the addons website (which will hopefully evolve into a multiplayer lobby someday) written in PHP.
Rich: What’s planned for the future? Anything exciting to look forward to in the next release?
Joerg: The most exciting feature is native support for wiimote. We are currently working on some portability issues, but hope to get the solved for the next release. We will have two new game modes – a soccer mode for split screen play, and a ‘Find the Easter Bunnies’ more targeted for kids
Online multiplayer is probably the most important outstanding feature of STK, but it will take some time before we will have this ready. It is currently plannd to become 0.9, but we will have more releases in the 0.8 series to gradually introduce features for that:
Adding a lobby, in-game voting for addons, online highscores, playing against ghost recorded by other people, a tutorial and achievements. Hopefully part of this will be done as part of GSoC.
Rich: Thanks so much for your time, and congratulations again.
Rich: SourceForge is delighted to announce that the March project of the month is Postbooks. Postbooks is an ERP and I’m speaking with Ned Lilly, who is the CEO of xTuple, the company behind this project, to talk about what that means, and where the project is going.
If you’d like to have your project featured on the SourceForge podcast, just drop me a note and we’ll schedule something.
If the embedded audio player below doesn’t work for you, you can download the audio in mp3 or ogg formats.
Congratulations on winning the project of the month.
Ned: Thanks. We’re excited about it.
Rich: The vote was much closer than we’ve seen in years past – I guess you followed that.
Ned: Yeah, it really was like a race. I was picturing the TuxKart guys in their little graphics going up and down. Hopefully they’ll have another bite at the apple, because it sounds like there was a larger number of votes than you often see.
Rich: Let’s talk about Postbooks. For people that aren’t really familiar with it, can you give us an overview of what it is, what it does, and in what kind of business somebody would want to use it.
Ned: Postbooks is a full featured ERP, Accounting, and CRM application that we developed, ourselves, from scratch. xTuple, the company, has been around for about eleven years, and Postbooks has been on SourceForge, free and Open Source, for … since the summer of ’07, so, five and half years. It’s had a good steady stream of popularity. We’ve got a good community of … last guess, probably 30,000 active users. In a nutshell – I said ERP, Accounting, and CRM, so it’s the next step up from a desktop accounting package like Quickbooks or Peachtree, but it scales up to full featured ERP that competes with Microsoft Dynamics, SAP, and the R3 product. And we’ve had people move to our ERP from just about any package you’ve heard of. Postbooks is he core, and it’s licensed under the CPAL license, which is successor to the Mozilla Plus Attribution.
It’s been great. Ever since we’ve had a steadily growing community.
Rich: I guess at some level ever company needs something like this. Is this primarily aimed at the enterprise, or is this something that could be used in non profits? Who are your users?
Ned: That’s a great question. Our roots are in inventory based businesses, so, in manufacturing, distribution, there’s a lot of good tools for that kind of stuff in the product, but we’ve got plenty of people that don’t carry any inventory that are some type of services. We use it ourselves to run xTuple, and it’s not like we’ve got a warehouse full of floppy disks or anything. In addition to all of the standard ERP stuff you’d expect, in the way of inventory manufacturing distribution, there’s time and expense management that’s tightly integrated with the accounting. Anybody that’s got a professional services capability in their business can automate a lot of that. Non-profits are an interesting area for us because we have project … there’s integrated project tracking management as well, and then we have an add-on called project accounting which allows you to do financial reporting by project, and track that kind of stuff. That’s pretty similar to the fund accounting that a lot of non-profits are organized around.
One of the fundamental ideas behind Postbooks is that accounting is accounting – It’s not like there have been fifty new and exciting ways to build a general ledger introduced in the past thirty years. You’ve got your debits and you’ve got your credits, pretty much. It’s a good candidate for Open Source because there’s a horizontal core of common functionality that any business would, could, and should use. And then we’ve got the fully integrated CRM as well. That’s something you see in a lot of low-end ERP and accounting packages.
Rich: Tell me about the relationship between your company and the community side of things. What parts of your business are not Open Source? How does that work for you guys.
Ned: Postbooks is sort of the core of the product. The two key technologies are the Postgres database on the server side and the GUI client is built with QT, the C++ framework. Those are the two core technologies. The GUI client that you download from SourceForge, depending on what database it’s talking to, could be Postbooks, or it could be one of our commercially licensed editions that adds bigger company functionality. The GUI client is exactly the same. Building out from the core of Postbooks, we have what we call the standard edition, which has some more distribution type functionality for companies that have multiple warehouses and are doing some planning, and lot and serial control, and that kind of stuff across multiple warehouses. We have a manufacturing edition, which adds some some manufacturing specific functionality. And then we have an enterprise edition which is everything with the kitchen sink. A couple of other packages people have build over the years. The difference between those editions is just additional tables and whatnot being created via script in the postgres database. We have an updater tool that you can also download from SourceForge, which does both updating you from one release to another – updating your database – as well as upgrading from one edition to another. The key there is that it’s the same code base, and that any contributions – any enhancements that anybody makes to one version of the product have the potential to flow through all of them.
Rich: On the community side, do most of the contributions to the product come from within your company, or from the community? And to add on to end of that, if I want to become involved in your community, where can I plug in?
Ned: Since we sort of originated the project, it’s more the model where one company started it and is the big fish in the pond. We do have an active community of contributors as well as users and participants in various forms – bug tracking and so forth. We’ve got a great deal of developer-oriented documentation on the website that goes into how you can get involved in developing both the core and we have a capacity for scripted add-on packages. QT has a variant of Javascript that allows for modifying screens in a GUI application. And we have a package management system for rounding up all those changes that you might make to individual screens and scripts and functionalities and bring them into one package. The one great example that is a guy in New Zealand who jumped into a conversation about fixed assets on our website, and people start talking about does this functionality exist somewhere, and someone else says no, it doesn’t exist in xTuple but here’s how I’ve seen it in other packages, and they start this design conversation in the forums, and it evolves into a spec document and this guy coded it up as a package. He actually ended up building a concentric circles model like we do for our products. There’s a core fixed assets module that you download for free. And then he’s got additional functionality that for a couple of hundred bucks you can add depreciation schedules and integration with the general ledger and that kind of stuff. It’s neat to see the free/open source community model and the ability for community members to have some economic gain in this too.
Rich: What’s the future? Where are you going with the project? What are the exciting things on the horizon?
Ned: I mentioned that we’re moving over to Git. The reason for that, or the work that we’re doing there is all related to a new mobile web client that’s kind of exciting that we’re developing. It will live alongside the QT client. We actually just released the first pice of it in December. It’s an all Javascript/HTML5 framework called Enyo, which came out of the HP acquisition of Palm. It’s really slick. It’s still the same Postgres database on the back end. The QT client connects directly to the Postgres database. Instead of doing that, we have a middle tier now. The Node.js server manages the data source. We built a model layer with Backbone.js, and then Enyo on top of it for the front end. And the really cool thing is the two clients are completely interoperable, so you can have your accounting and manufacturing types back at the home office using the GUI client, and then the sales people out on the road with their iPads, or their Zunes or they Galaxys, or whatever. We looked for a very long time for the mobile equivalent of QT when it became clear that QT wasn’t going to do that any time soon. We really are very happy with Eyno. It’s fantastic. We’re big fans. And I think we’re going to end up, as was the case with QT, having one of the most substantial enterprise applications built with this tool set.
Rich: Thanks so much for your time. Congratulations again.
Ned: Thanks, Rich, appreciate it. And thanks for everything you guys do managing SourceForge. It’s an incredible resource and we’ve been happy participants for years, and we wish you all the best.
I recently spoke with Emmanuel Engelhart, one of the developers on the project.
Rich: Congratulations on winning the SourceForge Project of the Month for
February.
Emannuel: Thank you for hosting Kiwix development tools and promoting free software.
Rich: Start by telling us what Kiwix is. How would someone use this?
Emmanuel:Kiwix allows to read Wikipedia offline. In addition, using the highly efficient ZIM file format (http://www.openzim.org), Kiwix can read any HTML content offline. In order to enjoy Wikipedia offline, you need to download Kiwix and a ZIM file of Wikipedia (from the Kiwix web-site or directly from the Kiwix internal library).
Then you can surf in Wikipedia as if you were online. Kiwix provides almost everything you will need:
Case and diacritics insensitive full text search engine
Bookmarks & Notes
ZIM based HTTP server
PDF/HTML export
Localized in more than 80 languages
Search suggestions
Tabs navigation
Integrated content manager/downloader
Rich: How did you come to start this project?
Emmanuel: Why lock up Wikipedia to Wikipedia.org? The contents of Wikipedia should be available for everyone! Even without Internet access. This is why we have launched the Kiwix project.
Rich: Can you give us some examples of your project being used in the real world?
Emmanuel: Our users are spread all over the world: sailors on the oceans, poor students thirsty for knowledge, globetrotters almost living in planes, world’s citizens suffering from censorship or free minded prisoners. For all these people, Kiwix provides a simple and practical solution to ponder about the world.
Spreading work is done by Wikimedia people and by third parties like NGOs. A lot of individuals also download Wikipedia offline once and then share it with their friends and relatives. We have had around 100.000 downloads in January.
Rich: Release more and more up-to-date content is our top priority. We continuously increase our ZIM file throughput by improving our ZIM generation toolchain. We will also soon start to release offline version of other Wikimedia projects.
To make Kiwix work on smartphones is our second priority. We hope to release a first version of kiwix-mobile for Android in April.
Regarding the far future, we will try to be one of the best open-source e-book readers. We think we have a cutting-edge file format with ZIM which is perfectly complementary with the actual EPUB standard. We will do our best to offer the best user experience with both in the future.
Rich: If someone wanted to get involved in your community, what could they do? Are you looking for developers? Translators? Users? Testers?
Emmanuel: Actually, the most important work to do, can be done by everyone: this is promoting and sharing Wikipedia offline with Kiwix. We have remarked that most of the people, although they would really need it, think it is impossible to have the whole Wikipedia with pictures on a USB stick. That’s why we need people to setup projects and spread it.
But, we have also plenty of work otherwise, for example:
We would love to have a new javascript developer able to add the EPUB support using Monocle
DC++
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