Advene 3.5 is released!

Advene 3.5 is released. There have been many evolutions since the latest 1.x series, which are detailed below. Note however that it is for the moment released only as source and as Debian/Ubuntu packages. The MacOSX and Windows installers need to be completely reworked and tested, and I currently do not have the time for it. I am ready to help any person that would be interested in helping on this issue, so please contact me if you can either help, or sponsor financially this installer update.

The latest developments have been funded in the context of the AdA project.

The whole codebase has been ported to Python3/Gtk3/Gstreamer1.0. This will allow Advene to get back into the official Debian/Ubuntu repositories soon, and also makes it more solid for future developments.

The user manual has been migrated to Github wiki, feel free to contribute.

Here are some highlights of the new features (described in more detail in the CHANGES.txt file). The focus has recently been on performance, constrained vocabulary edition, shot validation and various small interface tweaks for improved productivity.

• Performance has been improved, and improvements of the thumbnailing code now provide a more solid work base.
• Predefined keywords (that can be associated to an annotation type as a comma-separated list of keywords) can be used as the exclusive source for completion of annotations (see Edit/Preferences/Text-content/Predefined terms only). Moreover, if the Edit/Preferences/Text-content/Quick fill option is active, then a new edition mode becomes available in both Timeline and Table view: pressing a numerical key between 1 and 9 will set the content of the currently active annotation to the nth predefined keyword for the given type. In the timeline view, if the cursor is over an annotation type, then pressing a 1-9 key will create a new annotation at the current player time, with the content of the nth predefined keyword. This should help consistent event coding.
• Shot validation view shortcuts handling has been improved (and use Down/Up for previous/next shot navigation).
• The generic player controls shortcut modifier (Control by default) can now be modified through Edit/Preferences/GUI. It allows to choose a shortcut that does not conflict with other uses, depending on the OS/environment.
• If more than 2000 annotations are present in the package, the Timeline view will now ask to select annotation types to display instead of displaying all annotations. This is a workaround to performance issues that are still worked on.