How'd this get started?: What made you decide to begin working on the project?
Dirk Meyer: I wanted something like freevo or mythtv. I used a small similar (now
dead) program under windows for some time. After mplayer was able to
play videos under linux, I searched for a similar program and found
freevo and mythtv. Because I use a G400 and framebuffer, freevo was
the choice. So I started helping the project and are now project
leader.
Rob Shortt: I started using Freevo after examining several similar open source offerings. I chose Freevo because it was lightweight and seemed to just work - and easy to modify. I had some programming abilities so after having some ideas and seeing where improvements could be made I started chipping in. The developers were very receptive and after a few months I became a core developer. This all started back in the fall of 2002.
What do you think are its best features?
Dirk Meyer: Use other applications. The Unix way: the right tool for the right
job. Freevo is only a UI to other programs like mplayer and
xine. Freevo should also help users to use the mplayer options they
want and choose the best player for the given media.
Rob Shortt: I agree with Dischi here. Freevo devinately does things the unix way. Another good feature of Freevo is its use of plugins and the architecture there allowing users to make addons.
What is cooking for future releases? (2.0)
Dirk Meyer: We redesigned the core. Freevo is now faster, many
improvements in the recordserver (e.g. conflict detection). We also
support different outputs like directfb and in the future maybe even
dxr3 and full featured dvb cards.
Rob Shortt: Yes, all of those things. In addition to this we are using a new communications bus (mbus) that allows us to distribute Freevo processes across a network. Once the existing features are working well in the new architecture we would like to add live TV timeshifting - all this before the 2.0 release hopefully.
What do you consider its biggest challenge?
Dirk Meyer: Make it faster. Python has some nice tricks I'm learning while
programming to make things faster.
Rob Shortt: Sometimes speed is a challenge, yes. We have been doing more and more lower level code in python and some in C (python modules) which helps the speed aspect.
With regard to features I think the biggest challenge is live TV timeshifting. Since we rely on other programs to actually play video (ie: mplayer or xine) we need this kind of feature in that program. We have come close by leveraging or modifying existing features of these programs but Dischi and I haven't been able to focus heavily on this yet.
