Week 1

Me, UCOSP, and Freeseer

My name is Francisco Canas. I am a 4th year undergrad student at the University of Toronto's Computer Science department. This fall, I am participating in the Undergraduate Capstone Open Source Project (http://ucosp.ca/) as part of my 4th year curriculum. I will maintain this blog on a weekly basis in order to share my overall impressions of the UCOSP project, and also as a status report for my team mates and mentors.

The UCOSP project that I am participating is Freeseer , an open-source, cross-platform video streaming and webcasting program. You can read all about Freeseer here: http://freeseer.readthedocs.org/en/latest/about/index.html

Preparation

In preparation for the first official week of working on UCOSP, I first spent some time ensuring that my dev environment (ie. my laptop) was capable of running Freeseer and set up with all of my usual dev tools. My goal was to have Freeseer working, and to be able to run, test, and debug the project from my IDE by the time the first week started.

The first challenge encountered was a failing test suite, and I was able to fix these failing tests by installing a couple of dependencies that were missing from my Fedora system: gstreamer-python, sphinx, and sphinx-python. 

Running Freeseer successfully also required a little bit of troubleshooting. Although the program started up fine, I was unable to successfully record any video or audio, and was seeing stack traces in the terminal when attempting to record. Once again, this issues were caused due to missing dependencies. I use Jackaudio on my laptop, and so had to install gstreamer's Jack plugin, which came in the form of the package gstreamer-plugins-good-extras. This fixed the audio recording issue, but my webcam only became accessible to Freeseer once I installed and configured ucview as detailed in these instructions: https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/7456/my-webcam-does-not-work/

Week 1

What I Worked On

Most of the time I spent on Freeseer this week involved reading code and trying to understand the project's overall architecture. I also worked on some more immediate improvements to unit tests (see https://github.com/Freeseer/freeseer/pull/565).

What I Will be Working On

After a good discussion on the IRC channel about some potential additions to Freeseer's remote recording capabilities, I am considering working on a remote configuration API. Having such an API would allow users to remotely configure Freeseer, thereby opening the potential for using it as an entirely headless recording device. Before the configuration API can be started on, however, it may be very necessary to clean up the code for Freeseer's plugins. This is the area that i'll be focusing on over the next week (at least).