My name is Guillaume; I’m a 25-year-old Belgian Free software hacker currently living in Cambridge UK.

This TV is perfectly timed, as my old TV just stopped working 2 weeks ago.

My name is Guillaume; I’m a 25-year-old Belgian Free software hacker currently living in Cambridge UK. I’ve been involved in the Free Software community for more than 5 years now. Most of my contributions have been related to the GNOME desktop; for example, I wrote the Jamendo Rhythmbox plugin.

I’m working for a Free Software company called Collabora. Most of my job is to maintain Empathy, GNOME’s official chat and audio/video client.

As a GNOME enthusiast I’ve been very interested in Moovida since the beginning of the project (when it was still called Elisa). A year ago I moved from Brussels to Cambridge and wanted to continue to watch news from my country. So I started my first Elisa plugin, RTBF, to be able to watch news and listen to Belgian radio stations directly from Elisa. I continue to maintain it and try to support as much content as possible.

I was quite happy with my plugin and have been thinking for a while that it would be cool to be able to access ARTE’s video content as well.

ARTE is a a Franco-German TV network well known for its high-quality documentaries. A few weeks ago, I learned about the plugin contest and decided that it was a good time to get it done. Thanks to my previous experience and the help of the Moovida community, it only took me a few evenings of hacking to get something working.

I’d like to thank all the people who voted for me during the contest and the Moovida community for having created such a great Free media center.

I’m very happy to have won, and hope you enjoy my plugins.

If you experience any issues with them or would like to see more new features, feel free to report bugs, I’m always happy to get feedback from users.

I’m sure I’ll enjoy Moovida even more with my prize, and already have some nice ideas for future plugins.

Stay tuned!

My name is Michał Sawicz, you can find me on Moovida’s IRC, Forums, etc., where I come by the nickname of Saviq. I live in Wroclaw, Poland and I’ve been a Linux admin / user for about ten years now (almost half of my life ). I have since become an eager FOSS enthusiast and evangelist. I’ve done my share in translations at first and then started to properly contribute as much I can to many different open projects I’m fond of. Moovida is the first big project I get my hands on. Coming from translation, my initial focus was to get Moovida properly internationalized. The project is also my training background in Python, as most of my knowledge of it came from working with Elisa and Moovida. I really like the project and will try and keep ‘em  [plugins] coming

Michal is Moovida’s most active and prolific Forum member and moderator, and is responsible for the Vimeo, CNN and We Are Hunted plugins on Moovida.

Moovida’s first dev contest was a great success. Four new plugins were developed, giving Moovida users access to some great new content. Here are the winners:

• 1st place prize goes to Guillaume Desmottes from Belgium for developing Arte
• 2nd and 3rd place prizes go to Michal Sawicz from Poland, Moovida’s steadfast community member and most active Forum moderator, for his Vimeo and CNN plugins

Although We Are Hunted trailed behind, that plugin got my vote…

I will let the guys introduce themselves in an upcoming post. On behalf of the whole Moovida community, let me just say a big thank you to both for all your great contributions, and keep the great plugins coming!

Well the title pretty much says it all, but to be more specific, you have until 11:59 pm tonight to vote for Moovida’s dev contest winner. Competition is fierce between the two leading plugins, Arte and Vimeo, from authors Guillaume Desmottes and Michal Sawicz. It’s a race to the finish line… so make sure to show them your support!

If you’re not sure who to vote for, check some examples of the content you can now view from Moovida thanks to their participation:

Arte

If you’re in France or Germany, I’m really jealous because you can see the short documentary La Photographie Surréaliste on Moovida. If you have the priviledge to access it, make sure to comment what you think of it on this post.

Vimeo

Here’s a video I found browsing through Vimeo’s staff picks from Blake Whitman

Warning: This video features disturbing scenes (in case you have a phobia of clowns)

May the best plugin win!

Every now and again we can get complaints from Moovida users about hardware related problems. No, we’re not perfect, but often enough, neither is the user’s hardware, which is why we recommend Verybox.

Verybox is a Spanish based company delivering custom hardware solutions. You can select the type of hardware you want (media center, professional, xGamers or home), choose from a wide selection of models, then configure to your needs. Not only does Verybox have very competitive pricing, lucky for you Moovida & Verybox are in the giving mood and offer 5% off any Verybox hardware order, all you have to do is enter this promotional code when making your order: Moovida09.

So why not give a Moovida Media Center gift for the holidays this year? Moovida already comes pre-installed in all Verybox machines, just thrown in any infrared remote control, and there you have it! It seems the Christmas lighting and cheesy music is getting to us…

Note: Check out our minimal hardware requirements to put together the ideal Verybox machine for Moovida.

As you may have already noticed in an earlier post, Moovida’s dev contest brought some goodies to its user community, namely with the Vimeo plugin.

You’re most likely already familiar with Vimeo, YouTube’s younger, more attractive and less trashy sibling.  Why less trashy? Maybe because Vimeo has strict upload guidelines, and was created by a community of artists.

So yesterday while I was perusing through the Vimeo plugin on Moovida, I came across some good recommended content, like NIN in concert. Cool beans. Image quality is great, and when searching for videos, both Vimeo and YouTube results appear, just in case you wouldn’t find anything in Vimeo (which would be my first choice for the reasons mentioned above). If you’re feeling uninspired, I’d suggested checking out the videos from the always entertaining Montreal based electrofunk duo Chromeo:

Chromeo “Night By Night” Video

Chromeo “Fancy Footwork” Video

Congratulations are in order for Michał Sawicz, Moovida’s tireless community member responsible  for the Vimeo, CNN and We Are Hunted plugins. To show your appreciation for his work and for bettering the lives of Moovidamankind, vote for Michal’s Vimeo plugin.

To announce the partnership between Moovida and themoviedb.org, Travis Bell shares what the new collaboration means to him and TMDB community:

Hi there, my name is Travis Bell and I am the sole proprietor of the popular open source movie database, themoviedb.org.

For those of you unfamiliar with TMDb, it’s an open source, user contributable movie database. I started it originally as a source for movie backdrops but quickly realized there was a need for raw movie data as well. As I adapted to this change, many popular applications like Moovida jumped on board. This was pretty awesome, but holy crap, I was building something real that people actually found useful! What? When did this happen?

This is where the helpful hands of Moovida came in. As the cost of running TMDb increased, I rallied with my users to help donate whatever cash they could but it was never enough. TMDb was quickly becoming a financial burden for me personally and I did the only thing I knew how to do at the time, and that was to just persevere (hardly a plan, but it was working‚ sort of). It wasn’t until one morning I got an email from someone at Moovida telling me they would like to discuss the possibility of sponsoring my project. I’ve received offers like this before but they were generally not at the scale that would actually help. I appreciated them of course, but TMDb needed something a lot more ‘first class’ and that’s exactly what Moovida was offering me.

This means a lot more than you might think. See, TMDb was pretty close to being in real trouble. I was unable to keep up with our month-to-month growth and spending more time keeping things operating instead of doing what I loved. I started this project because of my passion for movies and media, yet I wasn’t doing that anymore. Moovida helped me by removing the problems I was facing so I could go back to making my community better. I’d like to make sure to extend my thanks to companies like Fluendo who have such a firm commitment to open source software and projects. If it wasn’t for guys like you, it would be hard for us small guys to get anywhere.

I extend my sincere thanks, and hope this can be an encouraging note to anyone else who might be in a similiar position.

Moovida and Fluendo now sponsor themoviedb.org by hosting its servers and managing its backend. Themoviedb.org is Moovida’s source for contextual information to provide users with fan art and synopsis details, for which all the content is licensed under Creative Commons.

For more information: www.themoviedb.org

Remember that development contest we announced a while back? It was decided the Moovida community would determine the winners [1], and now has come the time to act.

Here are the contenders:

• Arte [2]
• CNN
• Vimeo
• We Are Hunted

The criteria to help guide your decision should be:

• Functionality: Does it work the way you want it to? If not, make sure to recommend improvements on our Forum, or report the bug
• Value: Do you dig the content and are you likely to use this plugin?

These plugins are now available, so if it’s not already done, install Moovida now and start enjoying the new content!

Vote for your favourite plugin until December 15th, 11:59 pm CET in the poll below.

***

Good luck to our participants!

[1] 1st place plugin developer takes home the 1st prize, 2nd place plugin developer gets the 2nd place prize… you get the point

[2] Arte.tv only makes news content available to all, the rest of the content is restricted to France and Germany

Moovida 1.0.9. is the latest product of our team’s efforts, which includes a great number of much needed bug fixes (31 to be exact). Some of the most notable improvements:

• switching to the previous/next item in the playlist no longer hides playback
• the recategorization feature from the moviedb is now working smoothly
• it’s now possible to access home network parallels on win32

More importantly, if you encounter an error using Moovida, there is now a generic pop-up that lets lets you know. Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many times someone like me will hit a command to see if it works the 25th time around. Check out the full list of Moovida 1.0.9. milestones right here.

Thanks to our wonderful group of translators, Moovida has 3 new languages under its belt, which would qualify it as quite the polyglot media center given it’s now available in 13 languages:

• Czech
• Dutch
• English
• Estonian
• French
• Galician
• German
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Polish
• Russian
• Slovak
• Spanish

That’s being fluent in more languages than the whole Moovida team put together. We cover 5 out of these, not including the 10 Galician words I learned the other day. So go ahead, enjoy the latest Moovida release in the language of your choice!