SyncTV, built on GTK+
Really excited to be able to share some information about a project that we have been working on lately!
Pioneer recently released their new service SyncTV in a private beta. What makes it very interesting is that it’s built using GTK+ and GStreamer. SyncTV is an application and service to watch movies and TV-series over the internet.
SyncTV provide this service on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, all through the cross platform capabilities of GTK+. SyncTV also shows that you can make really slick applications with GTK+ that look identical no matter which platform you run it on.
At Imendio we have worked on the project since spring 2007, mainly by improving the GTK+ Mac OS X port, but also packaging the application into an easily installable application bundle.
The project also included making Webkit/GTK+ run smoothly on Mac OS X which involved replacing the font backend to make it use Pango. Sven blogged briefly about this last year.
The observant follower of All Things Imendio (TM) would also realize that part of this project was to create hooks for GTK+ to integrate with the Mac OS X menubar which Mitch blogged about.
For a more in-depth review, see Download Squad.
I’ve been following SyncTV since it was announced, mainly because I really enjoy watching HD shows, which are unfortunately only available via Usenet in The Netherlands.
Well, I guess I’ll just have to wait until the project goes into public beta or is lauched for everyone, since my beta registration didn’t come through yet
Good work! It’s great to have a project as interesting as this available for all major platforms!
Hey folks. This looks like proprietary software. If you value freedom in your software, don’t expect it from SyncTV.
Well Ben, I guess that is partly right, however, SyncTV makes use of open standards only. I think that’s good.
Pretty cool, Mikael! Can you briefly describe the architecture? At least the main parts of the app don’t quite look like normal GTK+; is that a theme, or is it done using WebKit?
Ah, looking at the screenshots, it looks like most of it is a GTK+ theme.
@Colin, as you figured out it’s mostly a GTK+ theme.
@Ben, yes, it’s proprietary software.
Neat. Although making an application look slick really doesn’t have much to do with the toolkit. Also making an application look identical across platforms is much much easier than making it integrate properly with each platform. Just about everyone else has realized that the same look across platforms is not actually a good thing. Firefox tries to integrate more and more, same with Java, etc. That’s not exactly something that GTK is very good at, as evidenced by the fact that just now stuff like the global menu bar is starting to work.
The app itself seems interesting though. I wonder how much it will cost.
I agree with you Leo, the app’s should look like the OS. But the question are still open, how I do to obtain a look like this?
@Leo, while i definitely agree with you for the applications that are part of your daily workflow (such as Firefox and for example a Java IDE) I think it is less of a problem for applications that are not part of that workflow (such as a media player).
In fact you could probably argue that having a different look to such applications is not necessarily bad, as long as it is well integrated in the platform otherwise.
Regarding the global menu bar not working before recently is that the GTK+ port to Mac OS X did not exist until recently.
[...] Mikael Hallendal reported last week about SyncTV using GStreamer across Linux, MacOSX and Windows for their multimedia [...]
Hm.. Just saw an article about Sony’s upcoming PS3 video service. It’s said to ‘embrace open standards’. Is Imendio/SyncTV involved in this? Could be a great opportunity..
Hi Sander,
We are not at Imendio at least, I can’t speak for SyncTV. It sounds good if the PS3 video service embrace open standards, I guess we’ll see in the future exactly what that means.
Thanks for sharing.