Miro on openSUSE 10.3…OMG!
November 16th, 2007 by heathenxA few days ago the Screencasters got several emails where the senders wished us to be fed into Miro (the old Democracy Player). I had fiddled with the Democracy Player quite a while ago, maybe when I was on ubuntu Hoary. I thought it was kind of neat but it wasn’t for me in the end.
Last night I decided to give Miro a proper install on my openSUSE 10.3 box. I fired up VirtualBox a couple of days ago and installed Miro on ubuntu Gutsy. Worked like a charm on that distro and installed in like a minute. openSUSE wasn’t so easy. There is no current RPM for it so I downloaded the source so that I could compile it. This is what sent me into a treasure hunt for an entire hour looking for all of the dependent packages so the thing would compile.
Before I got too deep into it I ran over to the Suse forums and asked for some advice. No one was really interested except for one, so he and I tried it together until we both got it installed. I’m not sure the average person would want to go through what we did last night. It was literally a compile until it errored out and then we had to solve the error puzzle before we could continue onto the next step. Cripes! It felt like a game after awhile but we were both determined to get it installed.
In the end I installed so many packages just to get Miro running that I lost track of what needed to be done so that I could help someone else. Which…is why I do not recommend installing this until an RPM is released (hopefully by Guru or Packman, our main community packagers for Suse). I think I did read somewhere where someone made an RPM for openSUSE 10.2 but it was for a much older release. I wanted the spankin’ new Miro 1.0. Miro might be better off if it made an Autopackage rather than supply RPM’s and DEB’s. Of course, maybe it’s not that easy. What the Hell do I know?
So to the original emailers…see what you put me through? :p The next thing Richard and I need to figure out is how to add a video feed into Miro so that our viewers can get to our videos. I am still unsure how to do this so any tips would be appreciated. Not sure if we have everything that we need already with our present RSS feed or if I have to make another just for videos. Nevertheless, I hope that part is easier than compiling Miro. In the meantime you can watch our limited selection on YouTube and the one that I have on blip.tv.
November 16th, 2007 at 4:26 pm
In Miro, you can just Add Channel and put in screencasters.wordpress.com and it will parse your RSS. Seems to work pretty well.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
Really? Is that all you have to do? So it picks up the video link?
I haven’t gotten a chance to experiment yet so if it’s that easy then I am excited about it.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:33 pm
That’s it. I just did it again to be sure. It lacks all the fancy graphics of a proper channel but it does indeed work.
November 16th, 2007 at 5:41 pm
http://www.getmiro.com/create/
There’s a link on setting up a channel. Also just to let you know another cool feature, you can save youtube searches as channels too.
November 16th, 2007 at 6:43 pm
Awesome. Thanks gruvsyco. I figured that I had to have another RSS feed. I haven’t gotten a chance to actually try this myself. Work keeps getting in the way. Pft!
November 17th, 2007 at 7:10 pm
And you should definitely submit your channel to the Miro Guide: http://miroguide.com/
You just need to make an account and then put in your RSS feed and some details.
November 17th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
Well, I tried last night without much luck. If I open Miro and add a channel and just add “screencasters.heathenx.org” (not our rss feed url) then it will pull up all of the videos on our first page (the last 10). When I try our rss feed then I get nothing.
I wouldn’t mind getting in touch with someone who actually has a channel on Miro so that I can get some advice.
Nevertheless, thanks for your help and support guys. Probably wouldn’t have gotten this far without the push.
November 17th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
Ok. I think I am making some progress. We already had an unused FeedBurner account. I was able to use FeedBurner to link up with our WordPress RSS feed and add some meta data so that our videos will show up in Miro. I added a new custom made video button under the last three episodes on this blog. I must link to our videos in order for FeedBurner/Miro to pick it up. We hadn’t been doing this. We were only linking back to our anchor spot on our website. We will most likely still do this…we’ll just add an extra video link at the bottom of the blog post. (see ep045, ep044, and ep043 blog posts for video button)
There are other ways to do this, I’m sure, but FeedBurner comes in handy for this sort of thing. I’m still working out some things but maybe you can try it. So far I can only get one video to show up.
Add a new channel in Miro using this link:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Screencastersheathenxorg
Only use the above feed for Miro and not for our standard WordPress RSS feed.
Also, when I get it working I’ll add a Miro subscribe button to our website and blog.
November 18th, 2007 at 7:24 pm
I’m not sure what it takes to get it to work. I use Miro to get the Audio podcasts i listen to by just added there rss feed.
I added the above feed and it shows 2 videos.
November 19th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
When I added, as I stated above… I didn’t use the RSS feed, I just used the URL of the blog.
HeathenX, these guys have a Miro channel you might try them
http://meetthegimp.org/
November 19th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
@gruvsyco
Doing it your way is fine except that it doesn’t pull up our channel graphic and info. Also, it only pulls the videos that are on our first page. You would have to add all 5 html pages to get all 45 videos.
So far I have set up our Miro channel very similar to meetthegimp’s. Only 2 of our videos show because we only had 2 videos on our blog’s front page at the time that I added the channel. Richard has changed this 10 post setting to 30 to help with that but it did not make a change in Miro. I cannot seem to retroactively get the rest of our videos. I’m willing to bet that the next screencast that we post will be picked up in Miro (I won’t bet any beer though).
If you subscribe to meet the gimp notice how many channels are listed. Not all of them. Then go to his blog and notice how many videos are on the first page of his blog. They should be the same. Both meet the gimp and screencasters use feedburner to sync our wordpress blog to Miro.
I have not figured out how to tell feedburner to scan old entries on our blog. I think I have everything set up correctly. That may be just the way feedburner/Miro work. I notice many other channels did not have a full listing either.