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Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding

Posted May 20, 2009 19:41 UTC (Wed) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648)
Parent article: Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding

Command line encoders like FFmpeg and MEncoder can perform almost any conversion, but require the user to know exactly which options to enable, and, in most cases, demand that every codec switch be specified or else they fail to produce a usable result.

Don't I know it! (I'm a longtime MEncoder/MPlayer user who regularly recycles a script that contains a plethora of command-line switches whenever I'm transcoding video.)

Thanks for the article. I'm tempted to try out either of Transmageddon or Arista, assuming I can wade through the dependency hell I'm facing (I'm a KDE user and, if I understand correctly, these are GNOME/GTK apps).

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Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding

Posted May 21, 2009 0:05 UTC (Thu) by boerner (guest, #4247) [Link]

Very well done article. Does an excellent job of presenting the 'big picture', not just some posting about a new release of some app. More like this one please...

subtitle support

Posted May 21, 2009 11:32 UTC (Thu) by alex (subscriber, #1355) [Link]

I've been using mencoder for a long time and I finally just fixed a script to encode for the one target I have (PS3). However I still haven't got a decent way of reliably generated synced subtitles. I have yet to find the one (or few!) clicks GUI to this nirvana.

Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding

Posted May 21, 2009 19:07 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647) [Link]

I'm tempted to try out either of Transmageddon or Arista, assuming I can wade through the dependency hell I'm facing

It always seems like video transcoding devolves into dependency hell -- not necessarily of the gnome/kde variety that you mention, but the fact that external tools and libraries are required to actually perform the transcoding. And these tools then get compiled with a variety of different options and enabled formats, so you can't just tell whether they will work from the version number. On one of my systems:

$ apt-cache policy ffmpeg
ffmpeg:
  Installed: 3:20080706-0.3lenny1
  Candidate: 3:20080706-0.3lenny1
  Version table:
     5:0.5+svn20090508-0.1 0
         80 http://www.debian-multimedia.org testing/main Packages
         50 http://www.debian-multimedia.org unstable/main Packages
     4:0.5+svn20090420-2 0
         50 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu unstable/main Packages
 *** 3:20080706-0.3lenny1 0
        990 http://www.debian-multimedia.org stable/main Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     3:0.svn20090303-1 0
         80 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu testing/main Packages
     0.svn20080206-17+lenny1 0
        990 http://security.debian.org stable/updates/main Packages
     0.svn20080206-17 0
        990 http://debian.lcs.mit.edu stable/main Packages

Now I understand that half the confusion here is from having the same package in debian-multimedia and Debian proper, but they're fundamentally different because the debian-multimedia one is often compiled against more non-free codecs.

I'd really, really love to see something like Arista as a standard package in Debian with properly vetted dependencies that make sure we're getting a known-good version of all the tools and libraries they use.

Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding

Posted May 22, 2009 5:19 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

Well, I was thinking more of the ./configure && make && make install variety of dependency issues (usually tripped when running the configure script). I use Slackware, and my preferred way of getting non-distro software is via source tarballs. But, thanks for your info!

Switches

Posted May 22, 2009 4:43 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

>...demand that every codec switch...

That is close to true about mencoder, but I have found ffmpeg usually does the right thing for common target formats with very few switches (mainly to set the bit rate).

...who regularly recycles a script...

me too, and that is the nice thing about a command-line tool: once you have tweaked the settings to your satisfaction, you can reuse it easily.