Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding [LWN.net]

Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding

Posted May 21, 2009 19:07 UTC (Thu) by jimparis (subscriber, #38647)
In reply to: Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding by pr1268
Parent article: Transmageddon and Arista pursue simple transcoding

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.

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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!