I’m currently working on a profile interface thingy for GStreamer. Think of an automated, simple way of saying how a file should be encoded in Sound Juicer or (hey 😉 ) GStreamer Recorder.

Screenshot of the profile editor: see here.

The idea is very simple: each plugin has default profiles (e.g. ‘DVD’ for an MPEG encoder, ‘CD quality’ for vorbis, etc.), and the user can define custom profiles, too. Sound Juicer or GStreamer Recorder (or any encoding/transcoding app) will, in the default preferences window, just show the available profiles for a given element. For the application, it’s a simple list/get/set as API. Of course, the app can also access properties individually, but that’s more for power users… Be honest: is there any user that knows whether a bitrate of 250 (kbps) is a good quality for half-PAL MPEG-4 TV capture (will the CPU handle fine? Too high/low bitrate? Finetunings?).

Thomas has a simplified (but working 😉 ) version of this in Gnome-media for Gnome-2.6. I hope this can go in for Gnome-2.8.