Transmageddon 0.7 released

I am very happy to announce the release of Transmageddon 0.7. This release of my simple to use video converter got some major new features. First of all it now sports full i18n support, thanks to a patch from Łukasz Jernaś. We only got Polish and Norwegian translations so far, but hopefully once I move Transmageddon into GNOME git, interested translators will find the infrastructure in place for easily adding more.

The second major feature in this release is that I did away with hardcoded element names. Instead I query GStreamer for possible plugins which I can then access using the GStreamer caps format. For instance to get mp3, instead of hardcoding the ‘lame’ element, I am now able to ask for a encoder doing ‘audio/mpeg,mpegversion=1,layer=3’ and GStreamer will provide me with any element I might have which supports creating mp3 files. The code for this is all in codecfinder.py.

This also let me enable another major feature, which is hooking into the automatic codec download system for GStreamer, now available in most major distros.
transmageddon-missing-plugins

As you might notice in the screenshot, Transmageddon now also displays the height and width of the video you are transcoding. Apart from the minor informational value this is not very useful atm, but it was a prerequisite for me to be able to add videoscaling support, which is my next step.

I also came across another python/gstreamer transcoder the other day, Arista. It got a pretty nice feature set already, and both application and website is a bit more polished in terms of looks than Transmageddon :) One thing I want to try to share with Arista is the XML device profile format, so that we can start building a database of profiles that can be shared between a lot of different applications.

Anyway, I hope people will try out this version of Transmageddon and let me know what you think. I am especially curious to hear how the automatic codec downloading stuff works for people.

Coherence nominated
Finally I would like to congratulate Frank his Coherence DLNA framework for being nominated to the 2009 Free Software Trophy in the multimedia category. Best of luck for the start of June when the winner is announced.

Entropy Wave launched
David Schleef who most of you probably know as a long time GStreamer contributor and the lead developer behind the Schrodinger Dirac library got the website up for his new company, Entropy Wave. David aims at offering various codecs and services for GStreamer and multimedia in general through Entropy Wave. At Collabora Multimedia we are looking forward to working with David and his company going forward. Lets just hope we can manage to get our own new website public soon :)

5 thoughts on “Transmageddon 0.7 released

  1. Have you thought/implemented two-pass encoding? It might seem like too much, but it improves the video quality a lot, specially in h264.
    I might be able to help too, I implemented the video transcoding in Conduit with GStreamer and Python.

    Btw, I would love to see a service such as your application availiable as a DBus interface, it would help a lot of applications and it would prevent applications from doing the same mistakes (I know the Conduit code is not perfect ;) Or we could build a library on it, so we can share the code more easily.
    At least we could share the device profile, as Conduit currently hardcodes elements for each device / format.

  2. “I also came across another python/gstreamer transcoder the other day, Arista. It got a pretty nice feature set already, and both application and website is a bit more polished in terms of looks than Transmageddon :) One thing I want to try to share with Arista is the XML device profile format, so that we can start building a database of profiles that can be shared between a lot of different applications.”

    Why do you keep Transmageddon, if there is a programm like Arista? I know Transmageddon is you learning project and it is hart to let you child die. But I think to join the forces will bring us a much better product.

  3. @stu: I’ll look into fixing that for the next version

    @Alexandre: I’ll be hanging out in #conduit in the next weeks, hopefully we can talk there.

    @Tobias: Well the learning part is a big part of it, I have a hard enough time understanding my own code, much less anyone elses yet. The other part is that I am also trying to write down what is hard to do today, in order to file API addition bugs for GStreamer. Finally I of course do have my own ideas for how I want the UI to behave etc. But I do want to try to share code and standards with other similar applications going forward, I mean ideally the difference between Transmageddon and other transcoders would be limited to the glade file and a little bit of glue code.

  4. Pingback: Passing on the Left » Blog Archive » Entropy Wave

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