So I’ve been spending some time talking with Daniel G. Taylor of Arista transcoder fame and I think there is a good chance we will be collaborating quite a bit going forward. Neither Transmageddon or Arista will be going away as separate projects, but we will collaborate on many features and the focus of Transmageddon will change slightly.
Daniel plans on making sure Arista works on latest Ubuntu releases, which means Arista will be the transcoder which actually works with what people have out there. Transmageddon will on the other hand
track GStreamer git master quit closely as I try out and help mature various GStreamer features. Of course as soon as these features matures and starts being shipped in the GStreamer versions shipped by distributions then Arista will start using them too.
There are a range of issues where I think this model will suit all our needs fine. First of all I worked quite a bit on a plugins based on caps system in Transmageddon 0.7 instead of using specific element names. Daniel wants this for Arista too, but until we get things like bug 580005 in GStreamer resolved and GStreamer versions with this change shipped by distros then of course it will break functionality to use the plugins from caps system.
So I will track GStreamer git and use whatever we have there, and Daniel will look to see when the distros ship this stuff to decide when Arista picks it up.
Another feature where this will come into play is presets. Daniel and I will work together on the presets stuff, figuring out what needs to work on the GStreamer level using the GStreamer element level preset system and what will go into a higher level device definition file, based on the XML files Daniel currently ships with Arista.
Arista has also been switched over to the LGPL(v21) starting from todays Arista 0.9 release to ease code flowing back and forth between Transmageddon (which is already LGPL) and Arista, and at the same time we hope to lay the foundation for a python transcoding library that can be used by stuff like Conduit. By defining this API hopefully we can also help establish what would be a useful C API for a GStreamer encoding/transcoding API.
Btw, I released 0.8 of to Transmageddon today, mostly containing some bugfixes. MPEG4/Divx5 encoding should work again for instance and xvid support is also added.
I haven’t used either project yet, though I expect to in future, but I just want to say – I’ve been following this via your blog posts and it sounds like an awesome story of collaboration. Kudos to both projects.
If you need inspiration for x264 presets take a look at the MeGUI presets. You probably don’t want to add all of them, but they are very well tested and the guys from doom9 really know their stuff.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=139765
Please also check out ogmrip.sf.net; it is by far the most usable endoer atm imho. Its presets for x264nare also excellent.
OGMRIP has evolved from being a theora-only solution to a universal encoder very like what the two of you are doing with your encoders.
Hi,
Actually, the video branch of gnac is trying to provide an C API to audio/video conversion/transcoding.
We may want to work together establising base work for a C api!
I’m pretty excited about that!
@David: that would be very good indeed. Adding some higher level APIs to GStreamer has been on the todo list for quite some time, so it would be great if we can through these efforts help chisel out what the encoding part of that API should look like. Gnac being C might even be able to provide the code for the API :)
@Uraeus: Great! Can you contact me privately ?
@David: I will
@Uraeus: I forgot to put my mail:
firstname DOT lastname AT gmail DOT com
I wish you make a tutorial for developing Multimedia Applications with Gstreamer and Python.
I hadn’t find any good tutorial for it.