Seen quite a few very positive twitter feeds since Edward Hervey announced the 0.13.0.2 pre-release of the PiTiVi video editor. Also saw this blog entry by Bryan Lunduke praising our latest efforts around PiTiVi. So all Pitivi sceptics out there, this is the time to give PiTiVi another look!

Transmageddon
Nathan Willis wrote a nice article on lwn.net covering Transmageddon and Arista. If you are not a lwn.net subscriber you should seriously considering becoming so, or you just have to wait until the article becomes generally available next week.

To avoid scaring to many people away I also I finally updated the Transmageddon website today, so instead of looking like a 5 minute website it now looks like I at least gave it about an hour :)

Did a new Transmageddon release today. This version includes the first stab at the device profiles support that I have been working on in collaboration with Daniel of Arista transcoder fame. While I think most of the profiles in there work many of them are probably not optimal as I haven’t gotten around to testing them as much as I wanted. Getting the Nokia 770 profile going basically sucked up all time I had for Transmageddon over the last weeks.

Be also aware that the presets might not work as expected as they rely on still unrelased changes to GStreamer. So while I put in checks in the code for this, it means that if it doesn’t find the GStreamer preset support, it will just go with encoder defaults, which will not work for some devices, most notably the iPod.

There are a couple of features on my immediate TODO list atm, which include multi pass encoding and remuxing, in addition to cleaning up the website, but things are looking a little hectic for a while, so I figured I get this release out as it might be quite some time until I get around to sorting out those issues.

I also got a Bugzilla entry set up for Transmageddon now, so feel free to file bugs and enhancement requests. But please be aware of the bleeding edge development goals of Transmageddon, which do mean your out-of-the-box GStreamer will probably not give you access to all the full featureset of Transmageddon.

So enjoy Transmageddon 0.10 :)

So I spent a lot of time this weekend hacking on Transmageddon. The result is that I got most of the needed code in place to do use profiles to transcode towards a specific device. The current code will scale down your video for instance, or resample towards a specific samplerate as specified in the profile. Got a screenshot of the current git here. Will be some time before a release though as there are lot of little bugs and issues that needs to be fixed and I depend heavily on GStreamer git currently for these profiles to work.

That said I have encountered two issues I am hoping someone in the community would be interested in tackling. The first is that in order to create files viewable on most phones out there I need AMR support. There current AMR plugin i -bad is a ugly fudge requiring you to download a tarball from the standards website and unzip it into the plugins structure. There is no need for this anymore as there is Apache licensed implementations of encoders and decoders for both AMR WB and AMR NB in Android. So if someone a bit familiar with C/C++ would be interested in trying to rip out these two libraries and turn them into GStreamer plugins I would be very grateful.

The code can be grabbed by doing:
git clone git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/external/opencore.git

The second task I would love some assistance with is creating an icon for Transmageddon. What I currently have in mind is a 3 window film strip, with the first windows being red, the second green and the last one blue. The green window part of the strip should be twisted around though so the blue window seen is on the ‘back’ of the film strip. But any nice looking icon would be welcome.

I plan on having some Transmageddon t-shirts made for GUADEC, so if anyone helps me out with either of these two tasks let me know your t-shirt size and I either bring the t-shirt to give you at GUADEC or if you are not attending I will send it in the post.

Managed to get the long promised interview with Edward Hervey about PiTiVi online today. Edward talks about some of the great work they have been doing recently and the incredible improvements the next release (happening this Month :) will have. I think anyone who have tried PiTiVi in the past who tries this upcoming release will be amazed of the great strides forward it is making. Hopefully once my Python coding skills improve enough from doing Transmageddon I could start contributing to PiTiVi too. If you are not afraid of grabbing code from a git repository I recommend that you grab git master of Pitivi and give it a go and come to #pitivi on irc.freenode.net, could be a good way to help Edward and the team nail down the last bugs before the release.

Transmageddon
I am continuing to work on Transmageddon. I have also gotten some great patches from Steven Walter, which essentially takes my gazillion lines of code and turns them into 4 line functions :)
I managed to integrate the profile reading code from Arista, so that as we continue to evolve the XML format for our device profiles I will be able to stresstest the changes. The code in git currently will let you choose a profile and set your container format and codecs based on it. Next steps is enabling video scaling and also setting preset values onto the encoders themselves. Once that is done I do a new release before starting to look at multipass encoding and remuxing.

Another small change is that I started adding Rank values to our encoders and muxers and is now checking for those ranks in Transmageddon. This means I don’t have to code in workarounds for specific plugins anymore, instead I just have general code checking for plugin ranks. Probably need add some code that ignores plugins with no rank though to avoid risking the code picking broken plugins like the ffmpeg Ogg muxer instead of using the automatic codec install code to grab the working muxer. Enabling such code would need to wait quite a bit though as all released GStreamer plugins have no ranks currently for encoders and muxers, so in practice it will be 6-9 Months at least before even the majority of users will have the versions with the rank set.