AMR in Transmageddon

So after the successful integration of the new AMR plugin into GStreamer, I went about doing some testing with Transmageddon. Discovered that it didn’t work so well. Turned out to be two different issues. First after some communication with Iago and then Martin Storsjö, Martin managed to fix some bugs in the original encoder which meant it was broken on x86_64 systems. Then even when that was fixed I couldn’t get Transmageddon to create a working file. I realized I should use the graph creation system to debug it, but this time I decided to add it as a permanent feature to Transmageddon, so that anything I or anyone else needed a graphical output of the transcoding process it would be very easy to do. So in the current git master version of Transmageddon you now have a ‘debug’ option under the Help menu. If you choose it, graphwiz and Eye of Gnome will be called, giving you a graphical representation of the pipeline at the time of choosing ‘debug’. With that in place I could quickly see that my audioresampler had ended up outside the standard pipeline and was able to fix the issue. After that encoding into amr-nb works without a hitch.

This screenshot of my desktop shows Transmageddon after having created a 3gpp file with AMR-NB audio, Totem playing that file and finally EOG displaying the pipeline used to create the file in Transmageddon. In fact you can create such images to view even if you don’t have any issues as it will not affect the successful completion of your transcoding process.

Great thing now is that any user of Transmageddon who experience a hang or similar can just choose ‘debug’ and add the debug image to a bug report. In a lot of cases I would be able to see exactly what goes wrong just from that. Having such a debug tool in the UI might not be the most usability PC thing to do, but at this stage in the development process I think there will be enough issues faced to warrant it.

A big thanks to Martin Storsjö for his effort today in fixing this issue, very much appreciated.