Transmageddon 0.20 released

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So after a very long 1 year development cycle I finally managed to push a new release of Transmageddon. The main reason for it haven taken this long was because I decided to port to the brand new discoverer and encodebin elements, to greatly simplify the code and improve functionality. The thing was that Edward Hervey when he wrote those elements took the conscious decision to make them assume that all needed GStreamer plugins worked as they should to be perfect GStreamer citizens. As you might imagine, since many of the plugins had never been tested for all such behaviour a lot of things did not work after the port. But over the last Months I have filed bug reports and most of them are now fixed. And with todays new python-gstreamer release (0.10.22) the fix for the binding bug for encodebin is fixed and thus I decided it was time to put out a new release.

I am quite happy with my new feature list:

  • Port to new plugins-base discoverer and encodebin
  • Replace radiobutton lists with a combobox instead
  • add support for audio only transcoding
  • add support for outputting audio only from video+audio files
  • Add deinterlacing
  • Support container free audio formats such as FLAC, mp3 and AAC
  • Add HTML5 and Nokia 900 profile
  • add support for video only transcoding
  • add support for mpeg1 video and mpeg2 audio

The new user interface should solve the problems people with small screens used to have with Transmageddon, like many netbook users. Transmageddon now also automatically deinterlaces deinterlaced video clips, I want to improve this feature in a later release, but making it optional to deinterlace and also use Robert Swains new elements that can help detect interlaced files that have been encoded as progressive files (as shown in his presentation in Prague).

Another major feature of this release is that audio only files are now officially supported, and you can also use Transmageddon to easily output just the audio from a audio+video clip.

I also added a HTML5 webm profile, so output to that should be easier than ever. In fact I used that profile when I transcoded 100GB of video that we had recorded at an internal session at Collabora.

My next goal is to port to GStreamer 1.0 and GTK3. That said if there turns out to be some brown paper bag issues in this release I will try to fix them and make a new release, but my guess is that most bugs people might encounter will be because there are issues that are only fixed in GStreamer git yet, so until they are all released not everything works 100% and until those releases are out there might be some small regressions from the previous release.

Anyway, I hope you head over to the Transmageddon website and grab the latest release for a test run. I will try to follow-up on bug reports, but might be a bit slow the next week as I am flying down to Lahore to celebrate my sister-in-laws wedding and also see my beautiful wife again after almost a Month apart.

7 thoughts on “Transmageddon 0.20 released”

  1. Nokia 5800/97 (s60v5) profile:

    Hi Christian,

    Could you please add a Nokia 5800 / Nokia n97 / Nokia n8 profile: here is the command I use to make mp4 for nokia 5800-n8. thanks.

    Using FFMPEG

    ffmpeg -i "$1" -f mp4 -vcodec libxvid -s 640x320 -b 640k -r 24  -acodec libmp3lame -ab 128 -ar 44100 -ac 2 "$1.mp4"

    Using MENCODER

    # step 1: convert the mkv to mpg ; many mkv files do not directly get converted to mp4
mencoder "$1" -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video -aid 0 -oac pcm -o delete_me.mpg

# step 2: convert the mpg file to mp4
mencoder -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -oac lavc -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
aglobal=1:vglobal=1:acodec=aac:vcodec=mpeg4:abitrate=128:vbitrate=640:keyint=250:mbd=1:vqmax=10:lmax=10:turbo  -af lavcresample=44100 \
-vf harddup,scale=640:-3 "delete_me.mpg" -o "$1.mp4"

# step 3: delete the temporary huge sized mpg file 
rm "delete_me.mpg"

  3. Imported it into Mageia. Available soon in Cauldron (development version) as therefore Mageia 2 (next year).

  4. Although the deinterlacing support is nice, the thing that I’m really missing is support for NTSC detelecining (reversing the 3:2 pulldown used to convert 24fps to 30fps). At the moment, the most reliable way I have of doing that I pulling out an old build of mencoder, for its ‘pullup’ or ‘filmdint’ filters.

    I suppose this would mostly be a matter of porting the relevant algorithms to gstreamer plugins.

    • Hi Calvin,
      There is a fieldanalysis element in GStreamer that should be able to deal with this. I will try to enable it in a future version.

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