Category Archives: Transmageddon

GStreamer Conference 2018

Posted on by

For the 9th time this year there will be the GStreamer Conference. This year it will be in Edinburgh, UK right after the Embedded Linux Conference Europe, on the 25th of 26th of October. The GStreamer Conference is always a lot of fun with a wide variety of talks around Linux and multimedia, not all of them tied to GStreamer itself, for instance in the past we had a lot of talks about PulseAudio, V4L, OpenGL and Vulkan and new codecs.This year I am really looking forward to talks such as the DeepStream talk by NVidia, Bringing Deep Neural Networks to GStreamer by Pexip and D3Dx Video Game Streaming on Windows by Bebo, to mention a few.

For a variety of reasons I missed the last couple of conferences, but this year I will be back in attendance and I am really looking forward to it. In fact it will be the first GStreamer Conference I am attending that I am not the organizer for, so it will be nice to really be able to just enjoy the conference and the hallway track this time.

So if you haven’t booked yourself in already I strongly recommend going to the GStreamer Conference website and getting yourself signed up to attend.

See you all in Edinburgh!

Also looking forward to seeing everyone attending the PipeWire Hackfest happening right after the GStreamer Conference.

Another media codec on the way!

Posted on by

One of the thing we are working hard at currently is ensuring you have the codecs you need available in Fedora Workstation. Our main avenue for doing this is looking at the various codecs out there and trying to determine if the intellectual property situation allows us to start shipping all or parts of the technologies involved. This was how we were able to start shipping mp3 playback support for Fedora Workstation 25. Of course in cases where this is obviously not the case we have things like the agreement with our friends at Cisco allowing us to offer H264 support using their licensed codec, which is how OpenH264 started being available in Fedora Workstation 24.

As you might imagine clearing a codec for shipping is a slow and labour intensive process with lawyers and engineers spending a lot of time reviewing stuff to figure out what can be shipped when and how. I am hoping to have more announcements like this coming out during the course of the year.

So I am very happy to announce today that we are now working on packaging the codec known as AC3 (also known as A52) for Fedora Workstation 26. The name AC3 might not be very well known to you, but AC3 is part of a set of technologies developed by Dolby and marketed as Dolby Surround. This means that if you have video files with surround sound audio it is most likely something we can playback with an AC3 decoder. AC3/A52 is also used for surround sound TV broadcasts in the US and it is the audio format used by some Sony and Panasonic video cameras.

We will be offering AC3 playback in Fedora Workstation 26 and we are looking into options for offering an encoder. To be clear there are nothing stopping us from offering an encoder apart from finding an implementation that is possible to package and ship with Fedora with an reasonable amount of effort. The most well known open source implementation we know about is the one found in ffmpeg/libav, but extracting a single codec to ship from ffmpeg or libav is a lot of work and not something we currently have the resources to do. We found another implementation called aften, but that seems to be unmaintaned for years, but we will look at it to see if it could be used.
But if you are interested in AC3 encoding support we would love it if someone started working on a standalone AC3 encoder we could ship, be that by picking up maintership of Aften, splitting out AC3 encoding from libav or ffmpeg or writting something new.

If you want to learn more about AC3 the best place to look is probably the Wikipedia page for Dolby Digital or the a52 ATSC audio standard document for more of a technical deep dive.

Mp3 support now coming to Fedora Workstation 25

Posted on by

So, in Fedora Workstation 24 we added H264 support through OpenH264. In Fedora Workstation 25 I am happy to tell you all that we are taking another step in improving our codec support by adding support for mp3 playback. I know this has been a big wishlist item for a long time for a lot of people so I am really happy that we are finally in a position to fulfil that wish. You should be able to download the mp3 plugin on day 1 through GNOME Software or through the missing codec installer in various GStreamer applications. For Fedora Workstation 26 I would not be surprised if we decide to ship it on the install media.

Fo the technically inclined out there, our initial enablement is through the mpeg123 library and corresponding GStreamer plugin. The main reason we choose this library over all the others available out there was a combination of using the same license as GStreamer (lgpl v2) and being a well established library used by a lot of different applications already. There might be other mp3 decoders added in the future depending on interest in and effort by the community. So get ready to install Fedora Workstation 25 when its released soon and play some tunes :)

P.S. To be 110% clear we will not be adding encoding support at this time.

H264 in Fedora Workstation

Posted on by

So after a lot of work to put the policies and pieces in place we are now giving Fedora users access to the OpenH264 plugin from <a href="http://www.cisco.comCisco.
Dennis Gilmore posted a nice blog entry explaining how you can install OpenH264 in Fedora 24.

That said the plugin is of limited use today for a variety of reasons. The first being that the plugin only supports the Baseline profile. For those not intimately familiar with what H264 profiles are they are
basically a way to define subsets of the codec. So as you might guess from the name Baseline, the Baseline profile is pretty much at the bottom of the H264 profile list and thus any file encoded with another profile of H264 will not work with it. The profile you need for most online videos is the High profile. If you encode a file using OpenH264 though it will work with any decoder that can do Baseline or higher, which is basically every one of them.
And there are some things using H264 Baseline, like WebRTC.

But we realize that to make this a truly useful addition for our users we need to improve the profile support in OpenH264 and luckily we have Wim Taymans looking at the issue and he will work with Cisco engineers to widen the range of profiles supported.

Of course just adding H264 doesn’t solve the codec issue, and we are looking at ways to bring even more codecs to Fedora Workstation. Of course there is a limit to what we can do there, but I do think we will have some announcements this year that will bring us a lot closer and long term I am confident that efforts like Alliance for Open Media will provide us a path for a future dominated by royalty free media formats.

But for now thanks to everyone involved from Cisco, Fedora Release Engineering and the Workstation Working Group for helping to make this happen.

GStreamer Conference 2015

Posted on by

Wanted to let everyone know that the GStreamer Conference 2015 is happening for the 6th time this year. So if you want to attend the premier open source multimedia conference you can do so in Dublin, Ireland between the 8th and 9th of October. If you want to attend I suggest registering as early as possible using the GStreamer Conference registration webpage. Like earlier years the GStreamer Conference is co-located with other great conferences like the Embedded Linux Conference Europe so you have the chance to combine the attendance into one trip.

The GStreamer Conference has always been a great opportunity to not only learn about the latest developments in GStreamer, but about whats happeing in the general Linux multimedia stack, latest news from the world of codec development and other related topics. I strongly recommend setting aside the 8th and the 9th of October for a trip to Dublin and the GStreamer Conference.

Also a heads up for those interested in doing a talk. The formal deadline for submitting a proposal is this Sunday the 9th of August, so you need to hurry to send in a proposal. You find the details for how to submit a talk on the GStreamer Conference 2015 website. While talks submitted before the 9th will be prioritized I do recommend anyone seeing this after the deadline to still send in a proposal as there might be a chance to get on the program anyway if you get your proposal in during next week.

Thanks for all the applications

Posted on by

Jobs at Red Hat
So I got a LOT of responses to my blog post about the open positions we have here at Red Hat working on Fedora and the Desktop. In fact I got so many it will probably take a bit of time before we can work through them all. So you might have to wait a little bit before getting a response from us. Anyway, thanks you to everyone who sent me their CV, much appreciated and looking forward to working with those of you we end up hiring!

Builder campaign closes in 13 hours
I want to make one last pitch for everyone to contribute to the Builder crowdfunding campaign. It has just passed 47 000 USD as I write this, which means we just need another 3000 USD to reach
the graphical debugger stretch goal. Don’t miss out on this opportunity to help this exciting open source project!

Time has come to support some important projects!

Posted on by

If you read this blog entry it is very likely that you are a direct beneficiary of open source and free software. Like myself you probably have been able to get hold of, use and tinker with software that in the old world of closed source dominance would all together have cost you maybe ten thousand dollars or more. So with the spirit of the Yuletide season fresh in mind it is time to open your wallet and support some important open source fundraising campaigns.

The first one is the Builder, an IDE of our GNOME which is an effort by the unstoppable Christian Hergert to create a truly powerful and modern IDE for GNOME. Christian has already made huge strides forward with his project since quiting his dayjob to start it, and helping fund him to cross the finish line would be greatly beneficial to us all. And I think it would make a wonderful addition to the Fedora Workstation effort, so this is an easy way for you to help us move that effort forward too. So head over to the fundraiser webpage or start by viewing the great fundraiser video below:

The second effort I want to highlight is the still ongoing fundraiser for the PiTiVi video editor. Since they started that effort they have raised 22190 USD of the 35 000 USD they need to get PiTiVi to a level where they are confident to make a 1.0 release. And I think we all agree that having a top notch video editor avaiable, especially one that uses GStreamer and thus helps improve our general multimedia story is very important. This effort also has a nice introduction video if I want to know more:

I have personally contributed money to both these efforts and I hope you will too! Both projects are crucial for the long term health of the ecosystem and both are done by credible teams with the right skills to succeed. So for those of us out of school and in paying jobs, setting aside for example 100 USD to help these two efforts should be an easy choice to make, the value we will get back easily dwarfs that amount.

Transmageddon Video Transcoder version 1.5 released

Posted on by

So just a quick update. I pushed out the 1.5 release of Transmageddon today. No major new features just fixing a regression in terms of dealing with files where you only have a video track or where you want to drop the audio track as part of the transcoding process. I am also having some issues with Intel Hardware encoding atm, but I think those are somewhere lower in the stack, so I hope to file a bug against either GStreamer or the libva project for that issue, but for now I recommend not having the Intel VA plugins for GStreamer installed.

As always you find the latest release on linuxrising.org.

I also submitted a Transmageddon update to Fedora 21, so if you are a Fedora user please test the build there and give it some Karma

Transmageddon 1.2 ‘All bugs must die’

Posted on by

Update: I had actually managed to disable the VAAPI encoding in 1.2, so I just rolled a 1.3 release which re-enabled it. Apart from that it is identical

So I finally managed to put out a new Transmageddon release today. It is primarily a bugfix release, but considering how many critical bugs I ended up fixing for this release I am actually a bit embarassed about my earlier 1.x releases. There was for instances some stupidity in my code that triggered thread safety issues, which I know hit some of my users quite badly. But there were other things not working properly either, like dropping the video stream from a file. Anyway, I know some people think that filing bugs doesn’t help, but I think I fixed every reported Transmageddon bug with this release (although not every feature request bugzilla item). So if you have issues with Transmageddon 1.2 please let me know and I will try my best to fix them. I do try to keep a policy that it is better to have limited functionality, but what is there is solid as opposed to have a lot of features that are unreliable or outright broken.

That said I couldn’t help myself so there are a few new features in this release. First of all if you have the GStreamer VAAPI plugins installed (and be sure to have the driver too) then the VAAPI GPU encoder will be used for h264 and MPEG2.

Secondly I brought back the so called ‘xvid’ codec (even though xvid isn’t really a separate codec, but a name used to refer to MPEG4 Video codec using the advanced-simple profile.).

So as screenshot blow shows, there is not a lot of UI changes since the last version, just some smaller layout and string fixes, but stability is hopefully greatly improved.
transmageddon-1.2

I am currently looking at a range of things as the next feature for Transmageddon including:

  • Batch transcoding, allowing you to create a series of transcoding jobs upfront instead of doing the transcodes one by one
  • Advanced settings panel, allowing you to choose which encoders to use for a given format, what profiles to use, turn deinterlacing on/off and so on
  • Profile generator, create new device profiles by inspecting existing files
  • Redo the UI to switch away from deprecated widgets

If you have any preference for which I should tackle first feel free to let me know in the comments and I will try to allow
popular will decide what I do first :)

P.S. I would love to have a high contrast icon for Transmageddon (HighContrast App icon guidelines) – So if there is any graphics artists out there willing to create one for me I would be duly greatful

Transmageddon 1.0 released!

Posted on by

It has been a long time in the making, but I have finally cut a new release of the Transmageddon transcoder application. The code inside Transmageddon has seen some major overhaul as I have updated it to take advantage of new GStreamer APIs and features. New features in this release include:

  • Support files with multiple audio streams, allowing you to transcode them to different codecs or drop them from the new file
  • DVD ripping support. So know you can use your movie DVDs as input in Transmageddon, be aware though that you need to install things like lsdvd and the GStreamer dvdread plugin from gst-plugins-ugly for it to become available. And you probably also want libdvdcss installed to be able to transcode most movie DVDs.
  • Another small feature of the release is that you can now set language information on files with one audio stream inside. I hope to extend this to also work with files that have multiple audio streams. If you rip a DVD with multiple audio streams Transmageddon will preserve the existing audio information, so in that case you shouldn’t need to set the language metadata manually.
  • Enabled VP9 support in the code.

There are some other smaller niceties too, like the use of blue default action buttons to match the GNOME 3 style better and I also switched to new icon designed by Jakub Steiner. There is also an appdata file now, which should make Transmageddon available in a nice way inside the new Fedora Software Installer’

Also there is now an Advanced section on the Transmageddon website explaining how you can create custom presets that allow you to do things like resize the video or change the bitrate of the audio.

And last, but not least here is a screenshot of the new version.
transmageddon-1.0-blue-button

You can download the new version from the Transmageddon website, I will update the version in Fedora soon.