This is all very interesting, but I don't want to know all of this information, and I don't want to have to know it. What I need is some kind of wrapper with sane defaults, such that when I perform some kind of operation on a video file, I only have to specify the parameters that matter to me. The last time I tried to work like that, the bitrate was unusable afterwards. I don't want to have to think about the bitrate to create a clip of a video.
While I agree with you that ffmpeg is hard to fully utilize in its current form, how do you design a "wrapper" for a CLI tool with 68,915 (I could be off by a few) parameters?
There's only one way to manage that, and that is to hide some options and functionality. Then it stops being an ffmpeg GUI, it starts becoming a "video transcoding application" (or an "audio grabber application "or a "subtitle insertion application") with ffmpeg as its backend.
I'm late with this reply but I've found LosslessCut[1] works quite well for what I need (cutting gameplay footage to upload to youtube). It doesn't have very many features though.
There was a decent wrapper tool called "transcode" which I really liked. Unfortunately went unmaintained and seems to have been forgotten by the internet (webpage has went away and I can only find some traces of its existance in some wikis).
Digging a bit deeper it seems the fate was the main developer lacking time and not finding anyone stepping in for four years and Berlios shutting down their servers. Makes you wonder which other open source projects have just vanished.
Sun May 30 11:16:00 CEST 2010
Call for developers
Transcode, like any opensource project, is always in need of contributions, but the situation has reached crisis point in recent weeks.
Despite a rich roadmap and plenty of ideas and proposals, the project is short of developers and close to stall. Moreover, one of the main developers (myself) has suspended its contribution to the development and maintainance for lack of time.
If you are interested in partecipating, bring it on! This is the right time! Join the development mailing list: transcode-devel at exit1 dot org (don't worry, the traffic is very low) and learn how you can contribute to the project.
Transcode needs you!
PLEASE NOTE!
Transcode does'nt need hardware or money donations!
Posted by fromani | Permanent link | File under: general, devnote, transcode, announce
