Notices

Hello!

Today I did an effort and polished/released the version 0.2.0 of TinyAVI.

This is a set of two very easy to use Python scripts for Unix (one command-line and one GUI using PyGtk) which will convert any (well... most ) video files which are correctly handled by mplayer/mencoder on PCs to a format suitable for portable devices, including Nokia N8xx.

The GUI application can be set up to use multiple CPUs, in which case it will launch several conversion processes in parallel.

Screenshot:


I wrote TinyAVI for my 12-year daughter, so it is expected to be very easy to use.

The program can be downloaded from its BerliOS page:
https://developer.berlios.de/project...?group_id=9512

There are ready Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.04 packages; for other distributions you will have to either build a package yourselves, or download the .tar.bz2 file and run 'make install'.

Of course, you will need mplayer and mencoder both installed, otherwise the program will do nothing

The program will automatically detect the size of your video and will also exclude black borders from the output. Then the source video size will be fit to target device resolution, taking into account the source video aspect ratio. If the aspect ratio of the video and of the device screen is very different, it will stretch "a bit" the image so that it fits better on target device screen, leaving less black space. For example, if your source video has the 4:3 (1.25) aspect, and you choose N8x0 as target device (800/480 = 1.6666 screen aspect), the resulting video will use the 1.45 aspect. If it would stretch it to 1.6666, that would be very noticeable, but with 1.45 it's not too noticeable, but at the same time you can see more details.

Hmm when I browse the site in Firefox 3 it seems to give me a security certificate error. (ugh)

BerliOS's public key is certified by FhG FOCUS which should be already in your trust database. Anyway, you can always simply replace https by http.

Is there anything new I should look at to enhance tablet-encode with?

I'm biased, but it seems a shame to invest effort in creating a new mencoder wrapper when we have Java ones, Windows ones and cross-platform ones already - and, of course, Nokia's Internet Tablet Video Converter.

I don't want to sound like a curmudgeon, or suggest that you might not have some whizzy new idea, but surely one of those projects could have been a base on which to accept some patches? Certainly, your goals sound exactly the same as tablet-encode's!

FWIW, RST38h has also been helping with some thoughts on how to improve the GUI. Two mockups from Pencil, based on his suggestions:



There'll also be a "lightning session" on tablet-encode at the Maemo Summit to try and increase the number of users and developers.

Andrew makes a good point. If anyone is interested in making any of these converters function as a plug in for ITVC (both for Windows and OS X), I'd be glad to help out however I can

Absolutely. The plugin API in ITVC is very powerful, and given the problems with QuickTime's MP4 encoding on OS X, I should stablise and test my "tablet-encode as ITVC encoder" plugin and release it.

tablet-encode is written in Perl, which I don't know and don't like.
Besides, my program is Unix-based and won't work in Windows because it uses shell scripts. Windows users already have that Nokia converter so I don't care about Windows much, besides I simply don't have Windows at home.

Java... I may be biased by Java sucks because it uses its own widget set which has a substantially different look and feel, and because it slowly starts up. C/C++ is simply not the tool for this kind of tasks.

That said, Python was the best choice for me. I looked around, and found no existing programs (in fact, I looked for any video encoders, but did not found tablet-encode - perhaps because when I started TinyAVI I had no internet tablet yet, so I looked at sourceforge and berlios).

P.S. By the way, I'm Andrew too.

FYI, the ITVC plug-in is socket communication based and supports launching plugins via Java, Python, or Perl.

Java has GTK+ L&F. tablet-encode started as Unix-based, dunno if it runs on Windows at all. Just for info

I tried the gtk look of java, but it still feels like a masquerade. For example, clipboard copy&paste does not work for me in Java with any look-n-feel, and this kills. In general, Java look-n-feel is too alien, I use both Qt and Gtk apps and I have no problems with them.

tablet-encode runs fine, but it doesn't do what I need from such an application. "Improving" it would mean a total rewrite, so I just made my own, without being constrained to learn/use Perl.