Re: GUI converter frontends (was: MPEG encoders?)

On Fri, 2005-07-01 at 09:58 -0700, Ramona Howard wrote:
> On Friday 01 July 2005 05:09 am, Brett McCoy wrote:
...snip...
> > been the philosophy of Unix for decades -- make one tool that does only
> > one thing and does it very well so it can be used in combination with
> > other tools that do their one thing very well.  It's easy enough to plop
> > a GUI over top this kind of thing.
...snip...
> We have found that most of our clients love the fact that they can take any 
> function(or tool) and use it aside from the GUI.  Kinda just the opposite of 
> where they were 4 years ago. Go figure....

Let me just preface this by saying that I am not a windows refugee who
is still looking for crutches to help me with the old way of doing
things.  I spend my days writing C++ and Python on Linux, and have used
Linux workstations as my day to day platform since 1996.  They can have
my find/xargs/locate/grep/perl/mutt etc.. when they pry them from my
cold dead fingers.

That said, I think that a transcoding/encoding gui is sorely lacking in
the free UN*X world (or at least I haven't found one that helps me
much).  There are a truly bewildering number of video file formats, and
an even more bewildering number of codecs that can be used inside the
wrappers.  Resolutions, frame rates, interlacing vs not, etc. etc..  For
us hobbyist dabblers in video who think "hmm, lots of spare CPU cycles
these days, maybe I should give cinelerra a whirl again and try to make
a little DVD" it quickly becomes apparent that this is not for the faint
of heart.

I would truly love (and have often told myself I will find the time to
research and write) a tool that focused on knowing not only how to turn
one crazy format into another without user intervention, but also on
making clear to the user what sort of format they need for various
applications (VCD, SVCD, DVD, streaming, etc..)

Just my outsider $0.02

thanks,
-emile

> Best of luck to all
>

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