Re: we need a (official) GUI

Hi Francesco!

Am 31.01.2009 um 17:28 schrieb Francesco Romani:

> On Sat, 2009-01-31 at 13:37 +0100, Jörn Reder wrote:
>> Francesco Romani wrote:
>>
>>> - The GUI should be coded in C or in C++. We're already full of
>>> dependencies, so I'm really reluctant to add new _core_ dependencies
>>> (modules are a different story) unless necessary.
>>> If the GUI will be in C or C++, that's another point _against_ a
>>> frontend and in favour of a native approach.
>> Probably another approach towards getting a GUI (official or not ;)
>> could be: provide a stable C-API to be bound by scripting  
>> languages like
>> Perl, Python, Ruby etc. So the GUI stuff could be done in an  
>> interpreted
>> language, which makes things easier in my opinion.
>
> You're raising a very interesting point.
> Which, unfortunately, isn't easy to address :)
>
> Anyway, granted my lack of experience, the mere GUI building step  
> should
> not be _that_ hard; I thought since the beginning some kind of  
> designer
> should be used, as glade or the QT equivalent (QT designer?).
>
> Once the .glade file is done, to write down a (thin) glue layer
> should'nt be a big deal, I guess I can afford without so much  
> problems.
>
> Maybe it's just easier if I put together some ideas, fire up glade and
> make avalaible a mockup :)

What is your general idea of such a GUI? Should it just offer a  
graphical interface for the many transcode options or should it also  
offer functionality that helps to find the best parameters for some  
options, as e.g. in Jörns dvd::rip that detects the right aspect  
ratios and size of the black bars at the top and bottom to cut them.  
The only bad thing is that it can only handle DVDs. I have here a lot  
of movies recorded with my DVB-T stick that I would like to transcode  
to save space but I don't want to determine the crop and rescale  
parameters manually. Such functionality is what I would expect from a  
GUI for transcode. You could also say that it should define a  
workflow, again dvd::rip is a good example here.

And regardless which GUI library or scripting language you select it  
should run on every platform transcode is able to run. It would be  
bad to read: You can compile transcode on Mac OS X too but the GUI  
only runs under Windows and Linux.

Since for the GUI part it is not important to run with maximum speed  
a scripting language shouldn't be so bad compared to a compiled  
program. A problem of a scripting language would be that a further  
programming language would become part of the project and at least  
the project maintainers should be able to use both ;-)

Regards

Michael