Need some testing of ffmpegGUI for upcoming release

ffmpegGUI is getting closer to a release, but first we need to get some users to test it out and report their findings:

5 Likes

What happened to MediaConverter?

Is it not running with FFMPEG too?

If your FFmpeg GUI is working will MediaConverter dropped?

I remember MediaConverter had some issurs converting Avi to mpeg4 in the past!

I just want you to remember MediaConvrrter since it is a BeOs app and was working in the BeOs past very well.

Nothing happened to it. It uses the Media Kit which uses ffmpeg. But encoding with Media Kit seems a bit broken currently. It has been like this for years. We don’t plan to replace it, but people seem more interested in porting other options than fixing it, or can’t find what’s wrong (I tried a few times)

So, maybe better to drop MediaConverter for Haiku Beta4 for the moment to not confuse the new user.

https://dev.haiku-os.org/ticket/16831

It’s a beta release. There are bugs in it and that’s normal. There is no reason to remove software from betas. The goal of betas is to get more people to test the software and continue finding bugs.

4 Likes

I can´t speak for the project, but I hope not. I see no reason to do so. This isn´t a competition between different apps. We all work on what´s fun for us. This is how non-commercial open source is supposed to be :wink:

Why would you do that? ffmpegGUI will most likely never be bundled with Haiku and is not even in haikuports yet. How should this confuse the users?

Just to clear up a few things (never thought that this would be necessary, ffmpegGUI seemed like a rather non-controversial app to me, but nothing seems non-controversial around here these days :wink: ).
I was looking for a project on HaikuArchives to participate in Hacktoberfest this fall and kinda stumbled on ffmpegGUI. It was of interest for me because it needed a gui rewrite from liblayout to the native Haiku layout api. A good opportunity to learn. As it turned out the app itself was only barely working (no offense to the original authors intended), so I ended up rewriting and enhancing the app quite a bit. All for fun and for the learning experience.
As for the comparison with MediaConverter (which, believe it or not I only discovered today). It´s quite obvious that using the Media Kit is by far the better way than running an external executable, like ffmegGUi does and which can be quite tricky. But I don´t think I have the skills to fix the bugs in MediaKit (or rewrite it as has been suggested in some threads in the past iirc).

11 Likes

@BlueSky: nice to see more people starting programming on Haiku. I see no problem with apps who do the same. Most of this apps do the things different, so people should decide to use this or that one. If you have fun to make this app, this is good and if you learn to program on haiku this is not only good, it is better :slight_smile:

By the way, it is completely normal that there are several solutions to a topic.

3 Likes

Let´s try and get this thread back on topic :wink:
What we are looking for is people testing the app for general errors and especially errors relating to the ffmepg commandline options set by the app. Preferrably also with both ffmpeg 4.x (pkgman install ffmpeg_tools) and ffmpeg 5.x (ffmepg5_tools). And on 32 bit Haiku as my testing admittedly happens mostly on x86_64.

For those of you who want to test but don´t know how to build the app:

  • Open Terminal and issue the command git clone GitHub - HaikuArchives/ffmpegGUI: GUI for FFmpeg EDIT: you’ll have to click the link to see the real url, I can´t get the forum not to mangle it :wink:
  • Change to the gcc11 compiler with setarch x86 (only on 32bit Haiku)
  • compile the app with make
  • install the ffmpeg commandline tool with pkgman install ffmpeg_tools or ffmpeg5_tools
    *run the app from the generated objects-xxxx directory.
2 Likes

Yes, that would be a job for the OS developers. But who knows, maybe you’ll join the team someday? It has happened to other app developers as they found too muny bugs in the OS and ended up fixng these so they could get their apps running. I don’t know if we are out of this situation yet.

6 Likes

Sounds like a good idea, thanks for encouraging me :+1:
I’ll try to help out with Web+ a bit, maybe this leads me to MediaKit some day…

8 Likes