Well, after just 8 short months of development (::)) I finally finished the new HTPC focused video encoding tool I’ve been working on! What makes it HTPC focused? I’m glad you asked…
[list]
[*]Its 100% CLI based which makes it ideal for scripting, batch processing, and inclusion into existing front ends.
[*]Its easily expandable and customizable. If one day you find an awesome new encoding tool/command online you can write up a new profile for this tool that uses it in under 5 minutes (That’s who long it took me to add a handbrake profile)
[*]Its as smart as you want it to be. I realized after I wrote my first DVD burning plug-in that a) I didn’t know what the hell I was doing and b) that there’s no way I could anticipate/accommodate every one’s needs. So I decided that none of the encoding decisions could be hard coded in the script. Instead I needed to create an incredibly poweful mini-syntax for inside the profile files so that I could easily distribute improvements and bug fixes without recompiling.[/list:u]
What I really need now is more people than just me to throw some videos at it and see how it performs. My concern really isn’t with the quality of the encodes (those can be improved by just modifying the profiles) but that it handles every type of video gracefully. The stranger the video (avi w/ ac3, mkv, vorbis audio, etc.) the better 🙂
You can download it at
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=181485&package_id=246238
To use it just extract it to its own folder, run profile2bat.exe, and drag and drop videos on the batch files it creates.
If the tool errors out completely it will generate a .zip file containing all of the relevant log files that you can email to me @ perl2dvd(at)gmail(dot)com. However, if a video is being created successfully but very badly, you can open up the .bat files and add “/saveZip” to the switches line to have it save a .zip file with every encode.
Oh, also, videoDVD creation is [b]working great[/b] in this build so I highly recommend playing around with that. It will generate .img files that you can burn using your software of choice (I recommend imgBurn).
Let me know if anyone has any questions (other than when will the SageTV plug-in part will be done :-[).
Edit: Removed readme because it was scary 🙂
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