[MPlayer-dev-eng] Announce of Movieconvert

[nix.wie.weg at gmx.de]

Hello,

I have developed a graphical frontend for mencoder, which is named 
movieconvert. You can find the homepage and the cvs sources at 
http://movieconvert.sourceforge.net

The software should be considered as highly unstable and in pre-alpha 
state. Nonetheless it is already possible to use the application.

Why do I announce software in such an early stage on this list? Because 
I need help with some bugs I encountered with mplayer or mencoder. I see 
my field of activity in getting movieconvert stable, but it seems that 
some bugs in mplayer have to be fixed until I can fulfil this task and 
it would be nice if they could be fixed by someone else.
I have 3 categories of bugs:

1. release-critical (not fixed, it will be difficult to release 
movieconvert)
2. very nice to have (it would bring some elementary functions to 
movieconvert)
3. feature requests

The two release-critical are:

A) mplayer -identify doesn't always deliver correct video bitrate values
These bitrate values are essential for movieconvert because they are 
needed for all size calculations. There seems to be different cases of 
this error. On *.vob files or DVD's the bitrate value seems to be too 
high (maybe it is exactly twice as high as it should be). This confuses 
even gmplayer. On other files like for instance 
http://pdl3.warnerbros.com/thematrix/us/med/trailer_final_1000_dl.zip 
you get an bitrate of zero.

B) mplayer -vo png|jpeg seems to be broken
Sometimes there are no images generated and you do not get a error 
message. In most cases you can find a way to work around this problem in 
changing the codec order with "-vfm", but this try and error method is 
not usable for automatic processing by movieconvert.

One very nice to have feature:

C) mplayer seeking is very unreliable
I have implemented the possibility of cutting the video by determining 
start and end of video graphical. For this task I use the "mplayer 
-slave -xid" features. But seeking is much too unreliable. Sometimes it 
differs over 3000 seconds (mainly on mpeg1 Videos). I tried very hard to 
find a workaround for this, but I failed. It would be very very very 
nice if you would have a "-slave" command "seekandstop TIME" and you 
could be absolutly sure that the picture which you see after this 
command on the x11 window shows you the video at that point of time.

And finaly two feature requests:

D) please dont use combined Options
For instance do not use crop=width:height:x:y use instead 
crop_w=width,crop_h=height,crop_x=x,crop_y=y the second version you can 
generate from GUI components automatically, for using the first version 
you have to write a special function which will deal with this format.

E) please sort the mplayer options
For instance you do an -vf scale=width:height -sws 1 why not -vf 
scale_w=width,scale_h=height,sws=1 or why is -ofps not a lavc or xvid 
option (it will be ignored if "-ovc copy" is selected) and why do you 
have different seperators in -lavcopts and in -vf (":" or ",")?

But hey anyway all of you have done a great job - thanks for this. If I 
have listed some bugs here, I didn't want to criticize your work, I try 
only to make mplayer even better and easier to use.

Tino!