13 Apr 2008

Writing a mencoder front-end in Python/Tkinter

Filed under: My software by Hari
Posted at 22:03:41 IST (last updated: 16 Jul 2008 @ 20:37:49 IST)
If you've been wondering why I've been so quiet on my blog, it's because I'm currently programming a mencoder GUI in Python using Tkinter as the GUI toolkit. The choice of Python with Tkinter makes this GUI as cross-platform as possible.

Why another GUI front-end for the mencoder video encoder, you might ask? Well, I wanted to improve my skills in Python, but I also wanted to write a GUI for mencoder which allows setting the video and audio codec options for the popular video and audio codecs (lavc, xvid, mp3lame, toolame, etc.)

It looks really simple at the moment, as most of the work is in writing the GUI code and translating the user-entered options into the respective command line parameters. Obviously it would be near impossible to encapsulate *all* of mencoder's available options, but I'm trying to keep it as friendly as possible.

5 comment(s)

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  1. Good idea Hari, mencoder is really straightforward once you know what you are doing but for newer users it's all black magic!

    Comment by ray (visitor) on 14 Apr 2008 @ 14:26:50 IST #
  2. It's not just the command line options, but also the audio and video codec (and their hard-to-remember parameters) which confuse people.

    My GUI tool will have dialog boxes which will allow people to configure even the codec parameters -- something I've not seen in some other video encoder GUIs like acidrip.

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 14 Apr 2008 @ 14:36:25 IST #
  3. Sounds good to me, anything which makes the regular jobs easier is good to me :)

    Comment by Ray (visitor) on 15 Apr 2008 @ 16:44:49 IST #
  4. Spending your time coding is cool, Hari. I've been doing some of the same. I'm trying to rewrite a plugin, write a new one, and get myself into more trouble.

    If coding is what keeps you away, it's time well spent.

    Comment by RT Cunningham (visitor) on 16 Apr 2008 @ 12:53:02 IST #
  5. Thanks RT. My script should be (actually is) cross-platform. If you've installed Python in Windows, my program should work as well. I've so far written the different codec options dialog boxes for audio and video.

    Hope you can test it out some time. I can send you the unfinished script if you want to test what I've done so far...

    Comment by hari (blog owner) on 16 Apr 2008 @ 13:33:23 IST #

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