Oggifier: A Simple GUI Wrapper for ffmpeg2theora
With the release of Firefox 3.5 earlier this week, the discussion around HTML5 and its native support for video and audio tags suddenly gained speed. One of the major issues around these new features is the lack of proper video codecs that can be used. Apple’s Safari supports H.264, but Firefox and other open source browsers can’t, due to licensing problems. Their adopted open source format, OGG, seems like the way to go, but it’s not that easy to generate, especially if you are on a Mac.
Yesterday, John Gruber from Daring Fireball published a lengthy post about possible solutions for OGG conversion on Mac, and his suggestion was to use Jan Gerber’s excellent ffmpeg2theora. I thought I would spend some time and build a simple GUI wrapper for this tool so it would be more easily adopted by Mac users. Today I am releasing an early beta version of Oggifier, a simple GUI wrapper around ffmpeg2theora.
Apart from a clean and simple user interface, Oggifier provides two additional features that might be useful to people:
It comes bundled with the latest version of ffmpeg2theora, so you don’t have to deal with installing it (even though Jan Gerber’s package installer is perfect, dragging and dropping an app that handles everything for you is easier)
Oggifier supports automated updates through Andy Matuschak’s Sparkle framework, which means that you will receive future updates to both Oggifier and the ffmpeg2theora automatically
You can get Oggifier 0.3.0 here. Please let me know what you think in the comments. I am planning to add support for advanced ffmpeg2theora options within the next few weeks.
Update: I just published version 0.3.0 that adds a simple preferences pane with support for automated conversion and optionally quitting after the process is complete.
Comments (2)
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Daniel
March 3, 2010 at 3:11 p.m.
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Hi, this is a great idea and I toyed around with creating a GUI for ffmpeg2theora, but I don’t have any programming skills.
If you added custom parameters (bit rate, resize, 1/2-pass etc.) — all of which I’m now doing with the command line — and batch processing, I would definitely pay 10-20 bucks for your program.
I guess many other would, too, because the Xiph.org QT component (the other customizable GUI alternative) is a piece of crap and most people don’t want to deal with a command line interface, yet want to encode HTML5 video.
Let me know if you’re considering beefing up this little tool!
Hey, I think this is a great start. If you could find a way for it to make custom outputs and a queue, I would pay money for this.