OggConvert

OggConvert version 0.3.2 “…and some blood on my shirt” has been released.

This is the latest release of OggConvert, a simple Gnome utility to convert media files into the patent-free Theora, Dirac and Vorbis formats.

Dirac encoding requires version 1.0.0 or newer of the Schroedinger encoder for GStreamer.

OggConvert is written in Python using PyGTK and PyGST. It is released under the GNU LGPL.

What’s new in this version:

• (Hopefully) fix time remaining being way off on AMD64. Closes bug #250174.
• Fix (MPEG) files occasionally showing “120% Completed” and other such oddities.
• Dirac is no longer considered “experimental” now that the encoder has reached v1.0. Go ahead and try it out!
• Use “perceptual weighting” in the Dirac encoder by default. This should result in much smaller output files (and slightly quicker encoding) at equivalent quality settings.
• OggConvert’s quality settings now match ffmpeg2theora’s.
• New translations: Catalan, Franco-Provençal, Hebrew, Hungarian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian Bokmal, Slovak, Serbian, Turkish and Traditional Chinese. Many thanks to all the translators.
• Other minor bug fixes

Known issues in this release:

• None!

Source code (executable without installation thanks to Python) can be downloaded from http://oggconvert.tristanb.net/download/source/.

Please file bugs on Launchpad: http://bugs.launchpad.net/oggconvert/+filebug

New translations welcome! Please go to http://translations.launchpad.net/oggconvert/

According to the browser stats, nearly one third of people who visit this website are using Windows. Up till now, almost every single one of them would have had to leave disappointed. Well not any more: if you’re a Windows user, I’m delighted to tell you that you can now run OggConvert!

Well, okay, so it doesn’t look great, but the point is it works. Installation instructions can be found on the Windows page, but be warned it’s not quite as easy as on Linux at this point.

It’s early days, and you should probably regard this as a beta version at best. It’s only been tested on 32-bit Windows XP — it should also work on Windows 2000, but I have no idea about Vista, and Win64 seems unlikely.

If you fancy trying it out, please do drop back here and leave a comment about whether it worked or not. That way hopefully we can make OggConvert a bit more Windows-friendly in future. And like it says on the other page, if anyone with the know-how wants to put together an installation package to make life easier for Windows users…

So after far too long, I’ve finally gotten around to replacing most of the content that got wiped out when our hosting provider went bust a few months ago. Enjoy!

Apologies to anyone who’s tried to comment on anything on the site in that time — your posts got lost amongst the many thousands of spam messages that accumlated when Akismet wasn’t enabled. This has now been sorted out, so hopefully everything should Just Work — and now with added OpenID for those who use it.

Please bear with us while we get back on our feet…