Dan Cunningham

So I finally got time to trim the fat and clean up the code last night and it’s now available on GitHub

It’s been fun working on both EncodeHD and WMA over the past few years and I appreciate all the support they’ve gotten. I’ll try to continue contributing bits and pieces and I’m really hopeful that someone or some people can pick up on both of these projects. If not, then I hope the code helps people better understand both FFmpeg and USMT respectively.

Regarding support for both apps, I’ve been trying to decide how best to handle this. I get dozens of emails a day and, probably to my own downfall, reply to every single one! So, over the next few days I’ll probably get rid of the GetSatisfaction support pages and start only occasionally trawling through support emails.

Update 06/10/2009: I’ve marked myself as inactive in the GetSatisfaction pages and i’ve taken the Feedback tab off this site.

So what’s next? Well, I’ve got an interesting tool in the works for sysadmins. It’s kinda like Win 7′s AppLocker – but retrospective. Rather than whitelisting, it uses a blacklist to remove applications automatically. I’ve sent it out to a few testers and if it proves worthwhile, then maybe it’ll see the light of day. I’m also learning Objective-C, so I’m hoping my next app will be for the Mac

Okay guys, so I’ve made a number of decisions over the past few days based on some great feedback. I’ve decided to open source EncodeHD and the Workstation Migration Assistant. I’ve spent the past few evenings doing some code cleanup on EncodeHD – removing some unnecessary stuff and fixing a nasty bug. I’ve also built the final (well, by me anyway) binary build. So, here it is.

Changelog:

• CHANGE: Removed all update checking code
• CHANGE: Removed About dialog
• CHANGE: Updated FFmpeg to r20060
• CHANGE: Updated MediaInfo to 0.7.22
• FIX: If the input audio was not AAC and the bitrate was too low, encoding would fail (due to an attempted stream copy)

You can download in the EncodeHD section.

I’ve decided to put EncodeHD on GitHub, and you can find all of the source code here.
Please note that the GitHub source doesn’t include any binaries and is only the source code so it won’t run unless you’ve got the rest of the EncodeHD binaries (ie, FFmpeg, MediaInfo etc).

The Workstation Migration Assistant will follow, I still need to do some code cleanup here.

Hope this makes everyone happy

Dan

Mainly a bugfix release just to wrap up a few outstanding issues. Here’s what’s changed:

• NEW: /SOF Parameter. Shut down the machine when finished encoding
• CHANGE: If the audio bitrate is too low on input files with AAC audio, the stream will now be copied instead of re-encoded (to preserve quality)
• CHANGE: AppleTV Profile now forces 25fps in order to meet Apple specs on 720p content
• CHANGE: Output file extension is now lower-case to ensure thumbnail generation
• CHANGE: Removed Donation screen on first start / version upgrade – it’s proven highly ineffective
• CHANGE: Updated FFmpeg to r19974
• FIX: Some more aspect ratio fixes

Download in the EncodeHD section.

In addition, if you haven’t already seen it – please read my previous post and post a comment. The fact that it’s been 2 days and there isn’t yet a single comment makes me wonder why I’m bothering at all. I may be completely misguided but there’s a lot of daily visits and downloads – I had thought there was some sort of community behind these apps?

Dan

It’s been ages since I’ve had the energy to spend quality time on either EncodeHD or the Workstation Migration Assistant. This is partly because I’m so busy with work, that when I get home I don’t actually have the brainpower to do it, and it’s partly because my heart isn’t in it anymore – although that could be systemic of being so busy

So at this point I’m wondering if I should just open-source both apps. This might (hopefully) relieve me of some unwanted extra stress (do you know how many support / feature request emails I reply to a week?!), and also hopefully entice others to pick them up and continue development, or at the very least, tailor to fit their needs.

It might also give me time to work on new projects. I’ve got something in the wings at the moment, something similar to Microsoft’s AppLocker – but haven’t had a chance to finish it. And also, I’d really like to have more time to dig deeper into OSX and iPhone development.

So, what do you guys think? Comments would be most welcome.

Dan

Hey all,

Another relatively small update – I seem to have no time for anything at the moment Here’s the changes:

• NEW: Files with no audio tracks can now be encoded
• NEW: Preliminary support for the ZuneHD (in theory, it all should work)
• CHANGE: Increased Zune audio bitrate limit to 192kbps
• CHANGE: Updated MediaInfo to 0.7.20
• CHANGE: Updated FFmpeg to r19673
• CHANGE: Some minor code cleanup
• FIX: Audio Sample Rate wasn’t being set correctly for each profile
• FIX: -ar FFmpeg flag didn’t work

Download is in the EncodeHD section