SIVE 1 Beta 3

SIVE, short from Simple iPod Video Encoder, is a graphical tool to make video conversion for iPod Video real simple.
SIVE is a GTK2 frontend to mplayer, mencoder and mp4creator. With it, you convert your movies to play them on your iPod very easily. It currently works under unix OSes (yes, including your linux distro) ); im thinking about Windows porting but thats far from being a priority, since similar tools already exist in the Windows world (and I dont like Windows programming, too).
Its usefulness is pretty clear : it makes converting videos for playing on iPod Video real simple, allowing to select audio tracks and subtitles tracks. No need for end users to browse manpages and documentation to learn how to convert their videos to read them on iPod, which might make them think "geez, its so easy under MacOS and Windows and so difficult in Linux/Unix". This simple GUI does the job.
SIVE produces iPod compliant H.124 videos, by using mencoder to encode and mp4creator to create a container iPod Video can use. It generates the options to be passed to these command line tools in order to create what the user asked (bitrate, audio track, subtitles, resolution, scale, crop). It shows the commands and their results in an embedded terminal so the user can learn how to use these tools manually.
It does not do any conversion itself : this tricky job is left to the tools which are known for doing it well.
At the moment, SIVE supports :
Input formats :
- MKV
- AVI
- (other common formats mencoder can handle will be added soon)
Output format :
- H.124, "baseline profile level 1.3" (these are iPod requirements ; understand "the videos play on iPod Video")
Input subtitles formats :
- embedded in input file (MKV)
- .sub file
- .srt file
- (other formats will be added soon)
- Audio track selection (MKV)
- Batch conversion
- Desktop integration
Translations :
- English
- French
- Chinese coming very soon
- Other languages coming