Move to use Arista device presets

[Aaron Whitehouse]

I really like the idea of MythExport and am really excited that it will eventually work for me (NZ digital TV uses LATM AAC, which I think is only supported in ffmpeg svn and MythTV).

There are a lot of good applications out there that convert video into formats for specific devices. My personal favourite is Arista (http://www.transcoder.org/ ). Arista has a huge list of device presets (http://www.transcoder.org/presets/ ), which are shared by other transcoding applications like Transmageddon (http://www.linuxrising.org/ ). There is even an online form to create new presets (http://www.transcoder.org/presets/create/ ).

To me, what is really important in MythExport are those features relating to getting MythTV information out of MythTV, like making cultists work (Bug #596539) and filling in metadata.

That is why I think it would be sensible to consider offloading the actual transcoding and managing of device presets to a project that focuses on that. I would be really keen to see MythExport move to using Arista for that purpose. That would have the added bonus that, once you have set up the profiles that work for your devices, you could use the Arista (or Transmageddon etc) GUI to do video conversion through a less-clunky interface than MythTV. Alternatively, I believe that the Arista presets are essentially Gstreamer commands, so MythExport could use these and call Gstreamer directly, rather than going through Arista.