BiaMovE (pronounced by-a-movie) is an advanced mencoder GUI I've written in Python and Tkinter. Features include:

• Configuration for popularly used audio and video codecs (e.g. LAVC, x364, xvid, mp3lame, twolame etc.)
• Save/load profiles. You can create a specific profile for encoding different types of videos.
• A dialog box for common video filters - crop, scale, expand etc.
• Other advanced mencoder options not found in other video encoding GUIs.

What BiaMovE doesn't do:

• Detect mencoder/codecs installed on your system. You need mencoder installed with specific codecs you need for it to work.
• Advanced error checking. Be aware that Mencoder is a complex video encoding software and supports hundreds of options. Using certain combination of options/codecs might produce invalid, incompatible video formats. BiaMovE just passes your choices to the Mencoder command line and doesn't do much more than that.

Read more »

As mentioned in my previous post, I'm still working on the Mencoder GUI, but it's now beginning to take shape. I've almost completed it (except for saving and loading profiles and the actual encoding part). All the codec specific/video filter configuration dialog boxes are complete as of now.

Here's a screenshot of the main window. More coming up later.

If you've been wondering why I've been so quiet on my blog, it's because I'm currently programming a mencoder GUI in Python using Tkinter as the GUI toolkit. The choice of Python with Tkinter makes this GUI as cross-platform as possible.

Why another GUI front-end for the mencoder video encoder, you might ask? Well, I wanted to improve my skills in Python, but I also wanted to write a GUI for mencoder which allows setting the video and audio codec options for the popular video and audio codecs (lavc, xvid, mp3lame, toolame, etc.)

It looks really simple at the moment, as most of the work is in writing the GUI code and translating the user-entered options into the respective command line parameters. Obviously it would be near impossible to encapsulate *all* of mencoder's available options, but I'm trying to keep it as friendly as possible.

I've written a new blog tool in PHP called LiteDoodle. It's a simple, configuration driven image blogging system, ideal for small webcomics. Doesn't use MySQL or any databases.

Before you test it out, make sure you read the install-readme.html file. It has some useful information. It's a very rough-and-ready tool, so you won't find much polish in the code, but it does the job and is not very complicated.

Download: LiteDoodle.zip (25 kB)

Here's my import script which I used to convert this blog from WordPress 2.3 to b2evolution 2.0.1-alpha. The attached file has instructions on how to convert your blog. I strong recommend that you peruse the README file before using it. This works only with WordPress 2.3 and not versions below it. If you have an older WordPress blog, please upgrade first to 2.3 before importing.

I have enjoyed using b2evolution so far as it's much more configurable than WordPress (in the admin interface) and it's more like a CMS than a blog. However, you can check for yourself. This importer does not touch your existing WordPress installation, so there is no harm in testing it out.

You can ask questions and provide your feedback here! I would appreciate it.

Download link: wp_2_b2evolution.zip (6.6 kB)