GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 727932
Please add back the xvid codec
Last modified: 2014-06-25 08:40:06 UTC
Hi there, there are bugs reported in Debian [1,2] complaining that it has become impossible to select xvid as video codec. Given how popular and fast that codec is, I agree that it makes sense to add it back to the list. Could you please add it back? Thanks Fabian [1] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=707254 [2] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=707259
Hmm, so the problem is that the term 'xvid' got dropped from GStreamer 1.0 as it doesn't really exist. xvid is a 'brand name' for MPEG4 Part 2 video (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MPEG-4_Part_2) which we do still support. And transmageddon still supports MPEG4 Part 2, although the UI currently just calls it 'MPEG Video' which is a bit unclear. I will see what I can do to fix that, and maybe I could even put back the xvid name somehow, will look into it. Anyway, any time people want to choose 'xvid' they should be able to choose MPEG4 Part 2 and get what they want.
Ok, fixed the bug that made 'MPEG4 Video' into 'MPEG Video'. Will do a hotfix for that along with a few other small fixes. Discussing with the GStreamer devs about 'xvid' to try to figure out the solution.
Ok, the xvid issue is actually this bug report: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=651320 so my original reply wasn't 100% accurate.
As it seems the "XVID MPEG-4" label has been dropped in favor of "MPEG-4 Video" [1], though it is still not clear from that label if "MPEG-4 Part 2" or "MPEG-4 Part 10" is meant. They should at least be made distinguishable from each other by adding "ASP" or "AVC", respectively. [1] http://cgit.freedesktop.org/gstreamer/gst-plugins-base/commit/gst-libs/gst/pbutils/descriptions.c?id=ba7d738d9e53b33907c607b8003014f7b5b0cb7f
Well Part 10 is listed in Transmageddon as H264 as that is the term most people know it by. The other thing to note here is that Transmageddon doesn't use its own human readable codec descriptions anymore, instead I get them from GStreamer itself. I used to use my own descriptions, but figured that if I used the same human readable forms that most other GStreamer applications used it would be more coherent. Of course the downside of this is that I can't change/update the descriptions myself I instead need to file bug reports against GStreamer. That said my goal here is two-fold. The first is to get the two profile options available in the caps, so I can differentiate between the two without any special casing inside Transmageddon. Secondly in the description for MPEG4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile, I want Xvid to be mentioned as I think more people know the codec/profile under that name than as 'MP4 Part 2 ASP'.
I don't know the difference between the two profiles, I only know "Part 2 is xvid" and "Part 10 is x264". So, if "xvid" is "MPEG-4 Part 2 Advanced Simple Profile" actually, what codecs hides behind "MPEG4-Video Part 2 Simple Profile"? apart from that, I agree with you on the whole!
ok, so added code for this now in git master. However due to using the GStreamer pbutils functions the UI just list two 'MPEG4 video' options. Trying to get an upstream fix so that one of them will include a mention of xvid to make them different from each other.