Thoggen 0.6.0 review

Thoggen project is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+. Note: Thoggen is still be

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Tim-Philipp M?ller

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Thoggen project is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+.

Note: Thoggen is still beta software, but should work fine nevertheless. Make sure you check the list of known issues.

Thoggen is designed to be easy and straight-forward to use. It attempts to hide the complexity many other transcoding tools expose and tries to offer sensible defaults that work okay for most people most of the time.

Here are some key features of "Thoggen":
Easy to use, with a nice graphical user interface (GUI)
Supports title preview, picture cropping, and picture resizing.
Language Selection for audio track (no subtitle support yet though)
Encodes into Ogg/Theora video
Can encode from local directory with video DVD files
Based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, which makes it fairly easy to add additional encoding formats/codecs in future.

Supported formats:

Ogg/Theora: - Theora video with Vorbis audio in an Ogg container (in case you have not heard of Theora before: it is basically what Vorbis is for audio - a patent-free, royalty-free codec that can be implemented by anone and is supported by recent versions of all major media players on all major platforms).
AVI/divx/mpeg4: - More formats, like MPEG4/divx/xvid in AVI etc., will be added once the core functionality has been finished and works reliably.

Thoggen is licensed under the GNU General Public license (GPL).

Requirements:
GStreamer core 0.8.9 or newer
GStreamer plugins required: a52dec, mpeg2dec, dvddemux, dvdreadsrc, theoraenc, rawvorbisenc, oggmux, videorate, and others (GStreamer plugins version 0.8.8 or newer is required)
Gtk+ 2.6.0 or newer
libdvdread3 (version 0.9.4 or higher)
HAL, libhal, dbus, and the dbus GLib bindings

Limitations:
Thoggen is SLOW

The theora encoder is still in alpha stage. Correct working and implementation of the specification are more important than speed at this stage. As the encoder matures, however, performance issues will receive more attention. Experienced users may check out the theora-mmx branch of the theora library, which gives a speed-up of a factor of 3-4.

DTS audio streams

Thoggen will ignore audio streams in DTS format unless the GStreamer dtsdec plugin is installed (which depends on libdts, which is in debian but isn't shipped in all distros). If a title has only audio streams in DTS format, the title won't show up in the title list at all. Usually DVDs ship audio streams in other audio formats as well, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Audio and Video are not in sync

With most inputs, this should not be an issue any longer if you are using up-to-date GStreamer plugins versions (gst-plugins >= 0.8.8). Double-check with different movie players if possible to make sure it is really the encoded stream and not your favourite movie player that is buggy. If you have A/V sync issues, please do let us know though.

Issues on PPC

Some people on PPC experience crashes when thoggen starts the encoding. This seems to be due to a compiler bug. If you come across this, make sure your libmpeg2 has been compiled using gcc-3.4 or newer. See GStreamer bug #154431 for more details.

What's New in This Release:
Port to GStreamer-0.10
Fix pad detection for titles where the logical audio stream number does not match the physical number used in the mpeg stream.
New spiffy preview dialog, nicer cropping dialog