traGtor - ffmpeg Encoder GUI for GNU/Linux (one of the best!)

I maybe wrong on this one but I think the origin of the Qt written KDE desktop actually comes from the German programmers. But the point is for good or worse..., unlike with Gnome, KDE has a philosophy that make sure the desktop and almost all the other applications come with a lot of options/features by default.

This was visible from the birth of KDE. But then again the reason for all those features is actually has nothing to do with the toolkit since it's the ideas and believe systems that define us thus even by a slight change of the "philosophy" any toolkit can be used to make a very powerful, features-rich application nonetheless.

In that sense, if you were looking for an easy to use yet powerful multimedia converter that comes with a GUI (hopefully :P) which is written in GTK+, then look no further, I don't know about you, but I've found it. It's called "traGtor".

Main features...

*. As said, this is actually a front-end that uses the ffmpeg multimedia library (one of the most efficient ones as well). So all the codecs supported by ffmpeg can be converted using traGtor.

I don't know about the manipulative history... but you gotta respect the way of the Germans... they really know their shi* :D

*. Change audio/video codec, bitrate, crop (my favourite and one of the important ones if you care about optimizing the output quality and size), and resize (enter values manually).

*. Edit audio sample rate, edit tags, change channels, 2-pass encoding (for the optimal results).

*. Change the output container (MKV, AVI, etc).

*. Change ratio and De-interlace.

By default it uses the German language... you can change it to English by Clicking on that "6th" tab under "Sparche wahlen" (don't know what that means though :/) choose "en" as shown in the screenshot.

*. If you know a bit about ffmpeg (command line) then you can enter additional encoding settings as well... and these are few of the features to mention.

You can install traGtor in Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal by following the below instructions.

It's not supported by the Ubuntu repositories at the moment but I'm pretty sure they'll be added when considering the amazing capabilities of this utility. So we have to add their repository first.

Open your GNU/Linux Terminal window and enter the below commands.

wget http://repository.mein-neues-blog.de:9000/PublicKey

sudo apt-key add PublicKey

rm PublicKey

echo "deb http://repository.mein-neues-blog.de:9000/ /" | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/sources.list

Now we can install it using the "apt-get" command as usual.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install tragtor

As said, you have to have the ffmpeg multimedia codecs pack (library actually) to do the actual work. If you haven't already, you can install ffmpeg by using the additional commands, again in your Terminal window.

sudo wget --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/$(lsb_release -cs).list && sudo apt-get --quiet update && sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get --quiet update

Then we can install ffmpeg in Ubuntu 11.04 and the id3v2 (MP3 tag editor) by using the next command.

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg

sudo apt-get install id3v2

That's it. Now you've installed TraGtor and all its dependencies thus you can start converting any audio/video under the sun in Ubuntu Linux! :D.