Conduit & iPod Module - Week 2

[Alexandre <airmind gmail com>]

The last week I havent been able to code much, I was busy with exams until thursday, but I took the time to think about the code, and I was finally able to find a solution to the other week problem.
I have finally been able to get the GStreamer metadata to work. It seems very fast and will work great for what I need. I'm planning on removing the Mutagen code completely. 
I'm very confident on the use of GStreamer. I had some problems with it's documentation, but I got some really good code from the Elisa Media Center, which will enable some very good features, like video thumbnails, with little effort.
I'm integrating it with the Audio type in Conduit and the iPod module. It will enable syncing files and folders to the iPod very soon. Videos will be a bit trickier to get it working at it's best (with thumbnails and separation between videos and music videos), but it won't take long.

I've also researched video and audio transcoding using GStreamer. There are a bunch of applications that try to do it in a generic way, but none are well developed. My problem, however, is much simpler. I only need to support three or four formats.
My menotr was very helpful in indicating an application written in Python that converts audio between formats. I took a look at the code and it's very simple.
I believe Gstreamer is the way to go. I'll probably write a few profiles using GStreamer, which are just GStreamer pipelines in text form. I'm thinking about writing four profiles for Videos (for XVid and H.264, each with fast encoding vs best quality), and two for Audio (AAC and MP3, I dont know about quality here). The one thing I still don't know is how to integrate this with Conduit, like how they will be selected and where the files will be saved, but maybe this is already handled inside Conduit.

Next week will be much better for coding. But it will be my birthday thursday, I hope it doesnt hold me too long ;)

-- 
Alexandre Rosenfeld 

EngComp 06 - USP São Carlos