QtlMovie

QtlMovie

What is QtlMovie ?

QtlMovie is a simple specialized graphical front-end to FFmpeg and other free media tools.

Why another front-end to FFmpeg? Because most of these general-purpose front-ends are complex. QtlMovie has been designed with simplicity in mind for just a few specific common operations.

QtlMovie performs a few repetitive specialized tasks which proved to be difficult or boring with other tools. In short, I developed QtlMovie primarily for my own usage to automate tasks which took me too long and I now share it.

So, what is QtlMovie for?

It is mostly the answer to the following needs:

Sounds reasonable? Yes. Or at least I thought so.

Sounds simple? Not so simple in fact. Before developing QtlMovie, I needed to use a dozen different tools depending on the type of input and output files: MediaInfo (always a good starting point), AviDemux, ProjectX, VirtualDub, MediaCoder, DVD Decrypter, VOB Merge, DeeVeeDee, Nero, several more or less functional subtitle conversion tools and, for desperate cases, a good old long ffmpeg command line. None of these tools could be removed from the toolbox. There was always a specific case (mostly because of the subtitle formats hell) where one of them was necessary. See some more on that below. Note that I only mention free tools. There may be some magic and expensive tools which do what I want but I am simply not interested.

This is why I decided to unify all of them behind a common GUI which interfaces (but does not hide) ffmpeg and other command line tools. FFmpeg is the key tool which does most of the work. But additional tools are added to extract Close Captions subtitles or create DVD file systems and media. A log window shows the generated commands and their output. To understand why QtlMovie can be useful, the log window shows no less than 10 successive commands to generate a DVD media from a TV recording containing Teletext subtitles.

Using QtlMovie

Basically, the main workflow of QtlMovie is:

Why is this complicated ?

Interestingly, although the most complex technical task, the video and audio transcoding was never a problem. Most tools handle that gracefully, mostly thanks to back-ends like FFmpeg and its libraries.

Here is a list of some technical difficulties I had to face. No traditional tool can manage them all, I needed a combination of tools. And when a solution existed in a tool, I needed to select multiple options and make some calculation each time. I hate to repeat the same or (worse) similar operations when a technical solution could exist to automate them.

Well, enough is enough. I just wanted to open a file, 5 clicks, go for a coffee and later collect my DVD media or movie file. So I developed QtlMovie.

QtlMovie is a not a sophisticated tool. It does not manipulate video and other complex bitstreams. It simply synchronizes the work of other excellent and complex tools such as FFmpeg. But "simply" is exactly the word that was missing and I hope that QtlMovie will bring it to you.

Availability

QtlMovie is open source and released under the BSD license. It is developed in C++ using Qt 5 and should work on any platform supporting Qt 5.5 or higher, ffmpeg and the other media tools. QtlMovie is now primarily developed on Mac but is also tested on Windows and Linux.

QtlMovie is available on SourceForge. The source code is available both as one archive file per version and as a git repository. Please see the list of useful links in the side menu.

Binary installers for Windows (32 and 64 bits) and Mac OS (64-bit Intel Mac's) are available. These binary installers come pre-packaged with recent versions of ffmpeg, ffprobe, dvdauthor, ccextractor, mkisofs and growisofs so that they are self-sufficient for end users.

RPM and DEB packages are available for Fedora and Ubuntu Linux (64 bits). Following the Linux package management usual rules, this package only installs QtlMovie. The media tools packages shall be installed independently.

Please report problems using the issue tracker.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the authors of ffmpeg, dvdauthor, telxcc, ccextractor, mkisofs and growisofs. They developed great tools. QtlMovie is just providing the glue...

Useful external references

The following references link to useful resources on the Web about FFmpeg, DVD format and other media tools.