Arista, a Multimedia transcoder for GNOME Desktop

Today a friend of mine asked me to suggest him some good video converters in Linux. As of now, I am only aware of the King of all, ffmpeg, but when I searched in the repos for some more video convertors I came across Arista Transcoder, a pretty cool application which makes encoding media content for various popular devices really easy for you.

Arista is a simple Multimedia Transcoder for GNOME desktop. It is really easy to use. Just select the input media, the target device, choose a file to save and your task is done.

Features:

• Presets for iPod, computer, DVD player, PSP, Playstation 3, and more.
• Live preview to see encoded quality.
• Automatically discover available DVD media and Video 4 Linux (v4l) devices.
• Rip straight from DVD media easily (requires libdvdcss).
• Rip straight from v4l devices.
• Simple terminal client for scripting.
• Automatic preset updating.

Requirements

Inspite of all the cool features, you should have at least Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jackalope, to make it work. It is written in Python and requires the bindings for GTK+ 2.16 or newer, GStreamer, GConf, GObject, Cairo, and DBus and Jaunty is the first release that has everything to make it run.

Installation

Ubuntu users can either click this link(in case of trouble, help) or run the following command in the terminal to install arista.

[shredder12]$ sudo apt-get install arista

I am not sure if a rpm exists in Fedora Repos.