Valence Video Encoder

NOTICE:

Valence is in prerelease at the moment, it is currently maintined by 1 developer and I work on it in my spare time. Features are added whenever I get a chance but if you want to see them come along more quickly, please feel free to submit a PR!

Project Goals

Long Term

Over the long term, Valence aims to:

1. Make FFMpeg easier to use by providing a clean and easy-to-use graphical user interface

2. Allow GPU accelerated encoding/decoding of supported codecs on supported GPUs

3. Be a one-stop-app for encoding/decoding, converting and tagging video files

4. Be seen or used by at least 1 person on the planet who is not either:

   4a. my wife; or

   4b. my mother.

Short Term

The alpha release of Valence v0.1.0-alpha allows users to:

1. Convert x264 encoded MKV video files to MP4 without needlessly re-encoding the video stream, speeding up conversion significantly, for playback on devices with limited container/codec support such as AppleTV.
2. Convert non-AAC audio streams to AAC so they can be played on devices with limited audio codec support such as AppleTV

It is particularly useful can speed up converting video for Apple iTunes and AppleTV.

What does Valence do?

It should really be called MKV to MP4 (in fact it nearly was, but I decided to pay my respects to Electron) as all it really does is change the container of a video file that is already encoded using the x264 or h264 codec from .mkv to .mp4 and ensuring the audio is in an iTunes supported codec.

How does it work? (and why did you bother creating it?)

Well I created it for 2 primary reasons:

1. I was sick of using the command line to change the container of a video file just so iTunes would acknowledge it's existence; and
2. I wanted to tinker with Typescript (try it! you won't regret it)

But a better explanation is:

Let's say you have a video file homevideo.x264.mkv and you want to add it to your nicely formatted iTunes video collection. Great, I'll just drag it into iTunes! But of course:

iTunes doesn't support the Matroska .mkv container, so you open up your trusty video converter tool like Handbrake 🍍 and convert it to MP4.

This works great but... it takes a long time and wastes alot of CPU computation in the process because it re-encodes a h264 video in h264.

So you look for a free alternative to Handbrake 🍍 and find, as I did, that the obvious solution is FFmpeg and that means command line.

By using FFMPEG to preserve (copy) x264 / h264 encoded video streams stored in MKV containers and converting them to MP4 containers, we can save a heap of CPU cycles and time!

Valence is basically just a wrapper/interface for the following amazing open source projects

• FFmpeg binaries for conversion and video file analysis
• Electron for a quick and easy cross-platform GUI application
• electron-prebuilt-compile which runs Typescript, LESS, and other Javascript superset languages directly without transpiling.
• Node.js runs javascript Server-side like a champ

LICENCE

Valence Video Encoder is Copyright © 2017 Liam Whan. Valence is Free and Open Source Software. No warranties either express or implied are provided, and by downloading this software or repository you are doing so at your own risk. Valence-specific source code is licensed under the MIT License. See LICENSE.md for the Valence License as well as the Licenses of all third party packages used.