I recently open-sourced our video exporting code into a neat little library and command line tool available on GitHub. The library is called smartcut because it “smartly” recodes only the minimum amount of frames required to create the output, instead of all the frames.
Here’s the link to the repository on GitHub
Of course this release doesn’t affect the users of the GUI app in any way, at least in the short term. This tech was already in the app from the very beginning.
It does mean that going forward if there are problems with the video exports (for example some formats are unsupported), you’re not limited to just whatever support I can give. You also have the option to either develop those features yourself, make an issue on the GitHub page to raise awareness of the deficiency or try to hire any opensource dev to add the support.
I’m not expecting huge amount of patches from opensource contributors, but maybe someone will prove my assumption wrong. I was positively surprised by the reaction from reddit. My post in r/opensource became top 5 upvoted post for the week and got 27 comments in total.
The demo video of the opensource tool is also the best performing video on the Smart Media Cutter Youtube so far:
All in all, this launch got a very nice response and I’m very grateful for the generally positive and exited response. Clearly people are interested in opensource video tools and it can be worthwhile to give back to the dev community in this way.
Leave a Reply