Aviator 0.2.0
Feb 11, 2023
aviator projects programming
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Why?

First, you can install here.

To enable simple, accessible AV1 encoding for the masses via Flathub. See my post about rAV1ator here for the rav1e + av1an based version of this utility.

Aviator has used SVT-AV1 & FFmpeg for a while, but has been missing a couple key features including a progress bar, a stop encode button, and more buttons on the header bar then just the close button. I've been glad to make this release available on Flathub, but I think it has surfaced some serious issues with how Flathub allows you to build applications.

rAV1ator vs Aviator: Flathub

There's an open issue regarding exactly my complaint here, which is that Flathub doesn't allow --share=network in the build-args. This places an undue burden on the developer to jump through extra hoops to make "reproducible builds," which I could guess there is potential to do with crypto instead of putting it on the dev. I champion Flatpak because of its superb user experience and seamless integration with the Linux desktop, but from a developer standpoint it is a nightmare of quirks & workarounds that require a depth of experience that many simply do not possess. Even if I did have such experience, I'm not sure how I'd be able to ship rAV1ator on Flathub with such a hurdle.

Aviator is great, and I'd easily recommend to anyone interested in video encoding. But I'd like it to be the best I can make it, and Flathub is simply not allowing this to happen. Hopefully with enough complaining we'll be able to fix things, but the light at the end of the tunnel doesn't seem to be approaching very quickly.

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