Arista Transcoder 0.9.7 Released With Revamped UI, Ability To Edit, Manage, Export Presets [PPA]

Arista Transcoder is a really cool video converter for GNOME. It comes with a huge list of presets: from iPod, iPhone, PSP, Playstation 3 to Android, Nokia, DVD and lots more. It supports MP4, WebM, Matroska, AVI, Ogg, FLV (codecs - video: H.264, VP8, MPEG4 / DivX, MPEG2, Theora, Flash Video / audio: AAC, Vorbis, MP3, FLAC, Speex, WAV) formats and it can rip straight from DVD or v4l (Video 4 Linux) devices too.

A new Arista Transcoder version (0.9.7) was released yesterday with a revamped user interface ( now you can click on a device in the "Live preview" to select the preset for it), the ability to edit and manage device presets, export presets and lots of small fixes.

(Arista - Live Preview)

Arista is one of the easiest to use multimedia transcoders for Linux thanks to its huge list of presets. All you have to do is select a video, your device and click "Create". It also comes with a Nautilus extension so you can simply right click a video, select the format and start converting the video:

But of course, if you want to customize the presets, that's possible: click the "i" button and you can edit the audio/video codec, container, etc. (starting with the latest version - 0.9.7):

Install Arista Transcoder 0.9.7 in Ubuntu

Because I couldn't find any PPA for Arista Transcoder 0.9.7 and I had some time last night, I've created a PPA for Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and 10.10 Maverick Meerkat (it didn't work on Ubuntu 10.04 in my test). The PPA will only provide Arista.

Add the Arista PPA and install the latest 0.9.7 version in Ubuntu 11.04 or 10.10 using the commands below:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:webupd8team/arista
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install arista

Also install the following packages to get support for most formats:

sudo apt-get install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad-multiverse gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly-multiverse

If you want to install the Nautilus extension, use the command below:

sudo apt-get install nautilus-arista

Using Arista 0.9.7 in other Linux distributions

If you don't use Ubuntu and Arista 0.9.7 is not yet available in your distro repositories, you can download Arista from here, extract it and double click the "arista-gtk" file. To make sure you have all the Arista dependencies installed, you may want to install whatever Arista version is available in your Linux distribution repositories (install it just for the dependencies).

Thanks to Daniel G. Taylor for the tip!