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Re: Utility to convert videos



On Sun, 21 Apr 2002 11:16:48 -0400
Michael Kaminsky <kaminsky@lcs.mit.edu> wrote:

> My digital camera can create short movies which are in AVI file format
> and use the Motion JPEG codec.  I have several programs that can play
> them; that's no problem.
> 
> I have two questions:
> 
>  1. What's the best file format and codec such that people using
>     Windows, Mac, and Unix can view the video relatively painlessly?
>     (A smaller size/better compression would also be great.)

If you want to be hip, DivX ;-). There are players and transcoders for
all three platforms. DivX generally has better qualilty at smaller file
sizes because it has this so-called 2-pass encoding. There are even free
(as in speech) clones of DivX, if you care about such things.

>  2. Is there a Linux command-line utility that can convert from my
>     current AVI/Motion JPEG format to this other format (command-line
>     is preferable but not technically a requirement)?
> 
> Again, I don't need a viewer, just a converter of some sort.

Command-line actually rules. The most compliant transcoders are probably
from the mjpegtools project ( http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/). They can
output to mpeg's (1/2) that are compatible for burning into VCD's and
DVDs (don't take my word on that one; I hate DVDs) and DivX. What you
might initially find offputting is that mjpegtools is a suite of tools
as unix'y as they come. Take a look at this sample command chain
(nothing an RTFM can't cure):

lav2yuv +n glav_edit_list | yuvdenoise -b 8,4,-8,-4 | mpeg2enc -o video.m1v
lav2wav +n glav_edit_list | mp2enc -o audio.mp2
mplex -f 1 audio.mp2 video.m1v -o movie.mpg

If you want something less fiddly, I would recommend either transcode or
MEncoder (from the mplayerhq.hu folks).


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