On this page I will try and pull together a number of recipies for encoding video into different formats.

3GP for Mobile Phones

This method requires three steps. Now assume we have a file called movie.mpeg and we want to convert it to movie.3GP. The steps required would be

mencoder movie.mpeg -nosound -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 \
-vop expand=176:144,scale=176:-2 \
-o movie.avi -ofps 12

This will extract the video, scale it and reduce the frame rate. Now we need to extract the sound.

mplayer -vo null -ao pcm -af \
resample=8000,volume=+4db:sc movie.mpeg

An output file called audiodump.wav will be created that has the audio that we require. Finally we need to combine these two files together.

ffmpeg -i movie.avi -i audiodump.wav \
-b 48 -ac 1 -ab 12 -map 0.0 -map 1.0 movie.3GP

I have been told that this can be done in one command as follows

ffmpeg -i movie.mpeg -vcodec mpeg4 -r 15 -b 128k -s qcif \
-acodec amr_nb -ar 8000 -ac 1 -ab 13 -f 3gp -y output.3gp

AVI File for inport to Kino

mencoder -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -of avi -xvidencopts bitrate=1350 \
-o output.avi input.flv

MP4 for iPod Video

For this to work, faac and xvid need to be configured in ffmpeg.
For a 4:3 video, use:

ffmpeg -i foo.avi -f mov -b 1800 -maxrate 2500 \
-vcodec xvid -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -s 320x240 \
-acodec aac -ab 128 \
foo.ipod.mov

For 16:9 video, use:

ffmpeg -i foo.avi -f mov -b 1800 -maxrate 2500 \
-vcodec xvid -qmin 3 -qmax 5 \
-s 320x180 -padtop 30 -padbottom 30 \
-acodec aac -ab 128 \
foo.ipod.mov

Rotate video

This one comes from the Hampshire Linux User Group mailing list. This is used to rotate a video by 90 degrees.

mencoder -oac copy -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mjpeg -vop rotate=1 00250.avi -o 00250_rot.avi

Join some AVI files together

mencoder -forceidx -ovc copy -oac copy -o file.avi p1.avi p2.avi ...

Create a DVD from a bunch of avi’s

movie-to-dvd -r 720x576 -d letterbox -f auto -a 16:9 \
-A 16:9 -q low -Q auto -o DVD -O "-aid 0" -M *.avi

That will create a bunch of VOB’s in a sudirectory called DVD. However, I am currently having a few problems with this on damaged mpeg files where the audio goes out of sync with the video. I am currently playing with ffmpeg to see if I can come up with a set of options to replace this command, and fix the audio. The following has worked best so far.

ffmpeg -i input.mpg -target pal-dvd -b 3000000 -aspect 16:9 \
-vcodec mpeg2video -acodec copy -map 0:0 -map 0:2 -vsync 0 -y output.vob

cd DVD && movie-make-title-simple -o title -m pal -n none

That will do some stuff to create the title

movie-title -o title.vob -t title prog1.vob prog2.vob prog3.vob

Actually create the title VOB and prepare the xml file for dvdauthor.

dvdauthor -o disk1 -x title.vob-dvdauthor.xml

That will bunch the whole lot up ready to burn to a disk.

growisofs -speed 1 -dvd-compat -Z /dev/scd0 -dvd-video disk1/

Burn baby, burn!

This process still needs some tweaking as the menus are not working properly yet. I expected that I would have a still picture for each button, but all I have is blank squares with a play button above.

And some more

The above are recipies that I have actually used, and recorded here for future reference. Here is a link to some more that may be usefull, but I have not actually tried myself.

http://streaming411.com/wiki/index.php?title=Encoding_prerecorded_video

Archiving MythTV Recordings

I have decided to have a go at archiving some of my MythTV recordings. This has proven to be a little more problematical than first expected, as the OOTB solutions just did not quite do the job.

First use the edit function in MythTV and set up the cut points to remove adverts etc., then log into Mysql, and select the mythconverg database. Then run the following query:

select chanid,starttime,title from recorded;

This will list all the recorded programs, and the other information that is needed for the next step. Now run mythtranscode as follows:

mythtranscode --chanid 1519 --starttime 2007-11-08-18-55-00 \
--mpeg2 --honorcutlist -o A\ really\ cool\ film.mpg

Note that the start time required by mythtranscode is in a slightly different format to that stored in the Mysql database.

Once I have done this, I then use the recipe mentioned further up the page to record this file as a DVD.

Another way
Windows Media Player compatible files