Piping straight into x264 on Linux

[skottish]

I've been using x264 through FFMPEG to produce H264 videos from raw PNG frames. I would like to be able to skip using FFMPEG or Mencoder and pipe straight into x264. For instance, Mencoder has:

mencoder mf://*.png ...........

and FFMPEG has:

ffmpeg -i frame_%06d.png ..........

Of course both of these solutions work, but the interface doesn't expose all of the functionality of x264. On top of that, the x264 command line interface is very well documented; A lot of which comes out of this forum.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[akupenguin]

mencoder does expose all the functionality of x264. Any options you put under -x264encopts get passed straight to x264's commandline parser. The only difference is they're separated by ':' instead of ' --'.

[skottish]

mencoder does expose all the functionality of x264. Any options you put under -x264encopts get passed straight to x264's commandline parser. The only difference is they're separated by ':' instead of ' --'.

I guess if I'm going to be wrong about something, this is a good one to be wrong about. Thanks.

[Thasp]

mencoder will ruin the sync of your video :/ See http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=106365&page=2&highlight=mencoder+sync , http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122082&page=2 , http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=122018

[nm]

Well, it works for me (tm).

[skottish]

Thasp, thanks for the heads up, although I don't think it applies here. All of my current video work is using raw image frames, and so far both Mencoder and FFMPEG have been right on the mark.

[jruggle]

mencoder will work fine, but since you asked about other solutions... MJPEG tools makes a little commandline util called png2yuv. It takes a sequence of png files and outputs a YUV4MPEG stream, which happens to be what x264 takes as commandline input.