MPEG2 transcoding

[ChristianHJW]

http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/

Just sharing this link with you, a search here did not give me any results, so it thought its maybe unknown. Unfortunately only for Linux users :D ...

[tiki4]

Sorry, but what did you try to show us there? I know of transcode, in fact it is feature packed and command line :(

But is there something special to look at?

Sorry, maybe I'm blind.

tiki4

[omol]

Originally posted by ChristianHJW
http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/

Just sharing this link with you, a search here did not give me any results, so it thought its maybe unknown. Unfortunately only for Linux users :D ...

The reason why you can't find Transcode in doom9's site is b'cos we linux users don't use doom9's site as software repositary but mainly use freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/) instead. Just like we don't use slashdot (http://slashdot.org/) as kernel release announcement channel.....;)

regards,
omol

[tiki4]

By the way:

I guess we won't be able to bring together Linux and Windows DivX community by any chance. The problem is that Linux users are in general more experienced with their OS than Windows users are, they usually don't bother when there is no GUI available for the programs they are using. Or even better, they write their own.
That's the case with transcode. The program is very rich in features and can transcode nearly everything to everything else. There is something like a graphical user interface available (in Perl) and it is really easy to use, but the installation is a pain in the ***

I tried it once myself and I must admit it is fast and transcode gives you a variety of options to play around with. Problem is there are many things not possible (as far as I know) that are quite common to Windows users, like VBR MP3 soundtrack and things like that. I didn't change sides when I tried to encode in Linux (I like Linux in general) because there is just no GordianKnot and no VirtualDub.

So the first step to 'unite' Windows and Linux encoders would be porting VirtualDub to Linux. I guess now with the existence of transcode this will not occur in the near future.

By the way I don't like to have to compile a full day the software I need for ripping a DVD, I just don't have the time to do so.

tiki4

[mpucoder]

I'd like to know if it can run in command line mode in Windows (aka DOS Box), and, if so, would someone like to post/email the binary. Like a lot of people, I don't have time to fart around with compilers (90% of the time there is some critical file missing)
I don't mind command line mode programs, and ReMPEG2 has many problems (not to mention no source).

[mean]

You may want to have a look at avidemux (http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux) which support multiplexing and cutting VBR mp3 soundtrack and is visual (looks like virtual dub a bit)

And of course it runs on linux and freebsd

But it's just for simple editing, transcode is much more powerfull for transcoding.

Ps: Oh, and yes it is a kind of advertising :)

[omol]

Originally posted by mpucoder
I'd like to know if it can run in command line mode in Windows (aka DOS Box), and, if so, would someone like to post/email the binary. Like a lot of people, I don't have time to fart around with compilers (90% of the time there is some critical file missing)
I don't mind command line mode programs, and ReMPEG2 has many problems (not to mention no source).

Just a suggestion, you can run mpeg2avi. As source code of transcode is available, you can DIY and port transcode to win32 with free (as in speech and beer) tools like this (http://www.mingw.org/) or this (http://sources.redhat.com/cygwin/).

regards,
omol

[mpucoder]

Yes, I know I could do it myself, it I had the time. What I was asking was if anyone else had ported to Win CLI to share the executable.
As for mpeg2avi, ReMPEG2 is a program used for transcoding .m2v to .m2v (usually at lower bitrates) used extensively by those of us who make DVD backups. We like to avoid avi formats for this.

[omol]

Originally posted by mpucoder
Yes, I know I could do it myself, it I had the time. What I was asking was if anyone else had ported to Win CLI to share the executable.
As for mpeg2avi, ReMPEG2 is a program used for transcoding .m2v to .m2v (usually at lower bitrates) used extensively by those of us who make DVD backups. We like to avoid avi formats for this.

The problem is, as tiki4 already pointed out in previous message, that not much linux users care about bringing apps to win32, esp. the developers. And users do video encoding on linux are even more rare, therefore, it's not impractical to DIY and port the apps you want from GNU/Linux platform to win32 if they are not already available. Without dealing with MFC and kernel specific call, I don't think it's that difficult.

regards,
omol

[tiki4]

Doesn't transcode rely in many ways on the AVIfile library to read and write certain codecs? It would be interesting to backport libavifile to Windows:D

No certainly, I think transcode is a very interesting program but porting it to Windows? Seriously, who would use it there?

The thing is: In Windows there is the VfW API and now also the DirectShow API. Programmers have to care to write code for both as apps like VirtualDub only work with VfW codecs while the players usually require DirectShow filters.

Now take a look on Linux: There is the VfL but as far as I know this one only deals with capturing so far. So it doesn't allow reading and writing of certain kinds of formats like AVI files. In order to handle these the developers rely on libavifile that serves as a wrapper for all the nice Windows codecs or they have to implement their own AVI reading and writing routines, so porting doesn't seem to easy.

If I am wrong with some of the above statements please feel free to correct me.

tiki4

[omol]

Originally posted by tiki4
Doesn't transcode rely in many ways on the AVIfile library to read and write certain codecs? It would be interesting to backport libavifile to Windows:D

No certainly, I think transcode is a very interesting program but porting it to Windows? Seriously, who would use it there?

The thing is: In Windows there is the VfW API and now also the DirectShow API. Programmers have to care to write code for both as apps like VirtualDub only work with VfW codecs while the players usually require DirectShow filters.

If I understand mpucoder correctly, he wants to use transcode to read mpeg2 stream either from HDTV or DVD and trascode them to lower bit rate mpeg2. Therefore, there is no need to deal with VfW nor DirectShow.

Um.....porting libavifile to win32? Very sick.....:D If someone really going to undertake such task, I will surely urge them to port Cygwin to linux.....:D

regards,
omol

[tiki4]

O.K.,

transcoding should be possible (if you get that stuff compiled, I guess one needs some experience to do so).

@omol: Porting cygwin to Linux, I guess that's a great idea. :D

No seriously, I don't like cygwin ported apps. They usually lack some very basic Windows (command line) features and behave more or less strange (I guess LAME isn't really cygwin ported for example but a native Win32 application).

tiki4

[omol]

Originally posted by tiki4
No seriously, I don't like cygwin ported apps. They usually lack some very basic Windows (command line) features and behave more or less strange (I guess LAME isn't really cygwin ported for example but a native Win32 application).

Me neither. When POSIX meets Win32, you get one messy klutch, like Cygwin. Yes, Cygwin works but it's slow, though compile with the magic flag "-mno-cygwin" improves a bit. MinGW is much better. I guess some LAME win32 binaries floating around are in fact compiled with MinGW. But still, I really appreciates all those involved in developing Cygwin for their efforts. Without Cygwin, there will not be jigdo-easy (http://cdimage.debian.org/~costar/jigdo/) (visit it if you like doing debian disc sets). No more pseudo image kit....:)

regards,
omol