[olug] Video conversion questions...

T. J. Brumfield enderandrew at gmail.com
Thu Jul 8 15:02:09 UTC 2010


There are containers and there are codecs. Many containers support multiple
different codecs.

x264, XVID, and VP8 are generally considered the best 3 codecs. All have
comparable file sizes, quality and performance.

Different browsers have different support for codecs in their HTML5
implementations. If you're concerned with HTML5 support, I'd go with x264 or
VP8.

-- T. J.

On Thu, Jul 8, 2010 at 9:53 AM, Dan Linder <dan at linder.org> wrote:

> I have a number of uncompressed digital video files of my daughters that I
> pulled off of my "Digital-8" camera via Firewire years ago.
>
> Right now these .AVI files are huge (total about 140GB), and I'd like to
> encode them into something a bit smaller without loosing too much quality.
>
> Questions:
> 1: What is the current suggested version to convert videos to that
> will primarily be viewed from a DVD on a computer (Linux/Windows/OSX)?  Two
> years ago I though about doing DivX, but now MP4 looks like it may be the
> better solution.  Is there an official "HTML5" compatible container?
>
> 2: What command-line tools have others used on Linux to convert similar
> videos?  I tried "mencoder" yesterday, but it just seemed to hang using
> 100%
> CPU and only wrote a 2K output file (even when I pointed it at a short 10
> second clip).  Is "avidemux" a good option, or is there something better?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Dan
>
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