The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

Posted Dec 13, 2007 3:46 UTC (Thu) by vmlinuz (guest, #24)
Parent article: The Grumpy Editor's video journey, part 1

I think you are unfair in your comments on mencoder. As you say, it is perfectly capable of doing all sorts of weird and wonderful things - and the documentation is sorely lacking in reasons why you might want to do such things - but if all you want to do is copy a video (or stream) from one place to another, a command-line like:
mencoder -tv driver=v4l -oac copy -ovc copy -o priceless-video-data.avi tv://
should get you something similar to the cp example given, except for the slightly odd result of having an MPEG stream embedded in an AVI file...

Yes, I had to look up the TV options to mencoder, but that's only because I haven't used a TV card for about 3 years now. You would probably want to fiddle with the options to the TV driver - the equivalent of your v4l2-ctl stuff - but the rest of the long mencoder example you posted was mainly configuring the output of the encoding. Using -oac copy -ovc copy means mencoder will pass the audio and video data through unchanged, without attempting to scale, filter, transcode, compress or do anything else to it.

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It's probably more accurate to say 'mencoder reflects the complexity of digital video' rather
then just saying the tool is complicated.

It's not easy stuff. There are a lot of choices you need to make between quality and
performance and trade-offs are a natural part of everything. 

Linux tools like Mencoder or Transcoder are going to be what you need to get the best out of
your encodings. The best quality for the smallest files.. this is what their game is about. 

Otherwise you have two choices... Either take generic defaults and sacrifice quality for
usability or have very large files and throw hardware/storage at the problem. 

Cheap, Easy, Quality: Pick two. 

No doubt that mencoder is a great tool. One would only wish to have some 
command line switches, or ready-made scripts, for common tasks, like 
animating a series of images, or re-encoding a video, that can be played 
on the default Windows Media Player on my mothers computer. 

If someone knows about a "Mencoder for Dummies" site, please post it 
here.

I agree about mencoder being able to do almost anything. I learned to use it from using
mplayer, and I think that's the best way to approach it. The options are reasonably straight
forward (most of the time).

I find mencoder to be more capable than transcode / gstreamer / vlc, but none of them can do
everything, and most of them I don't know them quite well enough...

There are tons of sites on MEncoder (and MPlayer) just use google
to find them. And if you don't want to read them, you can use one
of the hundreds of the front ends to MPlayer and MEncoder most of
which are listed on the MPlayer homepage (http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html).

BTW: MPlayer and MEncoder are written with a capital second letter.