• Compression Techniques

  Encoding a Windows Media Player compatible DV25 .avi file

  Posted by Andreas Wideroe on March 1, 2012 at 9:04 pm

  Hi,
  The past week I’ve been playing around with ffmpeg 0.10 installed from source on my FreeBSD 8.2 server.

  I’m trying to create a few ffmpeg presets that I can use for various standard encodings.

  Ie. one client always wants a DV25 .avi and .mov file of the films we make, an mpeg-2 DVD file and a h264 file for the iPad.

  The mpeg-2 and h264 is OK and so is the Quicktime DV25 file (as far as I can tell), but I cannot get the DV25 file to be accepted by Windows Media Player – and an earlier version of Adobe Premiere Pro (version 2). WMP gives the message no codec and Adobe Premiere says unsupported format.

  I try with the -target pal-dv, but with no luck.

  I want my parameters to work no matter if I encode a 10 bit uncompressed 4×3 file or a HD720P Prores file. As I said, it works for mpeg-2 and h264.

  My current sourcefile is a Prores 422HQ 1280×720 50P.

  Any suggestions of what I can try to get the DV25 .avi file to work and also for it to be either 16×9 or 4×3 depending on the source file?

  I have tried this aswell: -vcodec dvvideo -s 720×576 -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 25 -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ar 48000

  Thanks for your help!!

  Best,
  Andreas

  —
  Filmtek AS
  https://www.filmtek.no

  Filmshooting | Com
  https://www.filmshooting.com

  Stephen Dixon replied 14 years, 1 month ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
• 4 Replies

• 

  Andreas Wideroe

  March 1, 2012 at 10:32 pm

  I seem to be making some progress with these parameters:

  -vcodec dvvideo -s 720×576 -vtag dvsd -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 25 -f avi -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ar 4
  8000

  However, when playing back in WMP (which finally works) the 16×9 image is squeezed into a 4×3 frame.

  I need to make my parameters flexible so they can take either 4×3 or 16×9 and keep the aspect ratio on the output files, even if it’s 16×9 HD downscaled to PAL DV.

  Any ideas?

  —
  Filmtek AS
  https://www.filmtek.no

  Filmshooting | Com
  https://www.filmshooting.com
• 

  Stephen Dixon

  March 2, 2012 at 12:14 pm

  Have you used the -aspect option? I believe the parameters are just the ratio as x:y, e.g. 16:9 or 4:3.

  You could find the aspect of the original source with ffprobe, a bit of regex hacking would return it as a variable:
  AR=$(ffprobe source.mov 2>&1|sed “s/.*PAR[[:space:]]*([0-9]*):([0-9]*).*/1:2/”)

  then you can use the variable as a parameter in the -aspect option:
  ffmpeg -i source.mov [whatever] -aspect $AR [whatever] output.avi

  This is assuming you’re in a POSIX environment of course.

  Stephen Dixon
  Editor, Animator, Motionographer
  Museum Victoria
• 

  Andreas Wideroe

  March 6, 2012 at 8:33 am

  I can’t use the aspect tag because the parameters must work with any aspect regardless of what I feed it and it’s all done automatically, like a watchfolder.

  Anyways, I have concluded that this works in everything but WMP (which I seem to remember have some problems with DV files and 16×9).

  -vcodec dvvideo -s 720×576 -vtag dvsd -pix_fmt yuv420p -r 25 -f avi -acodec pcm_s16le -ac 2 -ar 48000

  Cheers,
  Andreas

  —
  Filmtek AS
  https://www.filmtek.no

  Filmshooting | Com
  https://www.filmshooting.com
• 

  Stephen Dixon

  March 21, 2012 at 11:47 am

  The script I provided would read the aspect of the original and supply it as the variable to be used in the aspect tag, so the output would always match. You will need to change the syntax to suit cmd.exe rather than Bash, as it sounds like you’re in a windows environment.

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