[Nik Jell]

Thanks yet again for your continued support Reuben.

VLC does indeed preserve the audio content, in fact I’ve never found much that VLC doesn’t play, it’s the Don of all movie playback apps.

I will continue to experiment with settings and post back here if I find a happy medium.

Thanks,
Nik

[Nik Jell]

Hi Reuben,

Thanks for your reply.

Here are some results:

input.MPG = 198.6 MB Duration 4min 18seconds

Output.mp4 produced using options: ” -sameq -y ” = 341.7 MB, conversion time = 59 seconds

Output.mp4 produced using options: “” -vcodec libx264 -preset ultrafast -trellis 2 -crf 21 -acodec libmp3lame -ac 2 -ab 192k -f mp4 -y ” = 193.8 MB, conversion time = 1min 12 seconds

As you can see the -sameq command produced a large file size but produced the file quicker than the other options!

Without wishing to sound like I want ‘The moon on a stick’ I’m just trying to find the best combination of options to produce the best quality of file with the smallest file size as quickly as possible!

The file produced using the libmp3lame audio option does not appear to have any audio when played back in Quicktime.

If you can offer any further advice I would appreciate it.

Thanks,
Nik

[Nik Jell]

Hi Reuben/Stephen

Thanks for your responses.

My version of ffmpeg was installed using Macports and I don’t think in has libfaac support. It also seems to be struggling with -vprofile. When I run the suggested options I get this error:

ffmpeg version 0.7.8, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
built on Nov 24 2011 14:31:00 with gcc 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)
configuration: –prefix=/opt/local –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-avfilter –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libvorbis –enable-libtheora –enable-libdirac –enable-libschroedinger –enable-libopenjpeg –enable-libxvid –enable-libx264 –enable-libvpx –enable-libspeex –mandir=/opt/local/share/man –enable-shared –enable-pthreads –cc=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 –arch=x86_64 –enable-yasm
libavutil 50. 43. 0 / 50. 43. 0
libavcodec 52.123. 0 / 52.123. 0
libavformat 52.111. 0 / 52.111. 0
libavdevice 52. 5. 0 / 52. 5. 0
libavfilter 1. 80. 0 / 1. 80. 0
libswscale 0. 14. 1 / 0. 14. 1
libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
Input #0, mpeg, from ‘/Users/nikj/Desktop/untitled folder 2/converted/final.MPG’:
Duration: 00:04:18.52, start: 0.240000, bitrate: 6147 kb/s
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720×576 [PAR 16:15 DAR 4:3], 9500 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 448 kb/s
[NULL @ 0x102009e00] [Eval @ 0x7fff5fbfe4b0] Undefined constant or missing ‘(‘ in ‘high’
[NULL @ 0x102009e00] Unable to parse option value “high”
Invalid value ‘high’ for option ‘vprofile’

I then removed the -vprofile high options and ran the command again and got this error:

ffmpeg version 0.7.8, Copyright (c) 2000-2011 the FFmpeg developers
built on Nov 24 2011 14:31:00 with gcc 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)
configuration: –prefix=/opt/local –enable-gpl –enable-postproc –enable-swscale –enable-avfilter –enable-libmp3lame –enable-libvorbis –enable-libtheora –enable-libdirac –enable-libschroedinger –enable-libopenjpeg –enable-libxvid –enable-libx264 –enable-libvpx –enable-libspeex –mandir=/opt/local/share/man –enable-shared –enable-pthreads –cc=/usr/bin/gcc-4.2 –arch=x86_64 –enable-yasm
libavutil 50. 43. 0 / 50. 43. 0
libavcodec 52.123. 0 / 52.123. 0
libavformat 52.111. 0 / 52.111. 0
libavdevice 52. 5. 0 / 52. 5. 0
libavfilter 1. 80. 0 / 1. 80. 0
libswscale 0. 14. 1 / 0. 14. 1
libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
Input #0, mpeg, from ‘/Users/nikj/Desktop/untitled folder 2/converted/final.MPG’:
Duration: 00:04:18.52, start: 0.240000, bitrate: 6147 kb/s
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video (Main), yuv420p, 720×576 [PAR 16:15 DAR 4:3], 9500 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 448 kb/s
Unknown encoder ‘libfaac’

I should explain that the files that come from the camera I first run this command on:

ffmpeg -i input.MPG -target pal-dvd -vcodec copy -y output.MPG

This is so that I have the option to burn them to a dvd.

I then concatenate the files using this mencoder commmand:

mencoder -audio-preload 0.0 -oac copy -ovc copy -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf -idx -mc 0 input1.MPG input2.MPG input3.MPG input4.MPG -o final.MPG

Its this final.MPG that I want to convert into an MP4 preserving as much quality as possible whilst producing it as quickly as possible.

Thanks again,
Nik