Here's the short story:I'm experimenting with different bitrates on a piece of video that I'm transcoding... and it seems that, once I hit a certain point, I can't make the file any bigger. I try...
transcode -i file.mpg -o file.avi -y xvid4,xvid4 -w 1000and I try all kinds of values for "-w"... up to 10000 or more, and the file never seems to end up as big as the source file.
Is there a limit to how high of a bitrate the xvid4 encoder will accept? Or... should I be using some other quality-vs-size parameter other than "-w"?
Here's the longer story:I've got several videos that crash my Windows Media Player. It's probably a wonky codec... but managing codecs on my Windows machine has always been a nightmare, so I figured that I make a system on my Linux box where I can drop the videos into a shared folder (via Samba), the linux box would see the incoming file(s) and automatically transcode them to a standard format (I'm planning on xvid4, obviously)... and then the system would move the transcoded file to some new shared folder as well as enter the details into a mySQL database that I could search through a web interface.
Great, huh? Well, the biggest problem facing me right now is in transcoding from a multitude of codecs/bitrates to the lowest xvid bitrate that doesn't sacrifice additional video quality. I'm expecting that I'm going to have to do a lot of trial-and-error testing myself to find out things like "Cinepac at 320x240 and X kbps should be transcoded to xvid at Y kbps".
Has some work like this already been done?Is there a better way to go about this? (For example, a standard xvid bitrate for a given resolution? However, that would miss out on space savings if the original content was compressed by a crappy codec or at an abnormally-low bitrate).
- Joe
smime.p7s
Description: S/MIME Cryptographic Signature
