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Old 18th December 2012, 18:04   #1  |  Link
Wintershade
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Join Date: Dec 2005
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A bit confused with FFMPEG - I want something to play in my "Home Theater"...

Hi everyone. It's been quite a while since I've last been here, and even longer since I've done any serious video transcoding. I've changed my OS in the meantime (completely switched to Linux from Windows), and a few other things.

Now that I want to rip some DVDs (and similar) again, I feel a bit confused. Yes, I've read the documentations and googled extensively, and yet, I haven't found a solution to my problem which I could really trust.

Here's the thing - my parents own an LG home theater, which happily plays MPEG4 files (in .avi container), i.e. the XviD, DivX and similar media. However, now that I'm on Linux, I'm surrounded by a few different commandline applications, as well as their GUIs, and it's quite a change from what I am used to (back on Windows, I used to rip DVDs with MeGUI, and through your forum acquired quite a bit of understanding about all this stuff, particularly about XivD and AVISynth). There's no such application on Linux, and besides, I personally prefer to use command line here.

Thus, from what I understand, ffmpeg is the thing to use if I want to transcode media. I am looking for a solution to make standalone-compatibile video files (i.e. MPEG4+avi), with the video quality and size like I used to in MeGUI. Which usually means, full DVD resolution and framerate, and that everything looks quite nice if I put it on 2 CDs (1,4 GB or so - usually 1000-1500 kbps video).

However, I can't get that with ffmpeg. I am using the "mpeg4" as vcodec, and the flags which were recommended in the official documentation - and at the same bitrate as XviD in MeGUI, this produces videos of much worse quality. The difference in video quality is blatantly obvious, in favour of XviD. The video which ffmpeg produces is terribly blocky, and if I set the constant quantizer of e.g. 2 the video quality is OK, but the resulting file is huge (usually not much smaller than a DVD - way over 3 GiB for a 2h film).

So, what am I to do? Should I use libxvid as a video codec? Is there a source which can give me good info about using it? Should I just try to get all the flags which I have in MeGUI's "HQ Home Theater" profile? Or am I doing something wrong with ffmpeg+mpeg4? Is there any other viable solution (what is the actual state of mencoder, compared to ffmpeg)?

Thanks in advance! (and sorry if I write too much)
(edit: just realised I might be in the wrong subforum for this... if someone would be so kind and move it to the right forum, that would be grand! )



TL;DR - Linux - ffmpeg's mpeg4 video codec, or libxvid? How to get good video quality at a "reasonable" bitrate (1000-1500kbps)? Any good documentation and/or examples of using libxvid through ffmpeg? What about mencoder? TIA!
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Last edited by Wintershade; 18th December 2012 at 18:07.
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ffmpeg, libxvid, mencoder, mpeg4, xvid

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