[mythtv-users] WAY OT, formats for transcoding camera movies

[James Crow]

On Sun, 2009-02-15 at 20:05 -0400, Mark J. Small wrote:
> Hi everybody,
> 
> This is way off topic, but you folks know an awful lot about video codecs and 
> compression, so I figured I'd ask anyway.
> 
> I'm looking to transcode some video that I took with my digital camera to make 
> them take less space and possibly be email friendly.
> 
> The videos are currently 640x480 avi's in MJPEG format with uncompressed audio 
> at 30 fps.  Here is some output from mplayer:
> 
> VIDEO:  [MJPG]  640x480  24bpp  30.000 fps  9214.6 kbps (1124.8 kbyte/s)
> ==========================================================================
> Opening video decoder: [ffmpeg] FFmpeg's libavcodec codec family
> Selected video codec: [ffmjpeg] vfm: ffmpeg (FFmpeg MJPEG decoder)
> ==========================================================================
> ==========================================================================
> Opening audio decoder: [pcm] Uncompressed PCM audio decoder
> AUDIO: 11024 Hz, 1 ch, u8, 88.2 kbit/100.00% (ratio: 11024->11024)
> Selected audio codec: [pcm] afm: pcm (Uncompressed PCM)
> ==========================================================================
> 
> 
> With these settings, a one minute video takes about 68 MB, which is a little 
> crazy.    I would like to transcode this to something quite a bit smaller, 
> and still have decent video quality.  Here's the kicker.  I want to be able 
> to play it with stock Windows Media Player, with no added codecs.  The 
> recipients would get awfully confused otherwise.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> 
> Mark

I don't have the perfect answer, but I would try any of the Windows
Media codecs. `ffmpeg -formats`  will show you what ffmpeg supports. On
My Ubuntu 8.10 machine it appears that encoding support is available for
wmv1 and wmv2. Maybe try one of those. Even if Windows Media Player does
not have the codec it should be able to grab it from Microsoft.

Cheers,
James