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Resources for 'Advanced Video Coding on Linux'

Issue 150

From Issue #150
October 2006

Aug 25, 2006  By Dave Berton
 in

“x264—a free h264/avc encoder”: developers.videolan.org/x264.html

“Codec shoot-out 2005—Final”: www.doom9.org/index.html?/codecs-final-105-1.htm

Apple QuickTime: www.apple.com/quicktime

“MPlayer 1.0pre8 released”: www.mplayerhq.hu

AudioCoding.com: www.audiocoding.com

GPAC: Content Authoring with MP4Box: gpac.sourceforge.net/auth_mp4box.php

Movie Trailers: www.apple.com/trailers

“Including QuickTime in a Web Page”: www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/embed.html

MPlayer Plugin: Embedded Video Player for Mozilla: mplayerplug-in.sourceforge.net

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Speed-up

Branko Majic's picture
Submitted by Branko Majic (not verified) on Sat, 11/18/2006 - 08:28.

By the way, you can speed-up the audio dumping with this command:
mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast max.dv

Great stuff

Branko Majic's picture
Submitted by Branko Majic (not verified) on Fri, 11/17/2006 - 15:57.

This was some great stuff. I already wanted to use h.264, but I was too lazy to find some documentation on it. I just copied over your code and made a few modifications (I created a nice little bash script). One question, though: can you put any resources as where the documentation for the x264 can be found? Something which explains the possible arguments in a little more detail?

x264 article question

alexandre parenteau's picture
Submitted by alexandre parenteau (not verified) on Mon, 10/16/2006 - 22:51.

Thanks Dave for this nice article.

I almost immediately tried to apply it to my mythtv box transcoding.

However I run into the problem that QuickTime 7 refuses to open the produced mp4 file, even though mplayer does. All I added was --sar 4:3. I also changed the FPS to 29.97 (MythTV NTSC).

I was curious if someone was successful at getting QuickTime 7 to read the H264 file.

Here is the script I made (python) out of the article:

def transcode_file(src, dst):
os.system('mkfifo test.fifo')
os.system('mplayer -ao pcm:file=test.fifo -vc null -vo null "%s" &' % src)
time.sleep(2)
res = os.system('faac test.fifo -o test.aac')

# video to x264
os.putenv("LD_LIBRARY_PATH", "/usr/local/lib")
res = os.system('mencoder -vf format=i420 -ovc raw -of rawvideo -ofps 29.97 -oac copy -o test.fifo "%s" &' % src)
time.sleep(2)
res = os.system('/usr/local/bin/x264 -o test.mp4 --fps 29.97 --bframes 2 --progress --crf 26 --subme 6 --analyse p8x8,b8x8,i4x4,p4x4 --no-psnr test.fifo --sar 4:3 480x480')

res = os.system('/usr/local/bin/MP4Box -add test.mp4 -add test.aac -fps 29.97 "%s"' % dst)
os.system('rm -rf test.fifo test.aac test.mp4')

On Fedora Core 5 (i386)
x264 and gpac from SVN

Anyway, I was blown away by the quality compared to DivX.

Regards,
alex

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