06.19.09

Peg it

Posted in Graphics at 12:04 am by Twm

ffmpeg is an extraordinary program, it seems to deal with just about any video format I care to throw at it.
If you are not one of the enlightened, ffmpeg is a command line tool which supports transcoding of content from one format to another. Many of the $10 video converters on-line are simply rips offs of the ffmpeg code base with a crap UI on top. (see the mmfpeg hall of shame for uncredited use)

As with any command line tool, the complexity of the arguments kill it for most. But generally you will be encoding for a particular device or standard format and so a quick google will give you the options you need.
I’ve been using ffmpeg to convert video content (including iplayer films) for Sony Walkman NWZ-A815 (which is very particular about the video size and bitrate).

I can’t even remember what the options do, but I wrote a python script to transcode all videos in a directory and spits out about 290mb per hour of video (assumes ffmpeg.exe is in your path).

import glob
import os

fileNames = glob.glob("*.*")
print(fileNames)

commandTemplate = "ffmpeg.exe -i \"%FILENAME%\" -b 567k -s 320x240 " + \
"-vcodec mpeg4 -ab 220k -ar 44100 -ac 2 -acodec libfaac \"%FILENAME%_TRANSCODED.mp4\""

for file in fileNames:
	if not "TRANSCODED" in file:
		command = commandTemplate.replace("%FILENAME%", file)
		print("Executing: ",command);
		os.system(command)

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