Transcode

Transcode is a command line video stream conversion utility for GNU/Linux. It will successfully re-encode a huge variety of sources into a huge variety of outputs. It will be useful to the BW project as it is possible to encode stream from most video sources into MPEG4 formats like divx5 and xvid.

It takes a long time to get into the command line arguments, so for an example to prevent anyone else having to go through what I did…

transcode -b 80,1,5 -i input.mpeg -V -y divx5 -o output.avi -w 400

will take an input file ‘input.mpeg’ (of any supported format – automatically detected) and output it into an ‘.avi’ file encoded with divx with a video bit rate of 400Kbps (defined by -w 400) and a sound bitrate of 80Kbps (defined in -b 80,1,5).

Users should be able to get there files onto the server by simple means, using a web interface to upload files to the server, and then converting them to ‘.avi’ format with transcode should mean people can easily submit videos to an archive. Does anyone fancy coding this ❓

I will soon prepare a CD on demonstration streams with transcode and put them on a CD, this should be useful for future streaming experiments.

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Mencoder is another possibility for stream conversion, though its facilities do not seem as appropriate to the BW project.