Today I tried to transcode a bunch of videos using my favorite script. I need to do this because the videos produced with my cheap camera use Mjpeg as video codec and raw-data as audio codec. This result of incredible large files. To share my videos with friends, I transcode them to mpeg4/mp3 files. This is all the dirty work my script is supposed to handle.

Unfortunately I didn’t use it since I upgraded Mandriva from 2005 to the 2006 release. As you can guess, it wasn’t working: mencoder gave me the following Audio LAVC, couldn’t find encoder for codec mp3 error message. First, I though it was because of a bad version of ffmpeg. Looking at the source RPM from PLF repository gave me the proof that my version was compiled with the right options.

To bypass this problems, I used the -mp3lame as output audio codec. This introduced horrible A/V sync. :( For 3 hours, I tried to play with mencoder options without success. I was completely desesperated… until I tried VLC. In less than 10 minutes I was able to get the expected result: perfect A/V sync movie file!

Thanks to the VLC wiki, I also discovered the h264 video codec, which is a good codec for low bitrates. Even if it produce bigger files compared to my older method (the latter can be found in the first version of the script), the quality is very awesome and video artefacts (ringings and blockings) are so reduced that it’s now very hard to distinguish. So I decided to use h264 in the new version of my script.

There is still an inconvenient of using VLC instead of mencoder: VLC is transcoded at real time! I tried the “hurry-up” parameters without effects. This is sad but acceptable, since my goal is to archive my tiny videos.

To summarize, here is the command line I use to do transcoding via VLC:

1 $ vlc --sout-all "input_video.avi" :sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264, acodec=mp3, ab=32,channels=1, audio-sync}:std{access=file, mux=mp4, url="output_video.mp4"}' vlc:quit -I dummy

This command is far from perfect and I plan to dig into VLC help to tune h264 codec.