Thursday, August 6, 2009

Encode VOBs into xvid AVIs on Etch

The output would mainly be consumed on Windows client.  The workhorse I can use is a virtual Debian Etch on XenServer 5.0.   I tried the ffmpeg installation from Etch native repository.  It worked fine but it can only use FMP4 for default video codec.  Windows Media Player / MPC just didn't play the video on my Vista x64 with Klite installed.  I was searching for a solution.  Some suggested configure ffdshow to support FMP4, which it already did ("other MP4" enabled).  Some suggested changing the 4CC of the file, which looks like too much work.  As I was fudging along, I wanted to double check what error message WMP had, if any.  But this time it played!  Weird.  All I did was checking the ffdshow config and using G-Spot on the file...

Anyway, this is all too unreliable.  I gotta produce xvid AVIs.  So I chose to use debian-multimedia.org.   Pretty easy to use.  After I added the repo to sources.list, updated, ffmpeg is ready with xvid.  The syntax that worked for me is just

ffmpeg -y -i VTS_01_1.VOB -vcodec xvid -b 1000000 -f avi my.avi

For multiple VOBs, it'd be a simple concatenation:

cat VTS_01_0.VOB VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB | ffmpeg -y -i - -vcodec xvid -b 1000000 -f avi my.avi

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