Re: [gentoo-user] Re: converting any video to mpeg-1, mpeg-4 or DivX-5

[Uwe Thiem]

On 15 December 2005 17:02, James wrote:

[ snip - lots of good stuff ]
> All things video are a work in progress. I can run (2) color
> video streams over a 56 kbps frame relay link, with acceptable
> quality for a utility. For their needs, nothing is close to
> H.264, at this time, as we have evaluated dozens of formats.
> H.264 is also the most efficient in raw video storage.  Still
> I stuggle with a software package that will run on linux;
> one day. H.264 is largely being ignored by the 'open source'
> community, for obvious reason, but, it does yeild stunning
> results.

I can only agree on each single point.

We managed to encode a 1h45m movie in full TV quality (which isn't all that 
much quality) using H.264 with a resulting file of about 500MB!!!!!! It took 
5 hours on a dual G5 (yes, a mac). So encoding is rather expensive. Decoding 
can be done on the fly. Especially interesting for me is that I can stream it 
using just about 100Kb/s per stream. My target is a LAN with hundreds of 
simultaneous streams, and H.264 let me get away with Gb technology for the 
backbone.

All that said, I *can* watch H.264 on linux by now. No audio yet, though. 
That's not the fault of ffmpeg; it's just that the encoding software on the 
mac uses some audio codec I can not get my hands on for linux - yet.

Encoding H.264 on linux is a different bowl of fish. Last time I tried it, the 
result was - how should I put it? - bizarre. But then, it is, like James 
said, a work in progress. I had a ffmpeg snapshot from August, and it 
couldn't display it at all. Got a snapshot from November, and it did it 
beautifully - except for the audio.

For now, I use macs for a commercial product. The moment things get right on 
linux, I'll drop macs and use linux boxes in newer deployments. 

Uwe

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cd ~; unzip; touch; strip; finger
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