[H-GEN] CD Burner software

[Paul Gearon]

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On Sun, 6 Jul 2003, Sandra Milne wrote:

> Now all I need is something that will re-encode AVI to MPEG and I'll be
> one step closer to ditching this OS.  It's frustrating to reboot just to
> encode something, when if I had it in MPEG format already I could just
> make the image and burn it.

Well Chris made the perfectly good suggestions of transcode and mencoder.
There's lots of others out there which provide more/less/different
functionality to these (eg. mjpegtools).  Sourceforge is your friend in
this.

I personally found transcode to do everything I wanted... but it often
crashed (haven't tried it for about a year though).  Mjpegtools is very
similar, but much more stable when I last used it (it doesn't do it all,
but has lots of pointers to the other applications to use with it so that
you *can* do it all).  http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/

But my reason for writing was to ask about the file formats you mention.
AVI is a framework for encapsulating video and audio streams such that
they can be played back together.  The video is often MPEG (either 1, 2 or
4) but may be other things.  The audio can be mp3, ac3, or several others.
DivX is MPEG-4 video with MP3 audio... though the spec is a little loose.
Anyway, AVI doesn't actually describe the type of video you have.

I'm assuming from context that when you say that you want to convert from
AVI to MPEG, that you want to convert from DV (obtained from a video
camera) to the MPEG format used as a basis for VCDs?

The AVI from a video camera has a video stream which is a form of "Motion
JPEG" (every frame is individually compressed as a seperate JPEG image).
I can't remember the audio type (MP3?).  The MPEG files used by VCDs are a
raw MPEG video stream (either MPEG-1 or MPEG-2), and a raw MPEG audio
stream in a seperate file.  By their nature, the raw streams are seperate
as they aren't in a multiplexing file (like AVI or Quicktime) to glue them
together.

The conversion to raw MPEG streams for use with VCD tools, VCD imager, and
their ilk, is easily found on the web pages for Transcode and Mjpegtools.

http://mjpeg.sourceforge.net/
http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostreich/transcode/


Regards,
Paul Gearon

Software Engineer                Telephone:   +61 7 3876 2188
Plugged In Software              Fax:         +61 7 3876 4899
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immane mittam.
(Translation from latin: "I have a catapult. Give me all the money,
or I will fling an enormous rock at your head.")



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