Arch Linux

evilgold

Member

Registered: 2008-10-30

Posts: 120

Mass-video convertion tool or script

Say i have a directory full of videos i downloaded, and i want to convert them all to be a lower bitrate. Does anyone know of an easy way to do this? I'm hoping for something similar to DIR2OGG.

I'd like something that will support XVID and x264 encoding... Theora is almost completely out of the question because ever tool i've used with theora fails to produce sync'd audio+video. I'd LOVE to use theora, but unless someone knows for sure of a tool that keeps things in sync, its just not an option.

So far i've been using mencoder and doing things one file at a time. This is really annoying because i have several hundred gigs (close to 1TB) of videos to deal with. I've also looked into avi-demux's "job control" feature... this is almost as bad except that it allows me to pause encoding whenever i like.

I would prefer some kind of script to do this one DIR at a time using mencoder, But im not exactly sure how i would make one.

Does anyone else have experience with this sort of thing?

JF

Member

From: France

Registered: 2009-03-27

Posts: 39

Re: Mass-video convertion tool or script

Hi evilgold,

I also have a lot of video files and I didn't find yet a gui or cli tool that suits me so I began to write a bash script to do batch re-encoding

It uses avidemux2_cli
It takes avi/vob/mp4/mov as input and produces x264+vorbis+ogm files
It's fixed quality-based and gives a file about 500MB for 1H30 of video, which suits me on a 1280X1024 screen

usage is simple: avi2ogm file1 [file2] [fil*] [*]

I put it here http://pastebin.com/m3523b239 ,maybe it can help you. I'm not a dev so I have very few notions of "cleanness" in the code

I use it daily so it works but it's not finished yet so some things are to be noted:

- It produces a log file for each encoding in the working dir
- It doesn't delete original (I like to check quality before deleting originals)
- error handling is not very good
- comments and script output are in French
- it relies on some preconfiguration in ~/.avidemux/conf (at the beginning, just before "# debug")

Feel free to ask questions about it, if it's usefull for another person than me, the next thing I'll work ont it will be translating French into English

Last edited by JF (2009-03-28 13:41:58)

evilgold

Member

Registered: 2008-10-30

Posts: 120

Re: Mass-video convertion tool or script

Update: Thanks to some other archers i found a solution that fits me pretty well. Maybe it will help you out as well?

http://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=68826

Last edited by evilgold (2009-04-01 02:19:40)

JF

Member

From: France

Registered: 2009-03-27

Posts: 39

Re: Mass-video convertion tool or script

Yes there are some good tips mentionned in that thread, thanks for pointing it.