On 16 Aug 2010, at 20:52, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 12:35 AM, Stroller
<strol...@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>wrote:
On 16 Aug 2010, at 04:02, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
...
My underling thing, if anyone can make other suggestions, is that my
camera broke, and I had to get one in a hurry, and didn't really
know what
to look for. I wound up with a fairly good Sanyo 1080p camera and
video
recorder that's super light, and not too expensive. The problem is
that its
videos are MP4s, ...
MP4 is a much better container format than .avi.
I previously discussed this a little in July's "viewing .m4v files
with
totem" thread:
http://www.mail-archive.com/gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org/msg103363.html
Use the `mplayer -identify` command given there to determine the
codec of
your video.
The codec is H.264, which most of my readers don't have. They are
non-technical which makes it a major pain, and I want out of it.
H264 is excellent - it's the best codec available today, and I would
have expected it to be widely supported. As far as browsers are
concerned, it's supported by about half of them, I think, natively via
HTML5. The reasons the others don't support it are patent related -
Mozilla won't incorporate h264 playback into Firefox, for instance,
because h264 is only free as in beer, not as in speech.
I would have thought H264 would be easy to remux into an .flv
container and host using an open-source YouTube-style player on your
own site. Alternatively, just open a free YouTube or Vimeo account and
upload your original .mp4 video files there. I appreciate that this
latter is not an optimal answer, however...
I stated that "I'm not convinced Handbrake is actually that good" - to
be fair, I don't know what *is* that good, short of an intimate
knowledge of video standards (interlacing, frame-rates &c &c) and
mplayer / ffmpeg / MP4box / other tools.
The reason the MP4 files out of your camera are so large is that
they're high-def and this very high video quality. Stuff recorded in
good light should look awesome, even on a huge great 42" TV. So you
will need to resize them smaller for the web (so, in fact, my previous
suggestion about remuxing h264 into an .flv container is useless for
you, until you've done that).
Try installing Handbrake and see if you get along with it - I have a
bias against it because I tried to rip studio-produced DVDs using it,
and had playback issues on the PS3. Maybe I'm being unfair. You might
also try media-video/h264enc - I think that is a wrapper script for
ffmpeg / mplayer, written by one of the mplayer devs.
Stroller.
