I occasionally need to convert Matroska videos to a format my stand-alone player (an LG DVD unit) can play. I don't need to author DVDs since the player can read from a pendrive via a USB port, but it's fairly limited in the formats it will accept. Xvid seems to work well so it's what I tend to use. The MKV files are for standard NTSC or PAL broadcast TV (not even HD in most cases, though they could be). I've so far been unsuccessful in hitting reasonable combination of options for producing a useful result. I've tried ffmpeg, transcode and mencode, but the resulting videos tend to have have noticeable blocking artefacts (despite playing with bitrates) and severe sound synch problems. Here's a random example of the kind of thing I've been trying: mencoder example.mkv -oac mp3lame -ovc xvid -xvidencopts bitrate=1000:profile=dxnhtntsc:quant_type=mpeg -vf scale=720:480 -o output.avi I've also messed a little with the mkv* tools, but they appear to assume a familiarity with Matroska terminology which I would prefer not to have to acquire. <rant> Part of the problem is that all the above tools are clearly aimed at people who know what they're doing. Those of us uninterested in a career in multimedia technology are liable to be completely lost when struggling with any of the (incomplete and ambiguous) manuals, not to mention the baroque syntax of the command-line options. Why are there no "multimedia conversion for dummies" tools in Linux as there are in Windoze? </rant> Anyway, my question is this: does anyone have a useful recipe for this kind of thing? And for extra credit: how about converting FLV (Flash video)? poc -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
