All kinds of movie conversion

[Rastalovich]

If, for example, you had an online situation where u gave users the ability to upload movies, clips - and wanted to make it as easy for them as u could - so u didn`t want to have any restrictions (other than filesize maybe). So any codec, any rate.

At the end of the day, u put aside a pc that would look into this folder, where they were all stored, and process them thus:

• Check if they needed fixing (corruption through transfer)
  
• Be sure they were under 25fps (for example)
  
• Be sure they were under a resolution
  
• Convert from whatevertheheck codec they were to one standard (yet to be decided)
  

What would be the best way to either use a util for this or be able to batch script it with these conditions ?

Resulting destination folder then being ok for submission as a standard, to be decided.

[AdamR79]

fps and res can obviously be altered during conversion.

I'll presume windows platform?

With such a diverse amount of formats and codecs, There is no one tool that can do a complete job of this.

However, the best tool I've come across for format conversion is "SUPER". It's got an ugly (imo) gui, but it's quite straight forward. Obviously this doesnt matter if it is to be automated, and I dnt know if SUPER supports command line operation.

Next tool, which definately does have command line operation, is ffmpeg. There are various builds out there which support various extra codecs etc. The good thing is the source is available, so if you have the skills, you can add in support for just about anything.

Anyways, moving on, first of all you need to detect the file type. Easy way to do this is the file extension, but obviously it wont always be right ( lots of people have avis labelled as movs, vice versa). So then you really want to code a script in your language of choice, to read the first chunk of the file and work out what the file is.

if its WMV, you have a few issues, the main one being DRM. The second being tools to convert the WMV into X. There arent many, and most only support earlier video codecs. SUPER uses direct show to get round this.

AVI, i'd be using avisynth probably.

MPEG, ffmpeg deals with mpeg1-4 pretty well. Not sure about advance x264 profiles?

MKV - SUPER will do it, dont think ffmpeg supports them.

Ogg audio - depending on the container format, you may have issues with ogg audio decoding.

Years ago I wrote some PHP to read the header of a variety of video formats, took about a days worth of research, but it could decode WMV, AVI and MPEG headers not got the code anymore though.

[Rastalovich]

I`m supprized.

I would have thought that in this day`n`age, with something like vlc playing 90% (as an example) of video formats, without massaging codecs, that there is not a tool that will load them in the same way and output them as require.

I bet the stupidest, but most effective way, would be to have vlc stream them and have a pc capture them in the required format. Or with todays multi cores, do it on the same pc streaming 127.0.0.1 with a util on each core.

I also wondered if TMPEnc had gotten any better over the years, I remember that had a batch process that u could probably edit, maybe run a fix program first or catch the non working ones after.

Crazy situation.