Re: [gentoo-user] Handbrake: Is it is or is it ain't in portage

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 16 Aug 2010, at 20:52, Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 12:35 AM, Stroller
> <stroller@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.