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

["Kevin O'Gorman" <kogorman@gmail.com>]

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On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 9:06 AM, Paul Hartman
<paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com<paul.hartman%2Bgentoo@gmail.com>
> wrote:

> On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 9:08 AM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 16, 2010 at 1:21 PM, Paul Hartman
> > <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com <paul.hartman%2Bgentoo@gmail.com>> wrote:
> >>
> >> On Sun, Aug 15, 2010 at 10:02 PM, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com>
> >> 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,
> >> > which are definitely not ready to put on a web site, and I know
> nothing
> >> > about transcoding.   My previous
> >> > camera took acceptable .avi videos, which had worked with most folks
> >> > browsers.  The MP4s are huge
> >> > and in a weakly supported format.
> >>
> >> You might want to check out kdenlive which is a full-featured video
> >> editor (using mlt as backend) but includes a simple transcoding
> >> function and several presets for many different formats (with the
> >> added bonus that you'll be able to edit your raw video should you so
> >> desire).
> >
> > Thanks, I emerged kdenlive.  I can not open my MP4 files, but I can add
> them
> > as clips. Okay.
> >
> > The clips do not play in any reasonable form.  I get moments of sound,
> and a
> > few pixels
> > changing on screen; nothing coherent.  I'd been told that H264 needs a
> lot
> > of CPU and I
> > guess an old 4-core 32-bit XEON (effectively 800 MHz each) on 2 GB ECC
> DDR1
> > is not enough.  Okay.
>
> I don't think you'll be able to play back HD video in real-time on
> that hardware. Even on, for example, Core 2 at 3GHz playing HD video
> used something like 90% CPU (without a hardware mpeg4 decoder).
>
> > The killer though, is that I cannot figure out how to export that clip in
> > some other form.
> > And of course, I'm clueless about what form would be optimum.  Asking for
> > help takes
> > me to a forum that has a thread on the topic, but no useful answer.
>
> You need to add it as a clip, then drag that clip to the timeline in
> the lower half of the window. It may take it a while to process once
> you've dropped it here (I believe it thumbnails/indexes the video).
> It's sort of like a multi-track audio editor, you can overlay effects,
> drag the ends of the video clips to change the start/end point, etc.
> The more effects you add the slower the encoding will be. For example
> I used it on a 5-minute video from my wedding to fade-in and fade-out,
> print a title at the beginning, and normalize the audio. I encoded it
> to a 720p mp4 which I could then upload to YouTube and let YouTube
> re-encode it to lower resolutions for people who can't do HD.
>
> Once you've got your clip on the timeline, to save as another format
> click the "Render" button. In the Render window, you can choose the
> output format. It will give you many options such as MPEG-2, XviD,
> Flash, RealVideo, Theora etc. You can also adjust the output video
> dimensions and bitrate. Hopefully you can find something that will
> work for your audience. If you have other video files that worked well
> for you in the past, you might check out what their specs are and try
> to mimic it.
>
> It will probably take ages to process, depending on how long your
> video is. I have a Core i7 920, overclocked, and encoding a 1440x1080
> interlaced video to another format still takes more time than the
> length of the video clip (usually 1.5 to 2 times with no effects
> added). Since you're dealing with even higher-resolution video and
> slower hardware I imagine you're probably looking at overnight, or
> days, depending on how much video you're dealing with.
>
> One "trick" to speed things up is to first transcode your video to an
> uncompressed format, and then do all of your editing operations on
> that uncompressed file. This requires massive amounts of disk space
> and fast disks, though (I think a 5 minute clip was about 70
> gigabytes).
>
> > Is there a kdelive tutorial anywhere?  One basic walkthrough and I'd
> > probably be able
> > to figure out the rest of what I want.
>
> There are some video tutorials here:
> http://www.kdenlive.org/tutorial
>
> And the user manual has a quick-start section, I believe:
> http://www.kdenlive.org/user-manual
>
> If you don't really need or want HD video, you might also consider
> going "old school" and getting a video capture card (which encodes to
> something more CPU-friendly like mpeg2). Then you could play the video
> on the camcorder and record it onto the computer and let the capture
> card do the heavy lifting.
>
> If kdenlive is a dead end, other alternatives might be:
> Install handbrake binaries into your user directory, forgetting about
> portage entirely for the moment.
> Use ffmpeg if you can figure out the commandline options (I never can)
> Other video-converter packages include tovid, though support of HD
> video might not be there.
>
> Good luck!
>
>
Great!  Thanks for all that useful information.  I think I'll be good from
here.
I was going to upgrade that 2002 Xeon system anyway (but maybe no right
away), but my results now make sense to me, and your information very
clear.

++ kevin
-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD

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