Re: [gentoo-user] convert wmv to mp4?

[Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 7:54 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 3:36 PM, Paul Hartman
> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 5:14 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:41 PM, Paul Hartman
>>> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 3:51 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 4:46 PM, Paul Hartman
>>>>> <paul.hartman+gentoo@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Neil Bothwick <neil@digimed.co.uk> wrote:
>>>>>>> On Tue, 1 May 2012 12:30:11 -0700, Mark Knecht wrote:
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>>> Notice the (-win32codecs) flag. Seems to me (on this system anyway)
>>>>>>>> they are hard masked off? I tried adding the flag to package.use but
>>>>>>>> emerge won't enable the darn thing...
>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> You need to unmask the USE flag first, by adding -win32codecs
>>>>>>> to /etc/portage/profile/use.mask
>>>>>>
>>>>>> If he is using amd64 he can't use win32codecs unless he uses a 32-bit
>>>>>> mplayer/ffmpeg. AFAIK.
>>>>>
>>>>> Wouldn't using multilib work around this?
>>>>
>>>> I think he would still need to compile a 32-bit mplayer/ffmpeg (in a
>>>> 32-bit chroot) to be able to make use of them. Multilib would let him
>>>> run 32-bit mplayer or ffmpeg binaries (which themselves would be able
>>>> to use the 32-bit DLLs). But I don't think 64-bit mplayer/ffmpeg can
>>>> call 32-bit DLLs.
>>>>
>>>> There is an amd64codecs package containing the 64-bit codecs, but it
>>>> has been masked and made obsolete by the fact that mplayer/ffmpeg can
>>>> natively do most (or all?) of those codecs these days.
>>>>
>>>
>>> And presumably for all the same reasons, if I cannot play them I
>>> cannot convert them.
>>>
>>> Ah, a world full of unspecified, proprietary vendor specific file
>>> formats hidden in old dlls... Ain't it a fine world we live in?
>>>
>>> Sort of painful to start maintaining a 32-bit chroot just to handle
>>> this sort of thing. I suspect there's some freeware for the Windows
>>> world that might allow me to do the conversion in a VM. I'll start
>>> looking for that. The web site that advertised conversion didn't work
>>> as it bombed out after an hour.
>>
>> There used to be a 32-bit mplayer-bin package in portage that would
>> have made it simple, but that disappeared some time ago.
>>
>>> Maybe there's some simple binary install I could do - Fedora or
>>> Ubuntu, etc. - but my concern there is that those binaries might not
>>> play well inside my 64-bit Gentoo environ...
>>
>> If you can find a statically-linked 32-bit mplayer somewhere, and
>> emerge the win32codecs package on your machine, I think it has a
>> chance of working.
>>
>
> Actually, going back to the title of the thread, I don't need to watch
> wmv files in 64-bit. I really only need to _convert_ them to mp4 so
> that I could watch them using xine, etc. or externally on the Kindle.
>
> Maybe a 32-bit Gentoo chroot that doesn't maintain any desktop or X11,
> etc. could work? If I could convert the files at the command line
> using ffmpeg in 32-bit then that would be pretty manageable in terms
> of Gentoo work, assuming the ffmpeg package can be built as without
> any GUI stuff?

I was just thinking that. I played with a chroot briefly just before
inara and kaylee bit it, and it seemed pretty trivial. Were it me,
that'd be the next thing I'd try. (But then, compiling is cheap for
me)


-- 
:wq