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

[Mark Knecht <markknecht@gmail.com>]

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 5:42 PM, Michael Mol <mikemol@gmail.com> wrote:
> 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)
>

I think I'll try it in a Virtualbox VM first I instead of a chroot.
That's pretty easy to deal with. Easy to back up. Easy to move to a
different system down the road. No disk partitions, etc.

Biggest issue for me is likely to be that I haven't done a 32-bit
install in at least 6 years. No idea what to watch out for but I doubt
it's any big deal. No idea how the 32-bit VM really does 32-bit when
it's running on a 64-bit processor that's doing 64-bit all the time
but I guess that's why we pay these Intel & Oracle people the big
bucks, right? ;-)

And if I end up needing X in the 32-bit environment for some reason it
will be easy to add that down the road.

It's a real drag about the hassles your machines have been going
through. I hope you get by that soon.

Cheers,
Mark