Video Re-encoding Software

timwhit

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I have the need to do video re-encoding (transcoding) for various reasons every once in a while.

I have found some free applications that can do this, but was wondering what other people use. FLOSS is preferred, but free as in beer is fine too.

Applications I've tried:
  • VLC - I have tried this on multple videos in several containers and several codecs and the output is almost never good (aspect ratio and quality issues). I've also followed tutorials from various sites and I still can't get the output to approach the input.
  • SUPER © - This is a free tool with a very ugly interface. It has worked pretty well the few times I have used it. I used it to re-encode an MP4 (h.264) to WMV9. Their website looks terrible, but the application does what they say it does.
 

Stereodude

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Transcoding what to what? The few times I'm messed with that sort of stuff I use AVIsynth with an appropriate codec to read the source.
 

timwhit

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Here are the two I've tried recently:

MP4 (h.264) -> WMV9
ASF (unknown codec) -> FLV (H.264)

I'm interested in software that can take almost any container/codec as input and transcode to many different output containers using a variety of codecs. Basically, the requirements are constantly in flux and I want to have a variety of tools ready in case I have a different requirement the next time around.

AviSynth looks interesting. Did you use a GUI with it or just write scripts and run them from the CLI?
 

Stereodude

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I wrote scripts in notepad. Then import the .avs file into a mpeg-2 compressor or a tool like Virtual Dub, etc depending on what I was trying to out as output.
 

Sol

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Handbrake is hard to beat for brain-dead easy. Mencoder, VLC or ffmpeg if you need lots of options. Virtualdub is also entirely capable of functioning as a pretty full featured trans-coder.

I've played around with a few trans-coders that make use of the GPU but generally been pretty disappointed. Just CPU trans-coding seems to peg 4 cores at 100%, with the GPU (5850) the trans-coding takes exactly the same amount of time but only uses half the CPU power. Multithreading, on the other hand, is well worth making use of.

timwhit said:
MP4 (h.264) -> WMV9

Aren't there international treaties against that sort of thing?
 

Mercutio

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I've automated the crap out of copying DVDs. Blu-Ray discs are still annoying. Normally, I want a movie-only copy that I can obtain from the largest file in the \BDMV\Stream folder, and I just run batch conversions of those files through Handbrake. That much can be quasi-automated.

When I encounter a disc (coughDisneycough) that has some messed-up non-sequential set of .m2ts files making up the movie, I copy the whole BD and run it through BD Rebuilder's alternate movie-only mode.

I have some discs - OLD discs, nothing like a new form of copy protection - for which neither of those things is working. Handbrake (for Windows and Linux) says it can't find any titles, BD Rebuilder just pukes and exits. But the .m2ts files play just fine with perfect audio sync on everything I try them with (VLC, PowerDVD, Media Player Classic et al).

Which has left me trying to find another application to use on these files, some sort of magic bullet for handling everything. The ideal is something that outputs a .mkv file, automatically picks the highest-definition English audio track and adds that track unmolested or as close to the original as possible to the destination file, supports multiple audio tracks and allows me to somehow pick a destination file size rather than a nebulous quality setting.

I'm testing on a six core i7/975 running Win 7 Ultimate and a Radeon 6770.

Xilisoft Video Converter - Supports CUDA and ATI Stream. Converts video ridiculously fast. Supports work queues. Opened my weird files just fine. Did four movies in 2.5 hours. No support for unmolested audio; final output had horrible audio sync problems.

For speed, this is by far the best option. I suppose I could use this to handle the video part of the encode, then just use command line tools to rip and multiplex the audio from the source .m2ts files but ideally I'd still like to find a single tool to do the whole job.

WinX HD Video Converter - Slow. No support for unmolested audio and in fact no option to retain AC3 or DTS tracks at all (a setting called "orig" that I thought meant "original audio" resulted in a 128kbps stereo .mp3 track, which is obviously just what I want to go with my 8GB lump of video, thank you). Seemingly arbitrary restrictions on what audio format can be paired with what video format.

Wondershare Video Converter Platinum - Supports CUDA but not ATI Stream. Ridiculously slow (nine hours to convert 150 minutes of video using 12 threads? Really?). Does offer the option to make MKVs with AC3 audio, but not in any unmolested form. No ability to change video encoding options. Audio sync issues again, but much less pronounced than Xilisoft's.

AVS Video Converter. It imported the problematic .m2ts files just fine but wouldn't offer any appealing audio output options. I didn't even bother with the encode. I do know that it's worthwhile for a lot of other things, but not this.

At this point, my quest is ongoing. Next up? MultiAVCHD.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Have you tried MakeMKV on these troublesome disks? That is my one-stop solution at the moment.

MakeMKV and MultiAVCHD both just bomb out.

I think there's something weird going on structurally with the files from the discs, but no one else is complaining of problems with these titles. It's impacting all of them and they were ripped from two different drives.

A nightly build of the Linux version of Handbrake is working, but not the Windows version. I've got that running right now.
 

Stereodude

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Most of the tools use eac3to. If that can't handle your source that would explain why most of the tools fail.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Yeah, I've been looking at that.

I really had high hopes for the Xilisoft package, especially since it offers GPU assisted transcoding, which led me down the path of looking at commercial packages in the first place.
 

ddrueding

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Intereresting. The only movie MakeMKV has let me down on was "Days of Thunder" (no big loss); all it could do was rip the french audio.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Handbrake is normally very good to me. It's very scriptable and has tons of fiddly options for me to play with if I want them (which normally I don't). Hopefully at some point it will be able to properly handle the structural defects that media companies use to deter transcoding.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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Handbrake's most current nightly build has an option to do DTS-HD passthrough. I don't think I've seen that option before.
 

Sol

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Have you tried ripping the DVDs with something like DVD decrypter before giving them to handbrake? I know the issue isn't DRM but you might be able to get the ripper to alter the files structurally enough to let handbrake handle them. (E.g. by removing logos and things while ripping instead while transcoding)
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I have the raw, unencrypted files from the BDs that I copied via AnyDVD HD.
I'm able to transcode via Handbrake in Linux, but my Linux machines are C2Ds and the process is rather slower than I'm used to.
 

Stereodude

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I was just thinking maybe you should try an old version just to make sure it's not a regression of some sort. It's probably unlikely though.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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I just received some really weird discs today. They have DVD logos on them rather than Blu-Ray. The file structure on the discs uses Video_TS and .vob files. It's just that there are 60+ 1GB .vobs on each disc.

I can only assume that it's some kind of fairly unique mastering weirdness; one of the .vobs, played on VLC on a Linux machine, is 47 seconds long while another appears to be 26 minutes long.

Whatever. They handbraked just fine.
 

Mercutio

Fatwah on Western Digital
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These are discs from a company that is very well known for messing with DVD file structures.

Either that or that company has bent the laws of space and time and somehow managed to actually put 78GB on something that isn't even read with a blue laser.

The other somewhat amusing disc I found recently: the Blu-Ray version of "Unforgiven" only has ~9.7GB of data on it, which is only maybe an omitted director's commentary away from being something that WOULD fit on a regular DVD.
 

Stereodude

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It's just a structural protection. They have multiple references to the same sectors on the disc so it seems to have much more data than fits.
 
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