[MPlayer-users] Converting many types to MPEG1 (or rawrgb)

[BENNETT,DAN (HP-USA,ex3)]

Hi all,

I'm trying to use mencoder as a tool to convert many different
movie file formats to MPEG1. Using mencoder, I can get quite
close, but the result is an AVI containing MPEG1 encoded video.
I want to get from the AVI to an MPEG file.

I do not need to support audio.

So far I have tried several techniques to extract the video from
the AVI as an MPG file, but with no success.

I have tried the TOOLS/mencvcd script with the -mpgonly option,
but the result is a small, scrambled mess that mplayer can't recognise.
I also tried the manual method (mkfifo -m 660 streams.yuv, etc)
with no success.

I have tried mjpegtools' lav2yuv | mpeg2enc, but I can't work
out how to specify generally the frame size and frame rate of the
original movie, so the conversion can't proceed.

I am *not* creating for VCD, nor am I trying to map to PAL or
NTSC formats. I simply want to produce an MPEG1 file that has the
same width, height and frame-rate as the original movie.

I have scoured the web... avi2mpeg or TMPGEnc look useful, but
they appear to be for Windows only, and I need it on Linux, and
preferably with source (as I may have to port it all to HP-UX...!).

An alternative approach would be to use mencoder to convert all
the source files to rawrgb. However, if I do this, I'll need to find
a way to extract the frame-rate info (and maybe other things) to
a scratch file that I can inspect in my application, because the
rawrgb format appears not to have a header with that kind of
information (though I could be wrong).

I am nearly pulling out what remains of my hair! :-)

If somebody could help me achieve what I'm trying to do, I would
be very grateful!

Thanks & regards,
Dan