[MPlayer-users] Re: Question on "trans-coding" with mencoder...

[Oliver Fromme]

Rainer Hantsch <rainer at hantsch.co.at> wrote:
 > | [Automatic answer: RTFM (read DOCS, FAQ), also read DOCS/bugreports.html]
 > 
 > ^-- PLEASE - could the list maintainer remove this offending automated text?

I think it is only offending to those who do not obey it,
and for those it should be kept until they do.  And for
all others it is not offending, so it can be kept anyway.
:-)

 > cat 1.avi 2.avi | mencoder ...........
 > 
 > as shown in the manual.

Oh.  To be honest, I wasn't aware that it is possible to
simply cat AVI files together.  As I said, I would have
concatenated the MPEG files in the first place (which _is_
definitely possible, provided that their parameters match).
 
 > | Mencoder definitely does allow one to encode or copy an arbitrary
 > | segment out of a source video. Check out the manual for the "-ss" and
 > | "-endpos" options. The latter is unfortunately misnamed, since it
 > | actually determines the total time of the output video, not the
 > | timestamp to stop at.
 > 
 > I never saw something about these option(s) in the German manual. As I said:
 > The manual is definitely weak. Good meant, but incomplete and weak.

-ss and -endpos _are_ in the manual.  Shall I quote?

(Though -ss has a bug, at least with some files it doesn't
hit the right position in the file.  For DVDs it's usually
too short, i.e. -ss 1:40:00 gets me to 1:10:00 or something.
Maybe it's difficult to perform time seeks in DVDs ...  But
then again, my standalone DVD player does it right, too.)

 > | There are several video editing tools, though I don't have much
 > | experience with them. I have used GOPChop for cutting MPEG-2 Program
 > | Streams.
 > | <URL:http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/>
 > | <URL:http://heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra.php3>
 > | <URL:http://outflux.net/unix/software/GOPchop/>
 > | <URL:http://kino.schirmacher.de/article/static/2>
 > 
 > You are right, avidemux looks VERY interesting and should do what I wish. In
 > theory -- practically, I tried to get avidemux working and found out that it
 > does not compile on SuSE 8.0 because it needs so many different versions of
 > libraries and (additional) tool(kits)

Installed for me without a hitch.

Regards
   Oliver

-- 
Oliver Fromme, secnetix GmbH & Co KG, Oettingenstr. 2, 80538 München
Any opinions expressed in this message may be personal to the author
and may not necessarily reflect the opinions of secnetix in any way.

"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that,
lacking zero, they had no way to indicate successful termination
of their C programs."
        -- Robert Firth