Spaced Out ::

Following on from yesterday’s post I hit a few problems with some encoding - whilst MPEGStreamClip worked fine (albeit slowly) with conversion from a DVD, it didnt work properly with a file copied off my Humax. Whilst the video transcoded and was fine, the audio wouldnt play. At this point I switched to TEncoder, a GUI for for Mencoder/MPlayer/FFMpeg, the standard open source transcoding tools. And this worked brilliantly - it doesnt compress quite as small as MPEGStreamClip but it may well be that the firmware in the Acer C112 uses open source libraries which are more likely to be compatible. I selected the Mpeg4 video codec, Mp3 audio codec (in mono) and downsampled to 480×320 at a 1024kbps bitrate. The video looks pretty clean. And, for whatever reason, it transcoded very quickly (<2 minutes).

UPDATE: I moved on to using DVD Shrink again to copy a video off a disc and I now realise that when you are using TEncoder you dont need to either demux the file VOB file (using Project X) or subsequently mux it using MPEGStreamClip. Once DVD Shrink has copied it, just load the VOB in to TEncoder and let it encode. Voila!