Encoding made simple, please

[ladubois]

I guess, to use an analogy, I can't see the dart board until I've thrown a dart.

[ladubois]

...Also, made a mistake when explaining how I had encoded my video. The bit rate was 1152000 bps, not 300000.

[Quu]

if you are running ubuntu, then compiling software and reading man pages should not be to scary. you should also be used to the command line

download and compile x264 - http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html
this is the video encoder you WANT to use... H.264 is the current state of the art when it comes to video compression, and that is the best encoder

Download and compile FLAC - http://flac.sourceforge.net/
(this is a lossless open source codec... it will be larger than aac, but perfect quality)

download and compile the mkvtoolnix - http://www.bunkus.org/videotools/mkvtoolnix/
this is a container, to hold your video and your audio

encode your video with x264 (my favorite settings are "--crf 14 --preset veryslow", encode your audio with flac (use --best) and then mux it with mkvmerge

if you were running windows we could make it simpler

[ladubois]

That's simple enough, thanks.

[Zarxrax]

There are some general guidelines that you generally want to follow:

You never want to compress your video to a lossy format until the very end (every generation of lossyness makes it look worse... its like copying a paper, then copying that copy, and so on). And yes, mpeg2 is a lossy codec.

So when editing, you want to use lossless codecs. These have big filesizes. You also want to use codecs that are all keyframes. If you don't do this, then 1) seeking around through your footage and general editing tasks will be slower and more painful, and 2) if your video isnt all keyframes, then the editing software may have trouble seeking in a reproducible manner, which means that what you see when you initially make an edit may not be exactly what you see later on when you decide to export your video. This would be totally unacceptable to most editors.

Aside from that, stuff is generally not all that bad unless you are working with dvd footage. DVDs are seriously screwed up and take a lot of learning.

[ladubois]

Thanks muchly. ^^

[Mister Hatt]

This entire thread is a load of shit. FFMpeg is one of the most intuitive pieces of software ever written, and has been deprecated for months. No idea why you're so hung up about there being an easy way to do things, the way you described is pretty hacky and takes more time and effort than just the normal ways, plus doesn't cater for weird formats or processes.

I don't understand why you think there is one tool that does everything, or why it's super difficult and requires godlike powers. I've yet to meet someone who makes amvs and actually knows what they're doing when it comes to video, I guess mirko and a few others come close though.

[Mister Hatt]

tl;dr it's hard but not impossible, just needs practice and for you to not be a baby and do some reading :V