rkaja84's Blog

BenQ is back with another digital snapper ready for action during the holidays. At least we think so -- no price or availability were announced. Nevertheless, the DC-X835 is an 8 megapixel version of their DC-X735 slimster. As such, you're looking at a 3x smc Pentax optical zoom, 2.5-inch LCD, and a "unique" Super Shake Free mode. So unique they can't tell us whether it's optical, mechanical, digital, or what. VGA video in MPEG-4 at 30fps in a 12.5~14.7-mm thin take anywhere camera with SDHC storage closes things out.

There's certainly been no shortage of HD-DVD deals lately (or Blu-ray ones, for that matter), but it seem like those looking to get the biggest movie collection right out of the gate won't be able to do much better than Wal-Mart's upcoming "secret" sale, which includes a Toshiba HD-A3 player with twelve free HD-DVDs for $298. That, of course, includes the usual two movies in the box and five more by mail, plus an additional five that you'll get "instantly" when you buy the player (no word on what you'll have to choose from). You'll have to get up early if you want to walk away with that stash, however, as the sale gets underway tomorrow at 8 am sharp, when you'll also be able to snag a 50-inch Vizio plasma TV for $998 or a 40GB PS3 with a free $50 gift card for $399, among other slightly less notable deals.

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After much trying and testing I have found a viable solution to encoding movies using ffmpeg.

Simply put:

ffmpeg -i /movies/film.mp4 -b 800k -vcodec xvid -acodec mp3 -ab 192 -ar 48000 -vol 1500 /movies/film.avi -y

Breaking it down:

-i /movies/film.mp4: this specifies the input file
-b 800k: this sets the film bit rate (basically the quality of the output)
-vcodec xvid: uses the xvid codec to encode the video file (Linux users install xvidcore)
-acodec mp3: uses the popular mp3 codec to encode audio
-ab 192: sets a good scope for audio quality (sometimes depends on input bit rate)
-ar 48000: sets the highest quality sample rate (ensures quality audio)
-vol 1500: sets the volume (in case the sound is bad)
/movies/film.avi: the output file
-y: necessary if you want to overwrite without existing files without prompts (useful when testing)

Optional

-t 30: this allows only 30 seconds (variable in seconds) of encoding (so you don’t have to wait for the whole film to encode before testing it works as expected)

Bash Script for multiple file encoding

If you want to encode multiple files using a for loop the code below will help:

N.B. assuming you are i the directory where your video files are stored.

for N in *
do
ffmpeg -i $N -b 800k -vcodec xvid -acodec mp3 -ab 44100 -ar 128 /videos/$N
done

there it is!