Best results with Open Source Codecs?

[aahamm]

Hello Folks!

I'm pretty new to the whole video conversion thing. For a project i am working on i have to convert Videos recorded with FRAPS using open source codecs an - if posssible - FOSS.

I work with Ubuntu 10.10 and Win7. I tried VLC, WinFF, Transmageddon, MediaEncoder and Avidemux. But none with satisfying results. The Input files are about 4 Minutes and have 4GB.
Everything i try brings quite big files (about 50MB) with bad quality.

I mainly tried Theora und Vorbis in an ogg container by now. ANY help would be very appreciated! But please no solutions with Codecs that are not open source!

[Baldrick]

Try ffmpeg2theora, see http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/examples.html

[aahamm]

I already tried ffmpeg2theora using

ffmpeg2theora --optimize --soft-target --two-pass -V 1200 -A 112 --pp vb:a,h1:a,dr:a -x 960 -y 540 'input' -o 'output.ogv'

but the result is of very poor quality with about 40MB for 3 minutes.

[themaster1]

Try mediacoder with x264 cuda (you can use your graphic card to encode)

[jagabo]

x264 is better than theora. Handbrake is available for Linux. x264 is open source and free, but it's likely not free of patent violations. If MPEG-LA ever decides to crack down on h.264 patents you could be in trouble.

[pandy]

If your video is CG follow general rules related to such video - probably poor quality is unavoidable without high bitrate - try MPEG 1 with only I and P frames with fixed Q to avoid video "pumping"

[ronnylov]

You can also encode to WebM and VP8 format with ffmpeg.
http://www.webmproject.org/

But 50 MB is quite small file size for 4 minutes of video but it depends on resolution, framerate and compression.
Maybe you should increase the bitrate to get bigger files, or reduce resolution and/or framerate to get lower compression.

[RabidDog]

What you are trying to do is well nigh impossible .. unless you travel to the future, when quantum compression wavelet technology is prevalent.
4.000,000 /50 is already a compression ratio of 80,000 to 1. Of course your output is shite, you're trying to squeeze a gallon jar into a teardrop .
But you dont say what your source is and what you expect to get out ..
what sort of quality, what sort of use
Methods and results ?? xvid vp8
DVD to avi expect compression of approx 7:1 . this can be stretched to 15:1 but 80,000:1 is beyond your puny human technology.

[ronnylov]

What you are trying to do is well nigh impossible .. unless you travel to the future, when quantum compression wavelet technology is prevalent.
4.000,000 /50 is already a compression ratio of 80,000 to 1. Of course your output is shite, you're trying to squeeze a gallon jar into a teardrop .
But you dont say what your source is and what you expect to get out ..
what sort of quality, what sort of use
Methods and results ?? xvid vp8
DVD to avi expect compression of approx 7:1 . this can be stretched to 15:1 but 80,000:1 is beyond your puny human technology.

DVD is already heavily compressed. 4 minutes of DVD video is approximately 200 MB. 4 minutes of video at 4 GB can be compressed to the same size as 4 minutes of DVD video, no matter of original file size. I do think it is impossible to make it 50 MB with decent quality if resolution and framerate is about the same as DVD and using an efficient codec like VP8 or h.264.

EDIT: Sorry I did a writing mistake which I have now corrected (removed not). Actually I think it IS possible to make it 50 MB with decent quality...

[_Al_]

You can think specific numbers here.

Given : 4minutes and 50MB.
Result: 1700 kbps

Size of video for this bitrate should be no bigger then 960x540 or so and still it is going to look like internet video feed or so. It depends on type of video. If there is no noise, clean, perhaps you can try 1280x720. H.264 of course.