Conversion of AVI to alternative container formats

[xoa]

In an ideal world, people would stop trying to hack AVI to do things it was never meant to and switch to a decent format, but unfortunately many still insist on using AVI with combinations of video like H.264 and AC3. I would like to start converting various AVI files into a more modern container, such as MP4. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the source for a number of my files (example: family sports video recorded earlier this year), so I am not interested in reencoding the video, which would introduce quality artifacts I don't want. I merely want to put the video and audio streams into MP4. I have attempted to find a way to demux the AVI streams, but no success yet. ffmpegX's "passthrough" option, regardless of the source, appears to actually produce an AVI file which is pretty undesirable. All other options actually reencode the video. Does anyone know of a way to deal with this, or is the only option to go dig through the command line options for mencoder?

[Jacke]

I would go via mov. Get Divx Doctor 2 to convert avi to mov, or if you have QT pro w/ the DivX codec installed, just open in Quicktime and save as a new file. You might also be able to do that with QTAmateur.

When you have the mov file you can use MetaHoot to change the fourcc to 'mp4v', after that you can passthrough the video using QT's MP4 muxer. I'm not sure if you can mux MP3 into an MP4 container (I've never gotten it to work, in any case). Make sure you also install the 3ivx codec first, so that also ASP video can be played/passthroughed (uh, weird word).

Too lazy for url formatting.
Metahoot: http://metahoot.3ivx.com
QTAmateur: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/18278

[xoa]

Thanks for the reply Jacke, but your suggestion isn't useful here. As I stated, I'm not interested in reencoding the video. If I wanted to do that, there are dozens of options. The video is already using Xvid or H.264, so any reencode will just drop the quality. I only want to take the streams out of AVI and put them into a different container. Divx Doctor is a tool for converting to the inferior 3ivx codec, and tries to solve a problem that no longer exists on OS X. And of course, I definitely don't want to encode to DivX, a completely obsolete codec.

[major]

Jacke was correct, DivX Doctor II will NOT encode the stream, it just changes the container from AVI to MOV and leaves all video and audio unchanged.

[xoa]

Jacke was correct, DivX Doctor II will NOT encode the stream, it just changes the container from AVI to MOV and leaves all video and audio unchanged.

Thanks for the update, I was using a very old version which confused me. However, it still fails to function. In addition to other issues, DivX Doctor chokes on AC3. I've attempted a few other solutions, but none so far, so for the time being I'm just going to have to go try to figure out the mencoder command line options. If I get it all working I'll post back what to use for anyone else who has this problem. I appreciate your suggestions.

[yorkshire_keith]

DivX Doctor (II at any rate) should be able to dump the AC3 as a file. You can then convert this to MP3 using mAC3dec and add it to the Movie in QTpro using edit, add to movie. (Haven't tried with H264 yet I have to admit, but it works fine with DivX, Xvid, and 3ivx) Then save as a mov.

[ahmontgo]

You can also use the ffmpeg tool directly on the command line:

ffmpeg -i input.avi -vtag mp4v -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.mp4

The .mov solution never worked properly for me; this seems pretty solid and one step. Perhaps it should be added to the GUI.