Good Linux encoding software?

[tito13kfm]

Anybody know of some good linux based encoding software?

How is the speed of these versus, say, TMPGEnc or CCE, How about quality, are there as many options as either of these? I'm basically asking because I have a linux box just sitting here collecting dust (just a basic ftp server at the moment.) And was wondering what was available, maybe I could use it when my main CPU is tied up. It's only 1ghz with 512mb ram.. but would serve as a solid backup machine.

[MYoung]

I think Microsoft and Apple have the trump cards on multimedia on computers -- both hardware and software. Stick another hard drive in that baby and run dual boots -- Linux and Windows.

[mats.hogberg]

Take a look under the Linux tools section under Tools. The easiest to use (for a Windows user) is AviDemux2 (very VirtualDub-like). Most versatile (no matter what platform you choose) is Transcode 6, but has a steeper (much) learning curve.
Depending on your distro, the biggest problem is to find and install all dependencies at least Transcode requires. I don't know how this is for AviDemux2 as I had my system pretty well equipped before I installed this beauty.
As for speed, to my disappointment I found encoding (at least the mpeg flavors) much slower than TMPGEnc under Windows. DVD mpeg encoding from AVI at times drops to 4 fps. Best DVD to XviD I've done was about 17 fps iirc. This is on a PIV 1700 system.

/Mats

[andkiich]

Or, if you wantwed to "cheat" you could use VMWare and run any of the Windows stuff you wanted to.

[techt]

For encoding to DivX I use MEncoder which is part of MPlayer.

If you want to do a fast requantize of MPEG2 video (to make a DVD-9 fit on a DVD-/+R disc, for example) check out M2VRequantiser. M2VRequantizer is part of a MacOSX program but will compile using gcc on GNU/Linux with a minor change. Look in main.c and you'll see these lines near the top:

// #define USE_FD // use 2 lasts args for input/output paths
#define DEMO // demo mode
#define USE_GLOBAL_REGISTER // assign registers to bit buffers
// #define LOG_RATE_CONTROL // some stats
#define MAX_ERRORS 0 // if above copy slice

Just comment out the #define DEMO line and if your compiling for the PC also comment out the #define USE_GLOBAL_REGISTER line. Compile using gcc like so:

gcc -O2 -o m2vrequantizer main.c
chmod +x m2vrequantizer

That worked for me on the Debian testing (sarge) distribution.

[trumpf]

ffmpeg.. I use ffmpeg for everything I do in encoding. It's the fastest I know.
And quality is great. And typing one command-line is easy too.