A free way to re-encode?

[Paladinleeds]

OK guys, here's my situation:

I have game footage that I captured using Xfire, with their own XFR1 codec. However my problem is that I am wanting to edit my footage using my OS X Lion laptop. As Xfire still have no Mac support I can safely assume they won't have their codec working on Mac either, which leaves me with a problerm. Because it is the codec at fault here, I am curious as to how I can re-encode me video footage into a format that Premiere Pro CS4 for Mac can understand and import.

More information on the codec can be found here: http://wiki.xfire.com/index.php/Xfire_codec

So, what software can I use to re-encode it and convert it into a file format my video editing software can work with? What encoder would be best to use for Prem Pro CS4 Mac? Editing on the PC is out of the question... the best I have on that is Windows Live Movie Maker...

Thanks
Daniel

[usually_quiet]

I found nothing for OSX, but did find something for your Windows PC that may work. According to this link, http://iradar.blogspot.com/2009/06/how-to-play-andor-edit-xfire-videos.html Virtualdub (free, PC only) can import, edit, and convert XFR1 video in an .avi container.

[dragonkeeper]

The amount of freeware on Mac when compared to PC is mindbogglingly it is the main reason i still use Windows based PC or Linux. But if i were in a situation where i was using a Mac (Intel based) I would look into installing dual booting with XP or Win 7 or at a minimum a variant of Linux this would open your world to a myriad of software options that perform as well if not better than commercial software.

[jman98]

I know that as a Mac user you're not going to want to hear this, but as dragonkeeper pointed out, the sad truth is that on Mac you've got maybe 1 or 2 programs to do anything and if you don't like them, well, you're out of luck. I make my living supporting Linux and Unix computers and I'm not a fan of Windows, but that's where the software is.

Unless you are a hardcore gamer who is going to play Windows games on your Mac, an alternative that I prefer to dual booting is running VMware Fusion to get Windows running under OS X. Fusion is not freeware, but as it lets you run Windows under OS X (you are running Windows in a virtual machine while OS X itself is still running) you can just start and stop Windows as you wish with no need to reboot.

[jagabo]

Isn't the free VMWare Player available for OSX? VirtualBox is available for OSX, and free.

http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads

Of course, you'll need a Windows license to run Windows. If you only need it temporarily you run Windows 7 for a month without a license.

[poisondeathray]

Because xfire is not open source, you need access to a PC with xfire installed

You can use avisynth to frameserve into ffmpeg to encode to MOV (something like animation codec, or png in MOV). These files will work on a Mac, even other programs like FCP.

AVI container is generally not supported on a Mac. You need it to be MOV wrapped

[jagabo]

According to this:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:vl67nocJOpMJ:wiki.xfire.com/wiki/...ient=firefox-a

XFR1 is based on HuffYUV. You might be able to change the fourcc to one of the HuffYUV fourccs and use HuffYUV to decode it -- HFYU, FFVH. Depending on how much they changed the encoder.