I downloaded a show off my Tivo Series 3 last night, and wanted to convert it from it’s native MPEG-2 to MPEG-4. I’ve done it before, but didn’t want to spend time trying to find the scripts so I spent a bunch of time searching around for some quick tips on how best to do it. And despite some honest efforts I came up with nothing useful.
So a short time ago I dug up my scripts and thought to share some of them, not only will it make it easier for me since I can check this site for the syntax in the future but maybe it’ll help you too.
Of course I won’t cover installing transcode or it’s dependencies, I assume you have all of that done. I don’t recall what all of the options do but as you can see there are quite a few, not the easiest thing to remember. See the man page or transcode documentation for what the options mean.
Export audio portion of a video file to OGG Vorbis:
transcode -i input_filename -y raw,ogg -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0x55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m filename.ogg -o /dev/null
Export audio portion of a file to MP3(using lame):
transcode -i input_file -y raw -F mpeg4 -E44100 -b 128 -N 0x55 -w 120,300,2 -V -Z 176×120 -m output.mp3 -o /dev/null
Convert video+audio from some format(e.g. MPEG-2) to MPEG-4:
transcode -i input.mpg y xvid4 -F mpeg4 -E22050 -b 64 -N 0x55 –w 250,200,3 -V -M 2 -o filename.avi
I wish transcode had some easy to use templates, such as convert with low, medium, or high compression type of deal. I mean if you don’t specify any options by default it seems to use maximum quality and in some cases despite going from say MPEG-2 to MPEG-4 I’ve seen the file size increase.