I shoot home video's with a DVD camcorder. It records directly to DVD's, which is exactly what I wanted. I can pop the DVD's into any DVD player and watch them, as-is. I can also create backups of the originals quite easily using my DVD Burner. Loading video from the DVD player to edit on a computer is a little more difficult.
I *think* I prefer the MPEG2 (H.262) format for storage. It is 720×480 video used on HDTV, DVD, and SVCD. I like it because it's native to the DVD's I'm recording on.
Certain tools can only use certain file formats and codecs. Since I use Linux, my choices are limited. I need to consider this when working with video on the PC.
I've found I like DV for editing (without a container).
Video codecs like MPEG2 tend to handle a video sequence by reducing the number of full frames per second and encoding the differences between frames, making precise editing more difficult. These are known as “interframe” forms of compression. For this reason, I prefer the DV format for editing.
The AAC audio format was made as an improvement over MP3. The bitrate and file size is lower with about the same quality. (Not to be confused with AC3).
MP3 is wildly popular as a music storage format, and it can be used on DVD's, but more DVD players support the AC3 format.
The most common DVD format is 720 x 480 pixels MPEG2 (Called Full-D1) using AC3 (Dolby Digital) or PCM (uncompressed) audio.
A less common but smaller size is 352 x 240 pixels MPEG1 (same as the VCD standard) video using MPEG1 Layer 1 audio (MP1).
I think this smaller format will also burn to a DVD and play in most players.
My Sony DVD camcorder records VOB files in MPEG2 format with AC3 audio (I think).
To use ffmpeg with these files, I need the version that supports AC3, which is not the default under Ubuntu since it changes one of the licenses from LGPL to GPL.
To fix the problem, I just grab the latest snapshot and compile FFMPEG from source.
Under Ubuntu, first make sure that ffmpeg is NOT installed. Then, make sure that gcc, build-essential, and liba52-x.x.x-dev are installed (where x.x.x is the version number). Finally, build ffmpeg with:
./configure --enable-liba52 --enable-gpl make make install
You can pull chapters from VOB files using mplayer. Here's a command line to pull chapter 3 from the DVD drive and dump it to a VOB.
mplayer dvd:// -chapter 3-3 -dumpstream -dumpfile 3.vob
The following command will rip a VOB file strait from an unencrypted DVD and convert it to a strait DV file.
ffmpeg -i /cdrom/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB -target dv /home/joel/Videos/game_vi.dv
The following command will rip a VOB file to an MPEG2 video with AC3 audio for a DVD. It also uses the '-sameq' option which uses the same quality factor in the encoder as in the decoder, allowing almost lossless encoding.
ffmpeg -i myfile.vob -target dvd -sameq myfile.mpg
The following command will rip a VOB file to a MPEG1 video with MP1 audio.
ffmpeg -i myfile.vob -target vcd myfile.mpg
The following command will rip a VOB file to 352×240 (the same size as VCD) and will save it as a flash file.
ffmpeg -i myfile.vob -s 352x240 myfile.flv
Question: Can you make an swf?
You can use ffmpeg to identify the type of video and audio in a particular file. Try the following command.
ffmpeg -i <video file>
This outputs some general program details, an error, and then some information about the input file. An example is below.
Input #0, mpeg, from 'VTS_01_1.VOB': Duration: 00:14:48.3, start: 0.220133, bitrate: 9323 kb/s Stream #0.0[0x20]: Subtitle: dvdsub Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: 0x0000, 48000 Hz, stereo, 256 kb/s Stream #0.2[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x480, 9100 kb/s, 29.97 fps(r)
Here are some website resources.
Great detailed DVD information.
Newbie information from a newbie.
http://www.shallowsky.com/linux/videoformats.html
There's a good glossary of formats at the URL below.
http://www.crutchfieldadvisor.com/S-MudJJH3rs1b/learningcenter/home/fileformats_glossary.html
Here's a DVD authoring guide that looks useful.
http://www.linux.com/feature/118910
Another resource that might be good.
http://womble.decadent.org.uk/talks/dvd-ukuug06/dvd-talk-ukuug06-paper.html
