Resizing videos for the Pandora on a LinuxPC

[lomaxx]

I didn't try to move a mountain to get this done, but have been searching for an easy solution for quite a while to get large videos resized down to 800x480 with correct aspect-ratio and keeping the same quality (except for the fewer pixels).


With mencoder I just got a crappy quality out of it. It's probably possible, but all these parameters annoy me.


With avidemuxer i had problems that some audio-codec was not supported.


With arista i ran in some other problem.


What seems to work nicely is to use ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -i <input-file> -sameq -s 800x480 <output-file>

Note that you should give the output-file the same filename-extension as the input-file (e.g. ".avi") unless you want to change format/container/whatever_it's_called.


I only converted two movies so far, but the aspect ratio seems to be kept. Though I'm not 100% sure. Maybe i was just lucky that the original videos were close to the ratio of 800:480, but i read somewhere that ffmpeg uses the values "800" and "480" as maximum-values. So I'm confident.


Just in case someone finds this useful.

 

[I8NY]

I have been tempted to look into the "best" video codec + bitrate for the pandora on different players. It just takes a lot of time to try every reasonable configuration. Right now I'm using Arista Transcoder on preset PSP for my pandora video. It isn't the best settings but looks good and works.

 

[WizardStan]

This is part of my script for converting videos to DVD format. You should be able to abuse it for a better encoding

mencoder -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -vf scale=720:480,harddup -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=6000:vbitrate=3000:keyint=18:aspect=4/3:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192 -ofps 30000/1001 -o "$MPG" "$AVI"

 

[gruso]

When I finally get around to preparing files for Dragon's Lair (Daphne), I'm hoping to concoct a Handbrake profile for this purpose.

 

[lomaxx]

Thanks for the feedback/alternatives.


@WizardStan: Do you have enough experience with ffmpeg to know if your menconder-commandline-setup offers a better result (quality/size-reduction) than the ffmpeg-line i tried so far? Probably the difference isn't that large, but maybe i am wrong.

 

[StreaK]

i created a small script to convert video files to my "wd mini tv" [and all htpc top box'es should accept this format] and "OpenPandora's mplayer" compatible format


you can use it straight from cli-love


by typing:


"ffmpeg-heman [filename]"


or


"ffmpeg-heman-batch"