Bug#567863: RFP: Handbrake - video transcoder

[Rogério Brito]

Hi there.

I'm just including the Multimedia team, as they don't seem to be subscribed
to this bug.


On Oct 09 2011, Ralf Jung wrote:
> > Can't be packaged as x264 video codec and aac and mp3 audio codec aren't
> > free.
> How can that be, I can decode and encode mp3 and view MPEG4 videos without 
> problems, installing only packages from the debian repositories...?

Ralf, I think that when Christian wrote that, we didn't have x264 and lame
in the main archive. Things have changed since this bug was originally
filed.

Once we have faac (if it's acceptable for our archive), then it would be
lovely to have a new version of handbrake (e.g., from their git tree) in the
archive, as it is a frontend for multimedia libraries that quite possibly
passes the "useable by mom and dad" usability test, especially since it
comes with sensible presets.

> As far as I know, Handbrake does not even implement any of this. It uses
> gstreamer, ffmpeg and others.

Well, it does implement some things, like, for instance, their decombing
routines, which is very nice for some interlaced and almost-interlaced
things.

As a side-effect, this decombing of theirs results in variable frame rates,
which potentially feeds fewer frames to x264 (or whatever encoder is in
question), making the bitrates tend to lower.

Another side-effect that people may not appreciate because they run fast
architectures is that outputting fewer frames, some slower video cards
(e.g., in a powerpc machine) can have a fighting chance of playing some
videos.

I don't know of any implementation of handbrake's decombing algorithm in
other software (e.g., ffmpeg/libav, mplayer, mplayer2, gstreamer etc.) Does
anyone know?

The other transcoders (arista, transmaggedon) are jokes regarding the amount
of configurability that they allow.


Regards,

-- 
Rogério Brito : rbrito@{ime.usp.br,gmail.com} : GPG key 4096R/BCFCAAAA
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