![]() ![]() In case you’ve been wondering just what I’ve encoded as I took the screenshots, it’s a lovable and joyous little movie called Luxury Liner (1948). Oh, let’s not forget the Progress window:įinally, if you should need more instructions on how to use ffmpegx, there’s a great how-to section right on their site. There are a lot of features squeezed in there! The Tools screen has a bunch of sub screens that let you play with the video options even more. The Options screen lets you adjust the encoder parameters even further, and of course, lets you specify 2-pass encoding if you want extra quality. A white border will indicate the crop settings. Remember how wide-screen movies were letterboxed when shown on TV? Well, you can cut away the letterbox and be left with only a nice, widescreen movie! It’s a fantastic option! Oh, and in case the Autocrop button doesn’t work, you can also specify your own crop settings, and preview them by clicking on the Preview button. If there are extra portions of screen estate taken up by nothing but fuzz or black space, you can take them out through a crop. Can you see why?įorget all the other cool options, what I really like is the Crop option! Although the Autocrop only works sometimes, because the opening credits or sequences may confuse it, it’s a really cool button. The Filters screen is where things get really, really interesting. If this is a silent movie, you can add your own track, or if you’re doing a mash-up video, you can add your own voice-overs or soundtrack. If the movie you’re encoding has more than one audio track, you can select the one you want here, and you can even amplify it if so desired. Here you can select the codec, and the audio parameters. Now let’s have a look at the Audio options: What I really like is using the Best button to let it select the best bitrate for the video size. If you’re encoding a DVD, you can select which title, chapters and angle you want to encode. Here you can adjust the bitrate, fit the movie size to a particular archival disc (if you’re so inclined), and adjust its size. Now let’s have a look at the next screen, listing the Video options: As you can see, the basic properties of each file are summarized in the columns. The Apple H.264 codec, also available through ffmpegx, is much slower and the resulting file isn’t as small. I prefer to encode with the H.264 codec, but I use the mencoder H.264 flavor. You have the original movie on one side, and the compressed movie on the other. So in order to help you learn how to use ffmpegx, I took a few screenshots of a typical movie encoding that I do.įirst the main screen. I happen to like shows like Cartoon Alley on TCM, and I like old movies (made from the 20s through the 60s). One of things I like to do is to use a PVR (a Tivo-like device for the Mac), and schedule it to record my favorite shows and movies. ![]() When I use tools like these, I use them so I can edit and compress my movies, and fit more of them on my hard drive. I use ffmpegx or any other of my video tools for legitimate purposes, and I encourage you to do the same. I’ve never shared movies illegally, and I don’t intend to. I’ve never downloaded illegal moves from BitTorrent or anywhere else on the Internet. Now, before you think I use it for illegal purposes, I don’t. It’s a great, all-in-one, wonderful package. What sets it apart is not only the ease of use (though there are tons of options to choose from) or the speed of encoding (although it’s among the fastest I’ve used) or the fact that it’s free (because it is - well, shareware anyway), but it’s all of these things together. Granted, there is no Windows version, but still, I’m hard pressed to find its equivalent there. It’s one of the best applications I’ve ever used, and I don’t think I exaggerate when I say that it’s probably the best video encoding/compression tool on both the Mac and the PC platforms. I can barely notice the difference between the original and the compressed copy. After the first compression, I was amazed! The compression is fast, clean and very, very good. I was a little skeptical, but hey, it was free, so I gave it a shot. He pointed me to a great app for video encoding and compression on the Mac, called ffmpegx. A little while ago, I wrote a post outlining the things I didn’t like about my Mac, and while most of the issues I pointed out are still affecting my iMac, I have to really thank one of the people who left a comment, by the name of Howard Dratch. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |