convert for use on youtube (was: convert .mov to .avi?)

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 03 Sep 2014 23:55:38 -0600, Gary Aitken wrote:
> 
> >> Can anyone suggest an easy way to convert a .mov file to .avi? I
> >> don't have much experience with video and shot some with my camera
> >> when on a recent trip.  My wife uses windoze to burn dvds and the
> >> app she has access to (windows dvd maker) doesn't seem to support
> >> .mov files.
> 
> <snip>
> 
> > I suppose "ffmpeg -i path/video1.mov path/movie2.avi" should do it
> > for a fast and simple convertion.
> 
> Thanks all; that and some reading of the ffmpeg man page helped.
> 
> Now I'm trying to convert to something smallish that will play well on youtube.
> According to youtube's analysis, my firefox supports 
>   "HTMLVideoElement" and "WebM VP8".
> I've tried converting to
>   .avi, .mp4, and .webm
> but whenever I try to play them via youtube, I get the garbage about my 
> browser not currently recognizing any of the video formats available.

AVI is just a container format. Which formats (video and audio)
did you put in? For example, XVid for video + MP3 for audio, or
MPEG for video and AC3 for audio? With mencoder, you have control
over those formats and their options (for example quality, image
size, audio sampling rate and how much compression should be used).

You can test with "mplayer -identify <file>" to check what is
_actually_ in a file.

The web browser only supports playing video content in few formats,
and usually either through a "Flash" player or WebM standard, if
the required plugins, libraries and codecs have been installed.
Everything else requires an external player program (even though
there are browser-plugins for some players).



> I've tried switching the browser between HTML5 and the default player,
> but no joy there.
> The browser successfully plays .mov files previously uploaded, but they
> are huge and I'm trying to save on bandwidth and storage.

> I believe the
> uploaded .mov files were converted by youtube anyway.

YouTube converts them either into "Flash" video (flv) or
whatever they currently use to deliver with HTML5 (VP8?),
as far as I know.



> All of the generated formats play fine through vlc.

That's not a problem, because vlc and mplayer play everything. :-)


-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...