Dumb Bunny Productions » ffmpeg

natively compiling ffmpeg, mplayer, mencoder on MacOS Lion (with x264!)

tracey pooh — Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:42:01 +0000

OK, I’ve revamped my script to compile these tools:
ffmpeg
ffrobe
qt-faststart
mplayer
mencoder

on MacOS Lion, using the heads of the trees, with direct encoding support for:
x264
vpx / WebM

http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh.txt

A nice recent update to ffmpeg is the ability to decode/read Apple ProRes, too!

natively compiling ffmpeg, x264, mplayer on mac (with builtin x264 and webm encoding)

tracey pooh — Sat, 28 May 2011 22:41:51 +0000

i’m very pleased that after years of hacks here and there, all three heads of the current codebases pretty well build natively on mac (snow leopard) for

x264
ffmpeg
mplayer

here, i’m making sure that i compile in static version of libvpx (Webm) and libx264 (h.264) video packages so that the ffmpeg can easily make hiqh quality h.246 and webm transcoded videos.

http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/macff.sh

So we can make nice (2 pass video) ~768 kb/sec 640×480 derivatives like so (alter “-r ” as appropriate):

# make WebM ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.webm

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec webm -fpre libvpx-360p.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec libvorbis -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.webm

mv tmp.webm 'camels.webm'

# make h.264

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 1 -an tmp.mp4

ffmpeg -deinterlace -y -i 'camels.avi' -vcodec libx264 -fpre libx264-IA.ffpreset -vf scale=640:480 -r 20 -threads 2 -map_meta_data -1:0 -pass 2 -acodec aac -strict experimental -ab 128k -ac 2 -ar 44100 tmp.mp4

qt-faststart tmp.mp4 'camels.mp4'

our preset files:
http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libvpx-360p.ffpreset
http://www.archive.org/~tracey/downloads/libx264-IA.ffpreset

Nice things about the h.264 derivative:

plays on all iphones and ipads
browser video tag and/or flash plugin compatible
starts immediately, seeks immediately even before entire video is downloaded

hope this may be useful!

Star Wars re-remastered to high quality 1977 version!

tracey pooh — Sun, 18 Apr 2010 09:21:30 +0000

So I wanted to sit down in my updated home theatre and watch one of my favorite films, “Star Wars”. Problem is, I have two versions on DVD, and neither are ideal. The 2004 DVD version has remastered audio and video, but also added scenes and changes I really don’t like. The 1977 DVD version is a poor quality transfer and encoding.

So I combined the 1977 and 2004 DVDs into the highest quality 1977 version of the film! I show all my scripts and techniques here, too, so you can make the same version from your two DVDs, too!
http://www.archive.org/details/reremaster

star wars comparison of two films

ffmpeg for time-lapse, sets of images, and even archiving!

tracey pooh — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 03:49:36 +0000

I now use the FFMPEG package compiled locally on my Mac Leopard laptop.

If you want to take a bunch of JPEG images, you can turn them into a “motion JPEG” AVI video file (which is ideal for time-lapse). What’s neat about ffmpeg, is you can turn a directory of JPEGs into an AVI and later recreate the JPEGs from the AVI.

Thus, I can take 100-1000 JPEG images from a “shoot” and create a video time-lapse of all the JPEG images in a given subdir in a command-line shell (terminal):
ffmpeg -r 6 -i "%04d.jpg" -an -vcodec copy out.avi

Even cooler, you can go directly back to *the same JPEG* images like so (this is where you can see it is a lossless conversion from JPEGs to Motion JPEG and back):
ffmpeg -i out.avi -vcodec copy "%04d.jpg"

“-r 6″ is the framerate, ie: “make the video play 6 JPEG images per second”.

It doesn’t get much nicer than that! Not to mention, the encoding is FAST! I recently moved from mencoder/mplayer to ffmpeg since you can specify a complete copy of the input JPEGs (lossless from the source) as well as compress them down a bit (as you like).

For the lossless conversion, the (not entirely obvious) *key* to success is to use the “-vcodec copy” *after* the source file(s).

You can get this running on Windows with Cygwin, Mac with terminal, and any linux distribution like Ubuntu.

ffmpeg building on mac intel/x386

tracey pooh — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 05:13:36 +0000

ffmpeg v0.5 just came out. it’s the bomb. it’s got tons of fixes and massive amounts of new codecs that it can read. for example, it can now decode my professional filmmaker brother’s “DVC ProHD” highly proprietary (and massive bitrate!) format! it can also decode flac and 24-bit flac. (encoding flac is disappointing though).

at any rate! macports is a great way to get it installed on your mac.
the current way of setting up macports and then doing
sudo port install ffmpeg
works fine on my PPC at work (oddly — pretty old computer now) but not my Air (intel x386)

So I set out to find the fixes needed to make it work. Here they are:

step 1: install macports — see http://www.macports.org/install.php

sudo port install x264 +noasm # for i386 (not needed for PPC)
sudo port fetch ffmpeg
sudo port checksum ffmpeg
sudo port extract ffmpeg
sudo port patch ffmpeg
remove “–enable-shared” from /opt/local/var/macports/sources/rsync.macports.org/release/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg/Portfile
sudo port install ffmpeg