my panasonic dmc-fx10 produces videos in apple’s quicktime-format (.MOV), which are quite huge so i’d like to recompress the files on my desktop, preferrably without losing (too much) of the alread not-so-good quality…
for tasks like this, i prefer using avidemux, since i don’t have to bother with all the possible (and impossible!) combinations of mencoder’s commandline options… unfortunately, avidemux can’t read the files produced by the cam directly, it quits with an /assertion error/
thus, the files need to be converted first. to do this, i use the above mentioned without the huge bunch of options:
mencoder $file -oac pcm -ovc raw -o ${file/MOV/RAW}
now avidemux can work on the raw video-files and produce much smaller files than the cam directly (oh wonder…)
some experimenting show the following settings lead to satisfying results:
VIDEO: MPEG-4 AVC (x264)
Encoding Mode: Two Pass - Average Bitrate
Average bitrate (kb/s): 1800
yes, i know… one could simply look up the parameters for mencoder and do the whole stuff in one step… maybe later 😉