Making a mp4 file viewable on DVD
 

Folks,

I just got a mp4 file (an interesting one at that, the expose of a US Sergeant about running a Linux server in Irak - you can find the link on Slashdot's Monday news) and since it lasts about an hour, I'd like to view it on the TV. Now, if I can obtain a plain mpg file I can run dvdauthor and produce a viewable DVD that will play in a regular DVD player.

Question is, how to convert the mp4 file to a mpg file ?

It looks like it's possible. ffmpeg handles all possible formats. But there's no description on how to do this. I have the impression that I must read about the technical specs of both formats to deduce the bitrate parameter to pass to ffmpeg and all that. Hours ans hours of reading and thinking and trying.

Can someone tell me precisely how to convert a mp4 to mpg with as little loss in quality as possible ?

Thanks !

mpeg layer 4 is divX ...
look up "mencoder" - this is, amongst other things, a universal video codec converter.

If you put your distro in your profile, replies can get very specific.

mp4 is a container, probably containing MPEG-4 video, most likely AVC (unlikely DivX) with AAC audio.
Best future-proof solution is to build yourself a Media Center and avoid converting files. However, if you feel you need to do that, use Avidemux2. It has convenient presets for such conversion.

hi there carcassonne,

you might want to take a look at tovid

it's basically a a collection of video disc authoring tools. Mostly scripts that will do all the neccessary steps for you to convert almost anything into DVDs, VCDs, and SVCDs that you can playback on your home DVD Player.

There are quite a few dependencies, but once you've set them all up and give tovid a try, you will love it. I have been using it ever since I heard of it and there was nothing that I couldn't convert with the tovid scripts. And yes, I've converted those .mp4 files with tovid before :P

Good luck!

mplayer is a movie player for Linux (runs on many other platforms and CPU architectures, see the documentation). It plays most MPEG/VOB, AVI, ASF/WMA/WMV, RM, QT/MOV/MP4, OGG/OGM, MKV, VIVO, FLI, NuppelVideo, yuv4mpeg, FILM and RoQ files, supported by many native and binary codecs. You can watch VideoCD, SVCD, DVD, 3ivx, DivX 3/4/5 and even WMV movies, too.

mencoder (MPlayer’s Movie Encoder) is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies (see above) to other Player-playable formats (see below). It encodes to MPEG-4 (DivX/XviD), one of the libavcodec codecs and PCM/MP3/VBRMP3 audio in 1, 2 or 3 passes. Furthermore it has stream copying abilities, a powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess, rotate, scale, noise, rgb/yuv conversion) and more.

yeah all right - it is a container... it's close to 1am here...
I hear my bed calling: "sleep... sleep..."
Hah! "Sleep" is a poor substitute for caffein!
<starts vibrating>

Done. So it's SuSE 10.0 62 and 32 bits.

The replies were a bit what I expected: nothing precise. Like talking about the Flying Dutchman. Or the monster of the Loch Ness ;-)

Some have seen it, Some believe it's possible. But no-one has recipes or otherwise precise steps.

So once again, if some has did it before and knows precisely how to do that... please do not hesitate to post your recipe.

Cheers.

Could be good, as far as no-recipes goes. But that berlios.de site is either having serious problems or is overused. No way to make a connection to it.

Here's an article I found about tovid. Looks good.

http://applications.linux.com/applic...1.shtml?tid=39

carcassonne,


keep trying LOL..they must have having some routing issues or something. Strange enough before you replied to this post, I was still able to get to the site.

you can always try it from
http://tovid.sf.net/
OR
http://tovid.org/

but I believe both of them forward you to the main developer's page which is the link I gave you before.


If you want to get your .MP4 files in a DVD-ready format to be able to play it on almost any home DVD-player, tovid is the thing you need to look at.

It makes life so much easier as it does exactly that. You don't have to go through all options and flags of mencoder (UNLESS you LIKE TO !!!) to get things done. I, in the past, have had to "struggle" with mencoder and various other encoders just to get the right settings for quality/size/etc but with tovid it's just so simple :P

so keep trying :P


*edited*: oh and I do recommend you to make use of the scripts rather than going for their GUI version. I have not tried their GUI just because I'm a CLI-junkie and because I like to see what's actually happening as a DVD is being created for example :P

You gotta be kiddin'

What's wrong with Avidemux? It is as simple as loading mp4 and choosing DVD from AUTO menu :confused:
Do you want me describe how to open a file using GUI menus!?

Looks all right. Got it from packman.links2linux.de and it installed right away. I guess all other dependencies were already there. I did install from packman quite a few multimedia packages recently.

So avidemux reads some mpg files I've made. But no dice with that mp4 I want to transfer to DVD. Gives a green screen. xine on the same system (X86_64) plays the file just fine. avidemux outputs the following errors at the console:

Editor :Audio streamer initialized
MP4 audio
Found :44100 rate 2 channels
Frequency mismatch!!! 44100 to 44100 (SBR ?)
Faad decoder created
[h264 @ 0x950970]Unknown NAL code: 30
error in FFMP43/mpeg4!
Err: -1, size :1199
Editor: Last Decoding2 failed for frame 0
** conf updated **
error in FFMP43/mpeg4!
Err: -1, size :232
Editor: Last Decoding2 failed for frame 471

Frequency mismatch. And then its back to square one and studying for a university degree in video/audio codecs (not !).

OTOH, I still didn't get access to the tovid web site. Maybe they're in maintenance or something like that.

Cheers.

Works flawlessly in my system - but I have support for mp4, AVC and AAC in my system, all latest svn versions. And I'm using Avidemux 2.2, also svn version, configured and compiled for my system. Sorry, but can't help you much here. I've no clue how SuSe may handle this. However, you can consider Avidemux real swiss army knife for video in Linux, yet easy to use. It can used with GUI so you can see what you are doing and from CLI as well in case some batch processing is needed.