Psyk's stuff

Looking for a quick fire way to create an animated GIF from sections of video's I didn't need to look any further than the multimedia swiss-army knife of the linux world, mplayer/mencoder and ffmpeg.

mplayer -ao null -loop 0 -ss 0:11:22 -endpos 5 file.avi

First is to playback the video and find the section you want. Tweak the "-ss" parameter to find the starting point and the "-endpos" for the finishing point of your video clip.

 mplayer file.avi -ao null -ss 0:11:22 -endpos 5 -vo gif89a:fps=25:output=animated.gif -aspect 16/9 -vf scale=-2:100  

Use mplayer again to write out the animated GIF file. Adjust the "scale" parameter to adjust the size of the animated GIF which is useful if you're going to use it as a signature for web forum etc.

Playing around with encoding settings for playback on the PS3 led to alot of trial and error and tweaking. It seems to be easier to find a way on how "not" to do it than how to do it as there's so many utilities and tools out there.

I stuck with mencoder/mplayer as I've used it over the years and extremely comfortable with how it behaves and works. The only real challenge is that it can't really mux properly into an MP4 container that other devices can properly read (i.e. it can read it's own 'corrupted' MP4 but nothing else can!). If that's mencoder's only blemish on an otherwise powerful video encoding tool, then that's really nothing at all.

So the process is to use mencoder, faac for some additional flexibility in bitrates, normalize for levelling out the audio and then MP4Box to mux it all together into a universally compliant MP4 container.

If you're running Fedora, you'll need to install these applications as follows:

yum install mplayer mencoder gpac normalize faac

Firstly, create edit your ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf and add the following:

 [PS3]  
 vf=pullup,softskip,pp=fd,scale=:-10,hqdn3d,harddup  
 ovc=x264=yes   
 x264encopts=level_idc=41:crf=18:bframes=16:b_pyramid=yes:partitions=all:threads=auto:frameref=4:mixed_refs=yes:weight_b=yes  
 oac=pcm=yes  
 of=rawvideo=yes  
 sws=9  
 aspect=16/9  

Then create a file called "enc-to-ps3.sh" in your favourite editer (e.g. gedit). This will be the executable filename and you can choose any name you like.

Add the following lines:

mplayer -fps 29.97 -nocorrect-pts -vo null -vc null -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file="$1"_temp.wav "$1" && \
normalize -a 0.5 -v "$1"_temp.wav && \
faac -b 256 -c 48000 --mpeg-vers 4 -o "$1"_temp.aac "$1"_temp.wav && \
mencoder -profile PS3 "$1" -ofps 29.97 -o "$1"_temp.264 && \
MP4Box -fps 29.97 -add "$1"_temp.264 -add "$1"_temp.aac "$1".mp4 && \
rm "$1"_temp.wav && \
rm "$1"_temp.264 && \
rm "$1"_temp.aac 

Make "enc-to-ps3.sh" executable by running:

chmod +x enc-to-ps3.sh

So what does it do?

mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast:waveheader:file=temp_"$1"_temp.wav "$1" && \

This line rips the audio from your video track and writes it out to a wave file. The name of the 'temp' file is your original file prefixed and suffixed with "temp" for easy identification.

normalize -v temp_"$1"_temp.wav && \

Quickly normalize the audio to prevent clipping and clean up the sound. I have a lot of clips where the audio is too load/soft and this helps adjust that.

faac -b 256 -c 48000 --mpeg-vers 4 --tns -o temp_"$1"_temp.aac temp_"$1"_temp.wav && \

This line encodes the resulting normalized WAV audio file into AAC at 256kb bitrate.

mencoder -profile PS3 "$1" -o temp_"$1"_temp.264 && \

Mencoder is used here to encode the original video using the profile settings we created earlier. This is the lengthiest piece of the encoding process depending on your source, so grab a coffee and come back in a little while. The output is a raw h.264 (x264) stream.

MP4Box -add temp_"$1"_temp.264 -add temp_"$1"_temp.aac "$1".mp4 && \

Using MP4Box from the gpac utilities, the resulting h.264 stream and AAC audio file are then muxed together into an MP4 file using the detected frame rate of the original video to keep things in sync.

And then your done.

Usage is as easy as:

enc-to-ps3.sh <name_of_video>

The resulting file should be playable on the PS3...

The script is quite rudimentary, but the basis of keeping it like this allows understanding of the process and then empower you to tweak settings if you so desire.

I've been running Vista MCE for sometime now and while it's doing the job, I would've really liked to be running Mythdora... That'll be a project for another time.

In any case, I'm running ffdshow and the haali splitter. Haali is used to handle the MKV's (Matroska) and MP4's whereas ffdshow will pretty much handle any other format including Divx/XviD and anything else. As a result it's really all you need to prevent serious 'codec-hell' in Windows.

First and foremost, a lot of the credit needs to go to this UbuntuForums thread where the original poster walks through a process of ripping DVD's to MKV format.

Also, the following method is an alternative to my previous post in regards to encoding dvr-ms files into MP4 containers for PS3 compatible playback.

If you want to automate things and not really worry about tweaking or understanding the process (which will lend itself to allow you to tweak), then you can use something like avidemux.


However, I like tweaking and tinkering with the settings and understanding the process, so the manual method described in the Ubuntu link works for me.

One of the things I do, is use a different set of parameters for the H264/x264 encode in addition to using AAC encoded audio as opposed to ogg. Here is the 'to-mkv' profile entry in my ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf

[to-mkv]
profile-desc="        Makes a x264 raw video stream for muxing into MKV"
lavdopts=threads=2
ovc=x264=yes 
x264encopts=keyint_min=24:keyint=240:crf=18:qp_min=5:qp_max=51:qcomp=0.75:me=umh:subq=6:frameref=6:bframes=3:ip_factor=1.25:
pb_factor=1.33:deblock=-1,-1:nopsnr:b_pyramid=yes:brdo=yes:weight_b=yes:mixed_refs=yes:bime=yes:chroma_me=yes:partitions=all
:trellis=1:8x8dct=yes:threads=auto
oac=copy=yes
of=rawvideo=yes

The resulting mencoder command is:

$mencoder -profile to-mkv -vf scale=720:-10,harddup <video_source> -o <output_video>.264

The above command outputs only a raw h.264 video format with no audio. I'm asking it to convert "video_source" into a DVD scaled (720x576/480 etc.) h.264 "output_video".264. The ".264" extension helps identify it as a raw h.264 video and is of very good quality depending on your source. In my case they're usually TV recorded hi-def channels of 1920x1080 MPG format and AC3 audio.

Mux the .264 file into an MP4 container (the mkv utilities handles the mp4 format a little better):

$MP4Box -add output_video.264 output_video.mp4

If you haven't already separated the audio from the video, then you'll need to do that. Once done, normalize the audio file by doing:

$normalize audio.wav

Once you have separated and normalized the audio, encode to AAC format with the following:

$faac audio.wav -o audio.aac

Once you have the MP4 and AAC files you can use the mkv gui tools to mux them all into the Matroska (MKV) container. You can start the gui utility by running:

$mmg

...and that's all there is too it in creating mkv files in linux. I deliberately left out a lot of detail and only high-lighted some of the key points in the process in doing it as a lot of it is documented elsewhere.

Refer to the Ubuntuforums page for more detail: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=273635

Here's a simple way to join two AVI files together. The AVI's should be the same in regards to type (i.e. XvID/DivX, audio bitrate etc.):

$cat movie1.avi movie2.avi movie3.avi > movie_temp.avi
$mencoder -forceidx -ovc copy -oac copy movie_temp.avi -o movie_final.avi

With large capacity drives and USB sticks getting cheaper for more capacity, the tendency to carry more and more around with you increases. With so much information being digitzed, losing a USB-key or a small passport sized backup USB drive would be akin to losing your wallet, keys and credit cards...

Truecrypt

I've been looking at Truecrypt which is an open-source encryption application which can encrypt entire partitions, drives and/or create a virtual drive as a file on an existing file-system. It has a rich set of encryption algorithms and can also chain them together. For example, it can chain AES256 (Rijndael), Twofish and Serpent the latter two being finalists for AES encryption standard. There's plenty of information out there on the strengths of these ciphers, so I won't go into detail here...

However, if you are interested, you can read NIST's entire 116 page report on the AES encryption round and their decisions to choose Rijndael. In summary none have any known security attacks let alone cracked (it would've never made it this far if it had been cracked before :) ). The strength testing they used was on purposely weakened versions of the algorithms - and usually provided by the team themselves. Twofish and Serpent came out slightly stronger in the 'weakend' versions submitted for analysis, but didn't fare so well in things like implementation (i.e. smartcards, memory footprint for asic implementation etc.).

Unfortunately, Truecrypt only comes with packages ready for SuSE and Ubuntu, however the source is available for download.

A guide is available here if you want to build and compile it yourself.
http://arbitness.blogspot.com/2008/07/installing-truecrypt-on-fedora-9-howto.html

There's good information here as well:
http://penguinenclave.blogspot.com/2008/12/truecrypt-61-install-guide-for-fedora.html

However, what is nice is that there are binaries for Fedora available from here:
http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/fedora/9/

Since I run Fedora 9 x86_64 version, there was no binary, so I downloaded the srpm file from here:
http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/fedora/9/SRPMS/

The basic process for building it from SRPM is as follows:

cd ~/rpmbuild/SRPMS

wget -c http://www.lfarkas.org/linux/packages/fedora/9/SRPMS/truecrypt-6.1-1.fc9.src.rpm

rpmbuild --rebuild truecrypt-6.1-1.fc9.src.rpm

cd ~/rpmbuild/RPMS/x86_64/

su -c"rpm -Uvh truecrypt-6.1-1.fc9.src.rpm"

Truecrypt is easy to use. Once it's up and running it has a gui for mounting encrypted volumes and for creating them. Refer to the documentation at Truecrypts website.

PGP and GnuPG

Finally the other method I use is PGP or the linux implementation of it called GPG.

I've primarily been looking GPG to do symmetric cipher encryption on a single file, which basically asks for a passphrase prior to encryption. You just then need the passphrase to decrypt the file. Not as a secure as using public/private key encryption of course...

gpg -v --cipher-algo TWOFISH --symmetric --output <encrypted file> <name of file you want encrypted>

GPG defaults to 'CAST5' (or CAST-128) so I've forced it to use TWOFISH in this implementation. GPG supports a few ciphers, and you can check what's available on your system by running 'gpg --version'.

$ gpg --version
gpg (GnuPG) 1.4.9
Copyright (C) 2008 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>
This is free software: you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

Home: ~/.gnupg
Supported algorithms:
Pubkey: RSA, RSA-E, RSA-S, ELG-E, DSA
Cipher: 3DES, CAST5, BLOWFISH, AES, AES192, AES256, TWOFISH
Hash: MD5, SHA1, RIPEMD160, SHA256, SHA384, SHA512, SHA224
Compression: Uncompressed, ZIP, ZLIB, BZIP2

The best method to modify the cipher algorithm to use is to modify the ~/.gnupg/gpg.conf file and add the following items at the end. Modifying the 'personal-cipher-preferences' option as shown defaults TWOFISH as the cipher to use first.

personal-cipher-preferences TWOFISH AES256 AES192 AES BLOWFISH CAST5 3DES
personal-digest-preferences SHA256 SHA1 SHA512 SHA384 SHA224 RIPEMD160 MD5
personal-compress-preferences ZIP ZLIB BZIP2 Z0  

You probably don't need to adjust the digest-preferences unless you're wanting to use it with private/public keys etc.

To decrypt you would just type:

gpg <name of encrypted file>

If you want to encrypt multiple files, it's a lot easier to zip or tar them and then encrypt the final compressed file.

Windows users can use the win32 implementation of GnuPG available from here:
http://www.pgpi.org/download/gnupg/

A GUI front-end to GPG called WinPT is available from here:
http://winpt.gnupt.de/int/

Otherwise PGP is compatible.
http://www.pgp.com/downloads/desktoptrial/desktoptrial2.html#trial_or_freeware

Quick update, Truecrypt is now available in Fedora 11 called Realcrypt from the rpmfusion repositories. Make sure you have rpmfusion enabled and then install via yum.

yum install realcrypt

After some mucking around, I'm successfully streaming from my Fedora/Linux PC to the PS3 over wireless.

A great guide to get this going is from the mediatomb website and more specifically the transcoding section:

http://mediatomb.cc/dokuwiki/transcoding:transcoding

Take note to adjust your config.xml.

The site describes using ffmpeg and/or VLC as the transcoding engine, but I've always liked mencoder as I'm more familiar with it and have a lot of profiles defined already in ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf.

In regards to the mediatomb config.xml file (located at ~/.mediatomb/config.xml), like with most things, it needs to be heavily customised. I have a stack of AVI's that aren't in DivX/XviD format (which is what mediatomb tells the PS3 by default) and I have some AVI files which ffmpeg borks on... however, mencoder works very well on all these files. As a result, I transcode everything rather than pass the DivX/XviD to the PS3 - and surprisingly it streams well over wireless.

So here's the "~/bin/mencoder-tr" script I use that mediatomb calls to transcode the video's from the PC to a format the PS3 can understand. In this case I'm transcoding to a DVD compliant MPEG2 stream and AC3 audio in 720x576 format:

exec mencoder \
-oac lavc -ovc lavc \
-of mpeg \
-mpegopts format=dvd:tsaf \
-vf softskip,scale=720:576,hqdn3d,harddup \
-srate 48000 \
-af lavcresample=48000:volnorm=2 \
-ofps 25 \
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1835:vrc_maxrate=5120:vstrict=0:keyint=15:vbitrate=5120:acodec=ac3:abitrate=192:autoaspect \
"$1" -o "$2"

The "$1" and "$2" designations are mediatomb specific...

Lastly, I have the following "transcoding" section in my "~/.mediatomb/config.xml" file:

<transcoding enabled="yes">
   <mimetype-profile-mappings> 
     <transcode mimetype="audio/mpeg" using="vlcwav"/>   
     <transcode mimetype="video/x-flv" using="transvideo"/>
     <transcode mimetype="video/mp4" using="transvideo"/>
     <transcode mimetype="video/x-quicktime" using="transvideo"/>
     <transcode mimetype="application/ogg" using="vlcwav"/>
     <transcode mimetype="audio/x-ms-wma" using="vlcwav"/>
     <transcode mimetype="audio/x-ms-asf" using="vlcwav"/>
     <transcode mimetype="audio/x-flac" using="ffmpegwav"/>
     <transcode mimetype="audio/x-aac" using="vlcwav"/>
     <transcode mimetype="audio/mp4" using="vlcwav"/>
     <transcode mimetype="video/x-msvideo" using="transvideo"/>
     <transcode mimetype="video/x-ms-wmv" using="transvideo"/>
     <transcode mimetype="video/mpeg" using="mpeg2trans"/>
     <transcode mimetype="video/x-matroska" using="transvideo"/>
     <transcode mimetype="image/jpeg" using="rescalejpeg"/>
   </mimetype-profile-mappings>
   <profiles>
     <profile name="transvideo" enabled="yes" type="external">
       <mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
       <accept-url>no</accept-url>
       <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
       <agent command="mencoder-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
       <buffer size="10485760" chunk-size="262144" fill-size="524288"/>
     </profile>
     <profile name="mpeg2trans" enabled="yes" type="external">
       <mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
       <accept-url>no</accept-url>
       <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
       <hide-original-resource>yes</hide-original-resource>
       <agent command="mencoder-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
       <buffer size="28800000" chunk-size="512000" fill-size="120000"/>
     </profile>
     <profile name="ffmpegwav" enabled="yes" type="external">
       <use-chunked-encoding>no</use-chunked-encoding>
       <mimetype>audio/wav</mimetype>
       <accept-url>no</accept-url>
       <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
       <agent command="ffmpegaudio" arguments="%in %out"/>
       <buffer size="1048576" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="262144"/>
     </profile>
     <profile name="vlcwav" enabled="yes" type="external">
   <use-chunked-encoding>no</use-chunked-encoding>
       <mimetype>audio/wav</mimetype>
       <accept-url>yes</accept-url>
       <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
       <agent command="vlc" arguments="-I dummy %in --sout #transcode{acodec=s16l,ab=192,channels=2}:standard{access=file,mux=wav,dst=%out} vlc:quit"/>
       <buffer size="512000" chunk-size="32000" fill-size="64000"/>
     </profile>
     <profile name="rescalejpeg" enabled="yes" type="external">
       <mimetype>image/jpeg</mimetype>
       <accept-url>no</accept-url>
       <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
       <accept-ogg-theora>no</accept-ogg-theora>
       <agent command="convert" arguments="-size 1080x720 %in -auto-orient -resize 1080x720 +profile '*' %out"/>
       <buffer size="50000" chunk-size="100" fill-size="100"/>
     </profile>
    </profiles>
</transcoding>

Note the "mencoder-tr" entries that allows mediatomb to execute the required script to perform the transcoding.

The advantage of this method means that using mencoder's engine it can read pretty much any format and convert to any format, in this case a standard DVD mpeg stream.

As requested, here is my entire ~/.mediatomb/config.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<config version="1" xmlns="http://mediatomb.cc/config/1" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://mediatomb.cc/config/1 http://mediatomb.cc/config/1.xsd">
  <server>
    <ui enabled="yes">
      <accounts enabled="no" session-timeout="30">
        <account user="mediatomb" password="mediatomb"/>
      </accounts>
    </ui>
    <name>MediaTomb</name>
    <udn>uuid:xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx</udn>
    <home>/home/xxxxxxxxxxxxx</home>
    <webroot>/usr/share/mediatomb/web</webroot>
    <storage>
      <sqlite3 enabled="yes">
        <database-file>mediatomb.db</database-file>
      </sqlite3>
      <mysql enabled="no">
        <host>localhost</host>
        <username>mediatomb</username>
        <database>mediatomb</database>
      </mysql>
    </storage>
    <protocolInfo extend="yes"/>
  </server>
  <import hidden-files="no">
    <scripting script-charset="UTF-8">
      <common-script>/usr/share/mediatomb/js/common.js</common-script>
      <playlist-script>/usr/share/mediatomb/js/playlists.js</playlist-script>
      <virtual-layout type="builtin">
        <import-script>/usr/share/mediatomb/js/import.js</import-script>
      </virtual-layout>
    </scripting>
    <mappings>
      <extension-mimetype ignore-unknown="no">
        <map from="mp3" to="audio/mpeg"/>
        <map from="ogg" to="application/ogg"/>
        <map from="asf" to="video/x-ms-asf"/>
        <map from="asx" to="video/x-ms-asf"/>
        <map from="wma" to="audio/x-ms-wma"/>
        <map from="wax" to="audio/x-ms-wax"/>
        <map from="wmv" to="video/x-ms-wmv"/>
        <map from="wvx" to="video/x-ms-wvx"/>
        <map from="wm" to="video/x-ms-wm"/>
        <map from="wmx" to="video/x-ms-wmx"/>
        <map from="m3u" to="audio/x-mpegurl"/>
        <map from="pls" to="audio/x-scpls"/>
        <map from="ts" to="video/mpeg"/>
    <map from="vob" to="video/mpeg"/>
    <map from="wav" to="audio/wav"/>
    <map from="mpg" to="video/mpeg"/>
    <map from="aac" to="audio/x-aac"/>
    <map from="m4a" to="audio/mp4"/>
    <map from="mkv" to="video/x-matroska"/>
    <map from="mov" to="video/x-quicktime"/> 
    <map from="flv" to="video/x-flv"/>
    <map from="divx" to="video/x-divx"/>
      </extension-mimetype>
      <mimetype-upnpclass>
        <map from="audio/*" to="object.item.audioItem.musicTrack"/>
        <map from="video/*" to="object.item.videoItem"/>
        <map from="image/*" to="object.item.imageItem"/>
      </mimetype-upnpclass>
      <mimetype-contenttype>
        <treat mimetype="audio/mpeg" as="mp3"/>
        <treat mimetype="application/ogg" as="ogg"/>
        <treat mimetype="audio/x-flac" as="flac"/>
        <treat mimetype="image/jpeg" as="jpg"/>
        <treat mimetype="audio/x-mpegurl" as="playlist"/>
        <treat mimetype="audio/x-scpls" as="playlist"/>
        <treat mimetype="audio/x-wav" as="pcm"/>
        <treat mimetype="audio/L16" as="pcm"/>
      </mimetype-contenttype>
    </mappings>
  </import>
<transcoding enabled="yes">
    <mimetype-profile-mappings>  
      <transcode mimetype="audio/mpeg" using="vlcwav"/>    
      <transcode mimetype="video/x-flv" using="transvideo"/>
      <transcode mimetype="video/mp4" using="transvideo"/>
      <transcode mimetype="video/x-quicktime" using="transvideo"/>
      <transcode mimetype="application/ogg" using="vlcwav"/>
      <transcode mimetype="audio/x-ms-wma" using="vlcwav"/>
      <transcode mimetype="audio/x-ms-asf" using="vlcwav"/>
      <transcode mimetype="audio/x-flac" using="ffmpegwav"/>
      <transcode mimetype="audio/x-aac" using="vlcwav"/>
      <transcode mimetype="audio/mp4" using="vlcwav"/>
      <transcode mimetype="video/x-msvideo" using="transvideo"/>
      <transcode mimetype="video/x-ms-wmv" using="transvideo"/>
      <transcode mimetype="video/mpeg" using="mpeg2trans"/>
      <transcode mimetype="video/x-matroska" using="transvideo"/>
      <transcode mimetype="image/jpeg" using="rescalejpeg"/>
    </mimetype-profile-mappings>
    <profiles>
      <profile name="transvideo" enabled="yes" type="external">
        <mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
        <accept-url>no</accept-url>
        <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
        <agent command="mencoder-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
    <buffer size="10485760" chunk-size="262144" fill-size="524288"/>
      </profile>
      <profile name="mpeg2trans" enabled="yes" type="external">
        <mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
        <accept-url>no</accept-url>
        <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
        <hide-original-resource>yes</hide-original-resource>
        <agent command="mencoder-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
        <buffer size="28800000" chunk-size="512000" fill-size="120000"/>
      </profile>
      <profile name="ffmpegwav" enabled="yes" type="external">
        <use-chunked-encoding>no</use-chunked-encoding>
        <mimetype>audio/wav</mimetype>
        <accept-url>no</accept-url>
        <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
        <agent command="ffmpegaudio" arguments="%in %out"/>
        <buffer size="1048576" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="262144"/>
      </profile>
      <profile name="vlcwav" enabled="yes" type="external">
    <use-chunked-encoding>no</use-chunked-encoding> 
        <mimetype>audio/wav</mimetype>
        <accept-url>yes</accept-url>
        <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
        <agent command="vlc" arguments="-I dummy %in --sout #transcode{acodec=s16l,ab=192,channels=2}:standard{access=file,mux=wav,dst=%out} vlc:quit"/>
        <buffer size="512000" chunk-size="32000" fill-size="64000"/>
      </profile>
      <profile name="rescalejpeg" enabled="yes" type="external">
        <mimetype>image/jpeg</mimetype>
        <accept-url>no</accept-url>
        <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
        <accept-ogg-theora>no</accept-ogg-theora>
        <agent command="convert" arguments="-size 1080x720 %in -auto-orient -resize 1080x720 +profile '*' %out"/>
        <buffer size="50000" chunk-size="100" fill-size="100"/>
      </profile>
      <profile name="vlcyoutube" enabled="no" type="external">
        <mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
        <accept-url>yes</accept-url>
        <first-resource>yes</first-resource>
        <accept-ogg-theora>yes</accept-ogg-theora>
        <agent command="vlc" arguments="-I dummy %in --sout #transcode{vcodec=mp2v,vb=4096,canvas-width=448,canvas-height=252,acodec=mpga,ab=64,samplerate=44100,channels=1}:standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst=%out} vlc:quit"/> 
        <buffer size="14400000" chunk-size="256000" fill-size="80000"/>
      </profile> 
    </profiles>
  </transcoding>
</config>

Note the bold and italicized regions. The home designation should be your "/home/(username)/.mediatomb" directory, and the uuid is a unique 32 alpha-numeric string.

Lastly, my config.xml probably needs a lot of cleaning up also. I basically heavily modified the one avialable from the mediatomb website and didn't go and clean it up. Fo example, I could probably delete the "vlcyoutube" transcoding trigger as I'm using the transvideo one instead.

A couple of quick notes to build ffmpeg from svn under Fedora.

$svn checkout svn://svn.ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg/trunk ffmpeg
$cd ffmpeg
$./configure --prefix=/usr --incdir=/usr/include/ffmpeg --libdir=/usr/lib64 --shlibdir=/usr/lib64 --mandir=/usr/share/man --arch=x86_64 --enable-libdc1394 --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libgsm --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-libx264 --enable-libxvid --enable-x11grab --enable-avfilter --enable-avfilter-lavf --enable-postproc --enable-swscale --enable-pthreads --disable-static --enable-shared --enable-gpl --disable-debug --disable-optimizations --disable-stripping
$make
$su -
Password:
#make install

I basically used the same configure parameters (or as close too) as the original rpm packaged fedora build from rpmfusion. Satisfy the missing library requests if any errors come up after running the 'configure' script. Typically it will just be installing the 'devel' versions of the package.

Looking at ways to compress and encode movies/videos to a more compact size with minimal noticeable quality loss, led a search to some solid and well developed open source utilities. I run both Windows (home theatre) and Linux on a separate workstation so an open source solution made it much more flexible to use on both platforms.

Windows dvr-ms format is an absolute pain. Don't know why they don't just stick with an open standard like Matroska :) anyways...

First things first. Mencoder etc. has a hard time with DVR-MS files, so strip it using ffmpeg:

ffmpeg -y -i movie.dvr-ms -vcodec copy -acodec copy -f dvd movie.mpg

This extracts the mpg from the dvr-ms file to a more user-friendly format. Yes you'll lose the metadata information...

The following mencoder command creates a high quality h264 movie scaled to roughly 720x480 with aac audio (it all needs to be on one line).

mencoder -vf pullup,softskip,pp=fd,scale=720:-10,hqdn3d,harddup -lavdopts threads=2 -ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1200:subq=6:frameref=6:qcomp=0.8:8x8dct:b_pyramid:weight_b:me=umh:partitions=p8x8,i4x4:bime:brdo:nodct_decimate:trellis=1:direct_pred=auto:level_idc=30:nocabac:threads=auto -oac faac -faacopts br=128:raw:mpeg=4:tns:object=2 -of lavf -lavfopts format=mp4 -sws 9 -ofps 24000/1001 -srate 48000 -alang en movie.mpg -o movie.mp4

Rather than typing all that out, you can use mencoder's "-profile" parameter by creating a mencoder.conf file in ~/.mplayer/mencoder.conf with the following contents:

[h264mp4]
profile-desc="H.264 MP4"
vf=pullup,softskip,pp=fd,scale=720:-10,hqdn3d,harddup
lavdopts=threads=2
ovc=x264=yes
x264encopts=bitrate=1200:subq=6:frameref=6:qcomp=0.8:8x8dct=yes:b_pyramid=yes:weight_b=yes:me=umh:partitions=p8x8,i4x4:bime=yes:brdo=yes:nodct_dec
imate=yes:trellis=1:direct_pred=auto:level_idc=30:nocabac=yes:threads=auto
oac=faac=yes
faacopts=br=128:raw=yes:mpeg=4:tns=yes:object=2
of=lavf=yes
lavfopts=format=mp4
sws=9
ofps=24000/1001
srate=48000

In which case you can then run :

mencoder -profile h264mp4 movie.mpg -o movie.mp4

This creates a h.264 video stream and an aac encoded audio stream perfect for muxing into an MP4 container. Unfortunately mencoder's MP4 muxing is a little broken and will more than likely not play correctly in anything other than mplayer.

To mux it back into a more compliant MP4 format, run ffmpeg again:

ffmpeg -y -i movie.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy movie-remuxed.mp4

Make sure you use a different name for the mp4 output from ffmpeg above so you don't overwrite the original input file.