Following up my previous post, i've been playing more with HDTV content on my machines -- and spending more time re-coding content for my PS3 so I can watch it from the comfort of my lounge.
Using Avidemux is nice, but occassionally -- it's nice to stick it in a terminal, with relatively low overheads and use the GStreamer framework to do the same job.
So, here's two examples of how to use the CLI to generate content playable on the PS3.
For Standard Definition (SDTV) content -- you can use:
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="input.avi" ! decodebin name="decode" decode. ! queue ! ffmpegcolorspace ! ffenc_mpeg4 bitrate=999999 gop-size=24 qmin=2 qmax=31 flags=0x00000010 ! avimux name=mux ! filesink location="output.avi" decode. ! queue ! audioconvert ! lame name=enc vbr=0 ! queue ! mux.
As of the 2.42 firmware, the PS3 has issues playing VBR audio -- so you have to explicitly turn it off (setting it to CBR audio) using the vbr=0 option to lame.
For High Definition (HDTV) content in .MKV format -- the x264 encoder works better, with a higher quality re-encode at the expense of a larger output file (obviously, if you've downloaded a HDTV file that's already been encoded in the .avi format, you'd want to use the SDTV code above, because the .avi file would already have significant quality loss over the original source material)
In HDTV, we can also use AAC audio to generate 4.1 channel audio -- as opposed to recoding to MP3.
gst-launch-0.10 filesrc location="input.avi" ! decodebin name="decode" decode. ! queue ! ffmpegcolorspace ! x264enc ! ffmux_mp4 name=mux ! filesink location="output.avi" decode. ! queue ! audioconvert ! faac name=enc ! queue ! mux.
Where input.avi is the path to your existing media source andoutput.avi is the path and file that you'd like to save.
important note: Yes, the full stop (after the mux.) in both cases is intentional -- if you take it out, GStreamer will complain about the pipeline.
