[OT] Determining Video Formats

David G. Mackay mackay_d at bellsouth.net
Thu Mar 27 14:43:19 UTC 2008


On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 10:05 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-03-27 at 08:21 -0400, James Pifer wrote:
> > On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 22:26 -0430, Patrick O'Callaghan wrote:
> > > On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 16:16 -0700, Paul Lemmons wrote:
> > > > I am looking for a way to look at an AVI file and see how it was encoded 
> > > > with enough detail that I could reproduce the process using transcode or 
> > > > mencoder. I have a media server (D-Link DSM520) that plays most videos 
> > > > absolutely perfectly. Some, though, it has trouble keeping audio sync. I 
> > > > would like to compare the videos that work without issue to those that 
> > > > have issues to see if I can identify what the differentiator might be. I 
> > > > should then be able to identify those with problems and re-transcode 
> > > > them to look like the files without the problem. That is the goal, anyway.
> > > > 
> > > > I suspect this is real easy but I am just not finding it and I am 
> > > > completely Googled out. Any pointers in the right direction would be 
> > > > much appreciated!
> > > 
> > > The tovid package ("yum install tovid") has a command called idvid,
> > > which might be at least part of what you want.
> > > 
> > > poc
> > > 
> > 
> > I was/am in a similar situation trying to figure out a way to transcode
> > videos for my son's Zune. So far the only tool that has worked is crappy
> > MS Movie Maker. Anyway, I found this windows tool which I think is free:
> > GSpot. Just google and it should be the first thing returned. 
> > 
> > I will check out tovid as well!
> 
> Note that most Linux transcoders are simply frontends to parts of the
> 'transcode' package, which has a zillion options and can almost
> certainly do what you want if you can figure it out :-)
> 
> ffmpeg is also useful and somewhat simpler.

transcode has tcprobe, which tries to get information about audio and
video from a media source.  He also indicated that he might use
mencoder, which implies that he might have mplayer as well.  Running
mplayer in a console with the -v flag set gives you a ton of information
about what's playing.

Dave





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