Re: video support again: compressing video

[Emanuele Olivetti <emanuele relativita com>]

Lorenzo Milesi wrote:
> Emanuele Olivetti ha scritto:
>> Would it be interesting to embed such a function in
>> future f-spot releases? A basic implementation could be just
>> calling an external program, provided the desired level
>> of compression.
>>   
> Ciao
> I am not a developer, but from what has been told before I guess this
> won't be implemented into the main code. Many times Stephane said that
> video support in F-Spot will be VERY basic, limited to importing and
> tagging.
>
> There are more chances that it can be handled by an addin, that will
> call external programs like you said. I believe there won't be problems
> for this!

Ciao,

You're right about what Stephane said and I agree with him. But
at least in my case (Canon Ixus 65) it is a nonsense to store videos
in their original format (after a quick check I can confirm: 1Gb for
less than 9 minutes at high quality). So to have them in f-spot I
must compress.

Since I do believe that many other cameras have the same feature it
seems quite mandatory to think about compression in case f-spot will
handle small cameras' hi-quality videos.

What do you mean exactly by 'f-spot addin'? Is there a way to
manage external program invocation from f-spot now?

Here is a one-liner I use (mplayer/mencoder+lame), for those of you
interested
in that:
---compress.sh---
mencoder -channels 1 -srate 11025 -oac mp3lame -lameopts
mode=3:abr:br=16 -ovc lavc -lavcopts
vcodec=mpeg4:vhq:vbitrate=$1:vpass=1 -ffourcc DX50 -o $2.$1 $2
-----------------
The first argument is the video bit rate (usually 1000-5000
for me, but depends on your settings) and the second  is the filename.
So "./compress.sh 3000 MVI_2193.AVI" yields "MVI_2193.AVI.3000" (divx4)
at ~1/6 of the original size.
I'm not an expert in encoding so feel free to criticize/improve :)

Cheers,

Emanuele