[svlug] standard: sharing video with other OS

[Florin Andrei]

David Hummel wrote:
> 
> Only a guess, but I believe an MPEG-4 Part 14 (*.mp4) file containing
> an H.264 video
> stream and an AAC audio stream should fit the bill...

That combination is definitely on my short list. The container can be 
created with MP4Box, which is part of the gpac package. The audio track 
can be generated with faac. It's the video track that worries me.

I've found an old HOWTO claiming that xvid4 can be coaxed to generate 
mp4video, clean enough so that it's playable with Quicktime, provided 
that you do the right incantation in the xvid config file.

The other option is, of course, ffmpeg, but with ffmpeg you never know 
when you're going to get clean, standards-compliant video, or it's gonna 
be some kind of amazing Rude Goldberg contraption that happens to be 
playable due to an even number of opposite errors that cancel each other 
out. I'll have to do a bunch of tests to see what actually happens.

I guess I could always export to huffyuv or some other lossless codec, 
and transcode to MP4 with a Windows app. But if that app is not free or 
it doesn't run under WINE, then no thanks.

Finally, I don't know enough about MP4. Does it support 
arbitrary-resolution square-pixels frames? If it does, I'd rather use 
that instead of wasting bandwidth for the letterbox on the material with 
non-standard resolutions, or instead of creating files in a non-square 
pixel format (there's always some poor innocent who gets victimized by 
the non-square pixel stuff when they try to get "creative" with the video).

-- 
Florin Andrei

http://florin.myip.org/