1 Response to “ffmpeg”

1. 1 Sebastien Gomez
   March 13, 2006 at 8:41 pm

   http://sourceforge.net/projects/ffmpeg/

   An amazingly powerful application that every video editor needs to add to his collection. I have opened up ffmpegx countless times to standardize formats when coming from different sources.

   This software is so simple but underneath its user friendly format lies a monster codec converter. It is a simple as a drag and drop of your video files, a few clicks of tabs and you’re done. The only downfall of this software is its speed if you’re not using a G5 dual processor. Obviously you’re expected to be waiting a long time for a file to go from an .avi to an .mp4 (especially if the file is larger than 500MB) but I found that if you can use Apple’s Compressor to create your high quality MPEG2 for DVD; you’re better off because after all it’s all about speed.

   For those of you who read “speed” and say:”Yeah, ok speed but I want quality too”. Well with ffmpegx you’re getting all the quality and customization that you need. To give you an idea, I just coverted a 37.5MB MPEG1 file into a AVI XviD. It took 5 minutes, brought down the file size to 10MB and amazingly kept the quality the same to an untrained eye. I was blown away. I kept playing both files side by side and stood there in awe. The noise reduction is mind boggling.

   For those of you who want to watch the software in action; I just made a quick tutorial that explains some of the different options and gives an overview look at ffmpegx. Find the video here: http://www.gomezproductions.com/misctutorials.html

   Try it out today and see for yourself.