Alice in Userland

more adventures in video encoding / the incapabilities of ffmpeg

So. I went back and used this post to try to convert Haibane Renmei into rockbox format. The difference being, Lain is in .avi format, and Haibane Renmei is in an .mkv container. I used the script from lain, and got no subtitles. There is no subtitle extracting argument for ffmpeg encoding. So, mencoder, here we go. I need a 320×240 mpeg2 video.

Okay, mencoder FAILS AT ENCODING ANYTHING.

First extracting subs from mkv container with mkvtoolnix:

mkvextract tracks Haibane\ Renmei\ 01* 3:1.srt

Using mencoder to add subs:

mencoder Haibane*\ 01\ * -sub 1.srt -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -of mpeg -noskip -vf harddup -o menc-h01.mpg

which produces an unsupported format for rockbox, and something only playable in mplayer. Next, reformat it with ffpeg:

ffmpeg -i menc-h01.mpg -acodec libmp3lame -vcodec mpeg2video -s 320×240 -b 1200kb ff1.mpg

I had to downgrade to lame 3.97 first, however, because otherwise it’s choppy as fuck due to buffer problems.

The output from mencoder is smooth, but the final output from ffmpeg is choppy, seeming no matter what I do. So, fuck it, I’ll live with choppy video.

edit – okay fuck it seriously. the audio and video are horribly out of sync. fuck motherfucking ffmpeg, fuck mencoder. I don’t need videos on my POS ipod.