If you had one of these every day more affordable and really cheap mitzui and others DVD players that also reproduce vidx and xvid video and read USB sticks/Memory Cards, but not MP4 with AC3. Sure you want to be able to reproduce without have to burn a CD with something like nero or similar to convert between formats.
I tried ffmpeg on Debian and found some interesting things:
- Build lacks MP3 sound codec, cause patent problems on several countries
- Also DivX is not included as is commercially owned and the legal of this is not gray but more like black so not included (even when its a implementation of H264/MPEG-4VC, same or worse problem for DivX ;) (MPEG-4 version 3)
- Strange enough never can make Xvid output, I found this is because patent issues on several countries…
So even transforming to AVI, Indeo/M$/H264/MPEG-4, the audio where in mp2 or AC as cant make use of liblame without make a mess o compile my own ffmpeg.
In any case the magic incantation to get what I need was:
ffmpeg -i movie.mp4 -vcodec xvid -acodec mp3 movie.avi
This is cause before I have done a really big file with MPEG-1 video and mp2 sound (terrible if you wonder), to just found that my decoder reads well, but don’t support external subtitles on mpg files :( bummer.
Finally found that even in win you can use ffmpeg for free with WinFF (that regardless of the name runs on Linux and Win) [1] that gives nice menus and combos, yes I know that for win exist a monstrous encoder called Super [2] but that thing is really big, useful when you need FFmpeg , MEncoder , MPlayer , x264 , MusePack (mpc) , Monkey’s Audio (ape) ,Shorten Audio (shn) , Tom’s Audio Kompressor (tak) , True Audio (tta) , WavPack (wv) ,libavcodec library (compiled inside FFmpeg and MEncoder) & the theora/vorbis RealProducer’s plugIn… but normally FFmpeg is just enough.
By the way searching for info I reached 19 ffmpeg commands for all needs [3] that gives you a very good cheat sheet and examples of how craft ffmpeg switches and options.
[1] http://winff.org/html_new/
[2] http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html
[3] http://www.catswhocode.com/blog/19-ffmpeg-commands-for-all-needs