Video Encoding

[sjwaste]

Alright, so I'm going to get going on my encoder plugin. I wanted to get some opinions on initial codec support.

Since GB-PVR is primarily Windows-based, does it seem feasible to use the WMV format for archival purposes? Implementation is by far the easiest, as MS has a Windows Media Encoder SDK, and its a trivial amount of code to use. I'd like to know if it makes sense to you developers to use, though. I'd eventually like to add support for XviD and DivX, which seem as though they'll be slightly more difficult.

On a more broad note, does anyone have experience with writing a video encoder? I figure I might be able to use libavcodec, which mencoder seems to have done nicely, but it's somewhat buggy, at least on the machines i've used it on. Any advice on that front? It's desirable because it supports these

Does anyone have any input or advice from having already crossed this bridge?

[KingArgyle]

Check out the doom9.org forums. You should be able to get almost any of your video encoding questions answered there. Personally, I'd like XVid support, it's my primary choice when it comes to video compression. WMV is fine as well, but I've experienced some problems with it in the past (extremely CPU intensive).

[jorm]

The other thing to consider is decoders. Since mvp users will not be able to play wmv unless we find a decoder. We already have one for xvid/divx.

[jorm]

have you looked at the autogk script. You can search on the form for it. Posted by king Argyle. It is a command line for converting to xvid.

[sjwaste]

I want to try and avoid calling an external program to encode, since I want to be able to handle errors and monitor progress.

I should (hopefully) be able to use libavcodec to support DivX and XviD. I'm looking into that right now. If that works, it really shouldn't be too bad.

[stattik]

Hi sjwaste,

Have you considered automated processing of cutlists a la Cuttermaran?

[sjwaste]

I did some digging around tonight to find an easy way to support multiple codecs, and I think I've found a good resource for anyone here that's interested.

Here's some code examples to use the Windows AVI File API, part of VFW. The advantage is that it'll use just about any codec installed on the machine. I haven't looked too hard at it yet, but I'm about to. I hope this helps anyone else interested in the topic.

Here

[sjwaste]

Here's a .NET wrapper for the Avi File library. It's done in SharpDevelop. I found it over at CodeProject.

Here