Encoding Movies with x264 and mplayer · 2009-12-04 17:09 by Black in Scripts
An easy way to encode movies is mencoder. Unfortunately, it is fairly outdated and it’s muxers are mostly problematic. A better way is to use the tools directly: mplayer for decoding, x264 to encode the video, a suitable audio encoder, and a muxer for the container format that is desired.
I wrote an encoder script to handle this all easily. The core is using named pipes, constructs that act like files but don’t actually store content, but relay it:
Encoding Core
- mkfifo fifo.y4m fifo.wav
- x264 fifo.y4m -o out.mkv &
- faac -q 128 fifo.wav -o out.m4a &
- mplayer in.mpg -vo yuv4mpeg:file=fifo.y4m -ao pcm:file=fifo.wav:fast
- mkvmerge -o result.mkv out.mkv out.m4a
What this does: First it creates two named pipes of the desired name. Then the encoder programs for video and audio are started. They read from the named pipes, which blocks until an other process writes data into them. As last process, mplayer is started, writing raw output into the two named pipes with the file based video and audio output module. After encoding is complete, the two resulting video and audio streams are merged. If everything went well, the streams should fit perfectly.
The script also contains a lot of maintenance code that handles encoding and decoding in their own screen sub-sessions. That way the output from all tools can be seen easily… but it’s not really useful… :)
Problems with this method are the inability to handle variable framerate content and depending on the muxer the loss of meta data such as framerate and view aspect ratio/display size.