[Novalug] Video converter

[Bryan J. Smith]

Okay, replace "idiot" with "too silly to the point of a-hole."
I apologize regardless, I just found this stuff over 5 years ago
on Freshmeat and have been using what I use since.

I typically have a workflow with a high-quality, "source" video
which I always encode into the end-desired format -- H.262,
MPEG-2, DivX, etc... and then I use the appropriate solution
to package it for the device (iPod, DVD Menu, etc...).  So I
might end up using a couple different programs, but it is very
"seemless" because the GUI programs are all working on the
same tree.

Just like when I do photoediting, I don't edit from JPEG, I edit
from RAW, and then put to whatever end-format I want (be it
various JPEG, PDF with other things, etc...  I might use a few
different programs to do a few things (although see my new,
recent post on asking what others are using for their workflow).

The problem with many DVD authoring programs is that they
will not always encode to a quality that viable, and sometimes
fetches the wrong source file from previous editing.  I had to
correct some videos done by my family who were wondering
why the video quality came out so bad -- some product they
got at Best Buy (cannot remember).

I set them up with Handbrake with a pre-made option sets to
do the encoding and then they took those resulting files and put
them to iPod, DVD, all under Windows.  I don't understand the
number of programs that convert to DivX, then back to MPEG-2
for DVD, without maintaining the "lossless" source.

I don't see how the all-in-one program is any more seemless here,
but I'm not familiar with some of the Windows programs that some
are using.  So my ignorance does apply, and that's part of why
I apologized.



----- Original Message ----
From: John Franklin <franklin at elfie.org>

On Oct 6, 2009, at 2:35 PM, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> Okay, because I'm the idiot here ... let me point out that was 1 search.
> I was thinking that people could "follow my lead" and do more searches.
> I was merely pointing to FreshMeat, with an example.

You're not an idiot.  The problem with your post is that was a bad example of an "add GUI" search.  A lot of us (myself included) have done searches for authoring apps like that and in more places with no good answers.

No, I don't consider a DVD authoring program that can't figure out what kind of video it was handed thus requiring a second application for transcoding to be a good solution.  It's reasonable if I want to hand-optimize the video, but not if I just want a quick DVD for grandma / presentation / whatever.  IMHO, an excellent authoring app would include a transcoder with easy, common options for quick authoring and the ability to hand tweak every encoder option.

jf
--John Franklin
franklin at elfie.org
ICBM: 39º 01' 58.4"N 77º 24' 49.6"W Z+84m