Mac video conversion from command line?

[Devin Asay]

On Nov 11, 2011, at 11:35 AM, Phil Davis wrote:

> Hey People,
> 
> Do you use a command line tool of some sort on your Mac to convert .mov files to web formats? I sure would like to hear about it.
> 
> I'm expecting that I need to end up with several file types as described in this piece of advice from the web:
> 
> Make one version that uses WebM (VP8 + Vorbis).
> Make another version that uses H.264 baseline video and AAC “low complexity” audio in an MP4 container.
> Make another version that uses Theora video and Vorbis audio in an Ogg container.
> 
> Here is the advice source:
> http://diveintohtml5.info/video.html
> 
> Thanks for your input! My goal is to create a LC front end to manage the commandline-driven coversion process.

Phil,

You might want to look into FFMPEG <http://ffmpeg.org/>, an open source project that I used in one LC app to transcode video for uploading to a server. It was fairly easy to figure out, and there was an easy-to-follow set up instructions for compiling it to your specific platform and OS. (One thing I discovered was that it needed to be compiled separately for Leopard vs. Snow Leopard. Once it was compiled I just made it part of my .app bundle and the application makes shell calls to it as needed.

HTH

Devin


Devin Asay
Humanities Technology and Research Support Center
Brigham Young University