IPod Video Transcoding In Linux
I’ve cobbled together a pretty good tool for transcoding video in pretty much any format into the MPEG-4 format that iPods play. You have to have the VLC media player installed because it does the actual transcoding. So in other words, I’ve researched a program that was already out there and made an easy wrapper script. Damn I’m smart. Yay modularity! Seriously though, there aren’t a lot of guides out there that are easy to follow. Maybe someone will find this useful. It works great on Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon 7.10.
Here’s my bash script:
#!/bin/bash
extension=`echo "$1" | awk -F . '{print $NF}'`
name=`basename "$1" ."$extension"`
vlc -vvv "$name.$extension" \
--sout "#transcode{vcodec=mp4v, \
vb=1024, \
scale=1, \
acodec=mp4a, \
ab=128, \
channels=2}:standard{access=file, \
url=$name.mp4}" \
--aspect-ratio "4:3" \
--sout-transcode-width 360 \
--sout-transcode-height 240 \
--sout-transcode-fps 30 \
2>/dev/null