Exporting to MPEG 4 and OGG

[ssp]

I am trying to export some DV videos to MPEG 4 and possibly Ogg and tried a few of the applications available for that task on the Mac.

It turned out that the filtering/denoising/sharpening VLC applies to the movie is pretty much exactly what I need for the task at hand (much better than iMovie or HandBrake for my purposes), so I'd very much like to use it for this task.

I tried doing this with both the 1.0.5 and 1.1.0-pre3 versions and it seems like the features are a bit flakey:

1.0.5/MPEG 4:
→ audio: no MPEG 4 audio offered
→ video: H.264 working fine

1.1.0-pre3/MPEG 4:
→ audio: MPEG 4 audio support is available but the sound quality is very poor with static/jittering noises all over
→ video: H.264 video appearing black when opening the file in QuickTime Player

1.0.5/Ogg:
→ playback of the video and audio halts all the time

1.1.0-pre3/Ogg:
→ video and audio seem to work all right.

So it looks like things are improving but I do wonder whether there's any hope of seeing this in a working shape soon-ish.

In case that plays any role the input material I am using are DV files coming straight from the camera. According to VLC their format is
video: DV Video 720x576 @ 25 fps (PAL)
audio: PCM S16 LE Stereo 32kHz 16bit
If you require additional information, please let me know and I'll try to find it out.

A bonus question: I read somewhere about there being a VLC command line tool as well. Would that be a good option for doing such conversions when wanting to batch convert a bunch of files? [OK, I figured out that all I need to do is use the binary inside the application bundle and add some command line options. Let's hope I'll manage to figure out the right ones for what I want to do…]

Thanks.

[ssp]

I played around a bit with the command line tool now and got the following results in case that's any help:

with VLC 1.0.5:

I ran the command

/Applications/Vision/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/VLC -I dummy /Volumes/Jakob/iMovie\ Events.localized/Brunetti/clip-2009-07-31\ 16\;28\;35.dv --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=800,scale=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=32000}:std{access=file,mux=mp4,dst=/tmp/output.mp4}' vlc://quit

which gave the same audio distortions I get when running from the GUI. Terminal output contained a bunch of messages like these:

[0x291798] main input error: ES_OUT_SET_(GROUP_)PCR is called too late, increasing pts_delay to 300 ms
[0x291798] main input error: ES_OUT_RESET_PCR called

Perhaps that's a hint as to what's going wrong there?

When running the latest version built from git with the same options:

/Users/ssp/Developer/builds/Debug/vlc_build_dir/x86_64/bin/vlc --plugin-path /Users/ssp/Developer/builds/Debug/vlc_build_dir/x86_64/modules -I dummy /Volumes/Jakob/iMovie\ Events.localized/Brunetti/clip-2009-07-31\ 16\;28\;35.dv --sout='#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=800,scale=1,acodec=mp4a,ab=128,channels=2,samplerate=32000}:std{access=file,mux=mp4,dst=/tmp/output.mp4}' vlc://quit

I get better audio with that, similar to the 1.1.0-pre3 quality but still far from perfect. I also get no picture when viewing in QuickTime Player. I guess that happens because the Terminal output says

x264 [info]: profile High, level 3.0

and QuickTime doesn't support the High H.264 profile.

What remains open for me would be the following questions:

1. How can I get _good_ quality sound without the 'jitter' I currently have?
2. How can I make VLC use the H.264 Main profile that QuickTime can play as well?

[ssp]

Answering to myself again after going through VLC's GUI preferences and finding the popup menu to change to the Main profile at level 5.1 as used in the 1.0.5 version (instead of the High profile at level 3).

However QuickTime still can't play the the file created by this, which puzzles me.