The VideoLAN Forums

Hi all.. i was wondering if it's possible to use vlc as a command line tool for transcoding video files in a single command..

like

>vlc [some parameters about codecs and stuff] input.file output.file

or if i can use a configuration file containing informations about transcoding...

i need this so that i can use this in a sort of web application or a bash script.

hey,

yes this should be possible.
Take a look at: http://wiki.videolan.org/index.php/Transcoding and http://www.videolan.org/doc/streaming-h ... /ch03.html (Chapters 3 and 4).

As the syntax is not that easy, you could first use the build-in wizard. You can easily manage your settings and at the end just copy the automatically built command to your command line.

If you only need to transcode files without any video or audio-output or without streaming I would suggest to use ffmpeg directly. Because for some formats VLC only calls some methods of ffmpeg to transcode the files - so there is a speed up if you use ffmpeg directly.