The VideoLAN Forums

hi I was wondering is there a switch to transcode to gray scale. I know I can make vlc display in gray. but what I want to do is convert fom colour
input, transcode to gray scale mpg4 and transport the stream. via the net.
perhaps I am just missing it. could you give it to me in a example command line if there is

thank - you for your time

sash

I'm not sure how suited vlc is for this and wether it will work.

to bad it would be great if I could transcode to gray scale. I tried different commandline and none I tried would do it..

otherwise I can broadcast to the net no problem. and can be reached in german. I was just hoping I could reduce the colours so I could get better picture quality. I though ffmpeg had colour to grey scale switch. but guess I was wrong. I guess there is no frame rate adjustment either. where it can be dropped from 29 to 15 or 25 to 12 either..

vlc has a --grayscale option, but i don't think it has been tested in a long time by anyone.

hi DJ

thanks for your help it is appreciated

I tried the grayscale switch but i could not get it to work. I looked deeper into ffmpeg. in both vlc and ffmpeg itself. and I tried commands lines listed for ffmpeg encoder but they did not work either. I see some of the commandlines are the same and some are slightly different.. when compared to ffmpeg and vlc transcoder options

I also checked into the vlc ffmpeg encoder options it seems to allow auto contrast and lunminace control. I would think there should be saturation control too. if I could just set the saturation to zero that would be the same as gray scale..

is there any where that has a complete list of command line options for vlc. because all I find is partial lists. i looked through 3 docs that you have listed on the website. and they seem to be incomplete.. and it pretty hard to get it off your pop up windows, because they dissappear so fast. by the time you find your place in the long list it dissapears again.

thank you for your time
sash