XVid encoding

[obsidian]

Hi board,

A current issue for me is to transcode Mpeg2 PS (or maybe even better: Mpeg2 TS with selection of one audio track and one subtitle) to XVid-Mpeg4.

The reason is that the displaying device (an Mpeg4-hardware-decoder) is very restricted. I know that it is able to decode XVid-encoded movies up to ASP L5.

Using VLC to transcode would be the ideal solution. I have tried to transcode using the h264- and the mp4v-codecs but these files won't be decoded.



In an older post the question regarding encoding to XVid-codec was anwered in this way:

Xvid is a mpeg4 encoder.
VLC uses ffmpeg as the encoder which is also a very good MPEG4 encoder.

Now, as far as I know ffmpeg itself is able to create XVid-encoding (or, to be more exact to use a codec which is compliant to ISO-Mpeg4-Part 2 and change the FOURCC from the default "DivX" to "XVid").

However, I am not sure if ffmpeg will do this on a Windows OS or only on Linux. The solution I am targeting at would run under Windows OS.



My questions are:

• - If VLC uses ffmpeg and if ffmpeg is able to create XVid-encoded movies, is there a way to make use of this within VLC?
  
  - Is there any way to use the installed XVid-codec directly from within VLC

Many thanks for any hints and advices.

Best regards
Obsidian

[Reven]

There isn't any way that I know of to directly do what you are asking. VLC cannot use any installed system codecs - it is multi-platform and doesn't support using any particular OS's installed codecs. There should be no issue with including an XViD library with VLC, though. That has my vote - I personally think, while the ffmpeg library is more versatile (does a lot more than just mpeg4), that XViD is more stable and mature. XViD is only mpeg4 - that's all the XViD project is out to do and they do it very well.

What I have done, and has worked for me in the past, is to output mpeg4 from VLC in an ASF container. Then I convert the ASF to AVI and then use a FourCC code changer to mark the AVI as XViD.

I agree that a great advanced option for VLC would be to be able to manually set the FourCC code of the video codec.