Remuxing get_iplayer downloads to play on my TV

[Jon Davies]

On 20 April 2012 15:35, Steve Champion <steve at stevechampion.com> wrote:
> BTW: TV is a Technika 23-231-BB-G
...
>> ... what would be the ffmpeg command line to do the
>> required remux?
>
>>> try this:
>>> ffmpeg -i programme.mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec libmp3lame -sameq
>>> programme.avi
>
> Thanks. Well, that did not yield something that my TV could play.

Mmm.  ok. Try this then:

ffmpeg -i programme.mp4 -vtag xvid -vcodec mpeg4 -acodec libmp3lame -sameq

> However, a
> bit of poking around (ffmpeg -codecs and a lucky guess) allowed me to find
> the following, which does yeld something my TV can play:
>
> ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec mpeg2video -acodec libmp3lame -sameq output.mpg

that would also work, but would produce a much bigger file as you noticed...

> Rather a huge file (why?) but conversion said 120fps

mpeg2 pre-dates mpeg4 and requires less processing power to compress
video - hence it transcodes more quickly - (but doesn't compress video
as much as mpeg4).  For the same quality files will be bigger, for the
same file size quality will be worse.

>>> you may also find the the "command" option in get_iplayer useful - it
>>> runs a command (or script) at the end of a download, and you can pass
>>> "<filename>" as a parameter which is expanded by get_iplayer as the
>>> name of the media file it's just downloaded.
>
>
> This I will definitely look into! It would be nice to have anything I
> download converted right away. This can work from the web interface, right?

erm, er ... "from" I'm really not sure (I'm not a user of the web
interface); "with" I don't see why not.

Jon