Hello, I hope this is not an inappropriate list for this. This is the list suggested by http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/ I use Linux exclusively at the moment and do not plan on buying a Mac, but I am working on a CMS including html5 media support. Patent licensing costs forbid decoding proprietary video formats on the server for transcode into Ogg Theora so I am looking for a way that non technically inclined (IE afraid of the CLI) users can produce Ogg Theora files on their own to upload (along with h.264). I'm hoping that with XiphQT installed, for Mac users anyway it is as simple selecting Ogg Theora on some kind of export menu from QuickTime Pro or iMovie. Is that the case? Secondly, is the software stable enough for use by the general population? If XiphQT is not a suitable solution, is there another that is user friendly? My understanding is that many of the solutions out there are CLI only (IE ffmpeg2theora which I use on Linux) and often require using ffmpeg first to get the video into a format that ffmpeg2theora can work with. I know on Linux I frequently end up splitting the audio and video before running ffmpeg2theora because some source files have interlacing issues that ffmpeg2theora does wrong (part of video interlaced, part not) so I have to first fix that in ffmpeg, then encode it with ffmpeg2theora (and transcode audio seperately), then use oggz-merge to put them back together - and that is not the kind of thing I want to walk clueless users through. If I had a Mac (or a PC running Windows) maybe I could play with it and answer these myself, but I simply do not at this point in time. Thank you, Michael A. Peters
I've had fairly good luck with FireFogg. <http://firefogg.org> It's a Firefox extension that does video encoding to both Ogg Theora and WebM free/open video formats. It should run on any recent version of Firefox on any OS. There may be better options for Windows, but since I'm exclusively a Linux user myself, I can't comment on any Windows or Mac applications. ~Kyle
On 3 November 2011 08:15, Michael A. Peters <mpeters at domblogger.net> wrote:> Hello, I hope this is not an inappropriate list for this. > This is the list suggested by http://www.xiph.org/quicktime/The theora list might have been better, since you're talking about video, but this will do.> > I use Linux exclusively at the moment and do not plan on buying a Mac, > but I am working on a CMS including html5 media support. > > Patent licensing costs forbid decoding proprietary video formats on the > server for transcode into Ogg Theora so I am looking for a way that non > technically inclined (IE afraid of the CLI) users can produce Ogg Theora > files on their own to upload (along with h.264). > > I'm hoping that with XiphQT installed, for Mac users anyway it is as > simple selecting Ogg Theora on some kind of export menu from QuickTime > Pro or iMovie. Is that the case?Sort of. Unfortunately I can't really recommend XiphQT for this. While it was possible to use XiphQT to export directly to theora from FCP on older MacOS, the export interface was never that polished, and Apple has now abandoned Quicktime Components and external format support, so without an awful lot of work (which no one has volunteered in the past few years) this isn't going to be a good option for non-technical folks. Probably the best workflow is to have them export at high quality and then transcode using a separate application. Kyle mentioned FireFogg, which is a wrapper around ffmpeg2theora. This is a great option for an upload service, since your cms can signal the encoder profile it would like, but the actual encoding happens on the client side. However, it's still using ffmpeg so it's still without a patent license, and it requires Firefox. The best thing would be a 'qt2theora' programme which used the system decoders to make a free format version, but someone would have to write that. -r -- Ralph Giles Xiph.org Foundation for open multimedia