Re: [tlug] Video Editing Soft & Formats

["Josh Glover" <jmglov@example.com>]

On 17/07/07, Dave M G <dave@example.com> wrote:

> First, in consideration of Mencoder and ffmpeg. I am not an enemy of the
> command line just on principle. I do feel command lines have their
> place. However, I don't think video or graphics is one of them. Graphics
> are, by definition, a visual medium. Using pure text to manipulate
> images is like talking over the phone to tell someone how to paint a
> picture.

I disagree strongly here, but you knew I would when you wrote this. ;)

Using pure text to manipulate images is a time-tested concept in the
Unix world[1] [2] [3], and has the huge advantage of allowing you to
build shell scripts that perform very complicated transforms indeed.

For example, I have a shell script that takes a DVD and builds a
backup with everything the way I like it:

1. No Mediavision or region coding
2. English subtitles on by default; native language subtitles
preserved, all others thrown away
3. One and only one audio stream for the native language (I do not
watch dubs of any sort; fuck that), in order of preference: DTS, Dolby
5.1, Dobly 3.1, stereo, mono
4. 16:9 aspect ratio only
5. Only the main track and special features; no FBI warning,
commercials, etc; all trailers are moved to the end of the DVD
6. A trivial menu is written if there is no menu already on the DVD

So to do all of this, I just pop a DVD in my drive and run backup-dvd
(my script), which "thinks" for about 20 seconds and responds with a
huge long spew of command-line invocations of tools, allowing me to
(by default) approve all or edit any command to tweak it if necessary.

Can your GUI do that? I know you can save profiles and shite, but I
have yet to see a good graphical representation of a pipeline, which
is exactly what the Unix philosophy enables.

--
Cheers,
Josh

[1] http://www.imagemagick.org/
[2] http://www.mplayerhq.hu/
[3] et al.