[TriLUG] FOSS formats for digital video

[Cristóbal Palmer]

On Thu, Apr 10, 2008 at 8:06 PM, Joseph Mack NA3T <jmack at wm7d.net> wrote:
>  If the teacher does all the editing on a Mac, will the
>  stream be converted to iMovie format before the editing and
>  it won't be convertible to other formats post edit? Are
>  there format converters? How do I get a multiple formats?

Firstly, .mov is the container format that imovie uses, and several
linux media players can handle .mov containers. Secondly, she'll
likely put h.264 video and aac audio in the .mov. If she does that,
some media players may barf, but at a minimum mplayer and vlc should
play it.

Honestly though... just have her upload it to youtube and call it a day?

If your concern is keeping archive-quality video, make the video codec
MPEG-2 and use a lossless audio codec or just raw wav. The file will
be huge-tastic, and I don't even know if imovie will do that, but
really, how high-quality do you need a video of your talk to be?
Transcoding video is rather a PiTA. I suggest keeping an archival,
high-quality original around for encoding to lossy formats at a future
date rather than transcoding a compressed video.

For interesting stuff on video production under Linux, have a
look-see: http://www.ibiblio.org/joey/videolinux/

>  What format(s)/protocols are cross platform, or at least
>  well supported in Linux?

Container: MP4 (.mp4 file extension)
Video codec: MPEG-4
Audio codec: AAC

you should also be able to do the same as above with MOV (.mov) container.

Can you play the videos here (http://folkstreams.net/) under linux? If
not, please let me know. I should fix them. :P I can't play them
directly in firefox, but they work with mplayer. If you can play them,
you should be fine with what she produces.

Cheers,
-- 
Cristóbal M. Palmer
http://tinyurl.com/3apraw "They also abandoned other volumes, later,
while fleeing from the librarians."