[theora] Live CD/DVD for encoding?

Michael A. Peters mpeters at mac.com
Thu Aug 13 23:34:27 PDT 2009


Hi -
I'm running CentOS, which means many of the support libraries are a bit 
on the stale side.

I have occasional need to transcode to theora - but it seems the 
transcode program, which I have managed to successfully install, does 
not have theora as an output option. It seems I have to use a program 
called ffmpeg2theora which I just can not get to build on CentOS - I'm 
guessing because ffmpeg2theora really needs newer support libraries than 
I have available or maybe it is because I'm 64-bit? My media libraries 
are mostly from rpmforge and aren't *that* out of date.

I do NOT want to switch distros, I run CentOS specifically because I 
prefer the stability of older libraries without the bleeding edge quirks 
in day to day stuff that I always experience when I try more modern 
distros like Fedora or Ubuntu. But I guess I may need bleeding edge for 
this.

Anyone on this list know of live CD's/DVD's that include ffmpeg2theora?

My needs are motion jpeg (in avi container) to ogg/theora and standard 
DVD to ogg theora (not for piracy, for video camera clips transfered to 
DVD) - with ability to resize (shrink dimension) during the encoding 
process.

I've downloaded three different live iso's that claim to be for "media 
production" but none of them have ffmpeg2theora, so rather than waste 
additional bandwidth, I'd thought I'd ask if anyone here knows 
specifically of a live CD/DVD that does have it.

Unfortunately I do not own a copy of Windows nor do I wish to buy a mac 
nor do the videos really need any editing other than specifying time 
period I want (mplayer does that), so for this occasional use, a live 
linux DVD really probably is the best solution.

The purpose is to make short theora clips available on my field 
herpetology web site via the html5 video tag (IE clips of Rattlesnakes 
buzzing while fleeing to their hide or toads spawning, etc.).

I really would much rather use Ogg/Theora than something proprietary 
like DivX or other currently available options.


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