[theora] Is there something like qt-faststart for theora?

Michael A. Peters mpeters at mac.com
Sat Sep 5 23:11:49 PDT 2009


One thing I noticed though when reading about ffmpeg to make the h.264 
was that for internet, you could use qt-faststart to move some stuff (I 
think called MOOV) to the front of the file allowing the file to start 
playing before it was finished downloading.

That certainly helps quite a bit, I was wondering if there is a similar 
type of thing for theora? Theora files I host do not seem to start 
playing until the entire file has finished downloading (FireFox 3.5 via 
video tag and other browsers via cortado).

I'm new to this whole making videos for the web (er, at all) thing, it 
would be nice if the theora version of the files could start playing 
before they have finished downloading, and I'm wondering if I've just 
missed something that makes it possible.

This is how I'm making my ogv (and mp4) files in ubuntu 9.04:

#!/bin/bash

base=`echo $1 |sed -e s?"\.dv$"?""?`

width=384
height=288

#-s 384x288

# first make the theora
[ -f ${base}.ogv ] && rm -f ${base}.ogv
ffmpeg2theora -v 4 -x ${width} -y ${height} ${base}.dv -o ${base}.ogv

# now make h.264
[ -f ${base}.mp4 ] && rm -f ${base}.mp4
ffmpeg -i ${base}.dv -an -pass 1 -vcodec libx264 -s ${width}x${height} 
-vpre fastfirstpass -b 2048k -bt 2048k -threads 0 -y -f mp4 /dev/null

TMP=`mktemp ${base}XXXXXXXX.mp4`

ffmpeg -i ${base}.dv -acodec libfaac -ab 128k -pass 2 -vcodec libx264 -s 
${width}x${height} -vpre hq -b 2048k -bt 2048k -threads 0 -y ${TMP}

qt-faststart ${TMP} ${base}.mp4

rm -f ${TMP} x264_2pass.log ffmpeg2pass-0.log


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