Powerful Multimedia Command-Line Tools, Part II—Transcode
Friday, January 18 2008 @ 02:58 PM EST Contributed by: sde
MEncoder has supported video encoding for a long time with the MPlayer Project and FFmpeg, which also now is part of MPlayer now. Transcode is a new command-line tool on the horizon for video and audio transformations. Transcode used to give me horrors, but it is much better now. It does take some time to learn its wonderfully unintuitive syntax—the author used all the lowercase and uppercase English alphabet letters for specifying the command-line options. Using longer mnemonic options common in other Linux commands might have made things easier. Anyway, let's get to the meat of the matter.
You can apply certain video filters to smooth, blur, enhance, add or remove logos, apply masks and so on with Transcode. But before we get to all of that, here's a piece of advice from the trenches. Do the following:
$ tcmodinfo -p
Then, go to the directory and see what import modules, export modules and filters came with your Transcode program. Mine did not contain several export modules, and a few filters were missing.
