From 3d1ab9a99a1e20a3419ce273091bc79be68811be Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001
From: Robin Gareus
-Ardour supports a wide variety of video file-formats and video-codecs. More specifically, ardour actually does not support any video at all but delegates handling of video to ffmpeg which supports over 350 different video-codecs and more than 250 file-formats.
-
A short primer on video-files, formats and codecs â because it is often cause for confusion:
Video Formats and Codecs
-Each of the tracks by itself in encoded - using a Codec. Common Video-Codecs are h264, mpeg2, mpeg4, theora, mjpeg, wmv3. Audio-Codecs: mp2, mp3, dts, aac, wav/pcm. +Each of the tracks by itself in encoded - using a Codec. Common Video-Codecs are h264, mpeg2, mpeg4, theora, mjpeg, wmv3. Audio-Codecs: mp2, mp3, dts, aac, wav/pcm.
-Not all codecs can be packed into a given format. For example the 'mpeg' format is limited to mpeg2, mpeg4 and mp3 codecs (not entirely true) and generally naming conventions uses for format and codecs are cause for a lot of confusion. DVDs do have stringent limitations⦠+Not all codecs can be packed into a given format. For example the 'mpeg' format is limited to mpeg2, mpeg4 and mp3 codecs (not entirely true). DVDs do have stringent limitations as well. The opposite would be .avi; pretty much every audio/video codec can be contained in an .avi file-format.
-The export dialog includes presets for common format & codec combinations (such as DVD, web-video,..). If in doubt use one of the presets. +To make things worse, naming conventions for video codecs and formats are often identical (esp mpeg ones) which leads to confusion. +All in all it is a very wide and deep field. Suffice there are different uses for different codecs and formats. +
+ ++Ardour supports a wide variety of video file-formats and video-codecs. More specifically, ardour actually does not support any video at all but delegates handling of video to ffmpeg which supports over 350 different video-codecs and more than 250 file-formats.
-All in all it is a very wide and deep field. Suffice there are different uses for different codecs. When importing a video into ardour, it will be transcoded (transcoding: change from one format and codec to another) to avi/mjpeg for internal use (this allows reliable seeking to frames at low CPU cost - the file-size will increase, but hard-disks are large and fast).
-As last note: Every time a video is transcoded the quality gets worse. Hence for the final mastering/muxing process always to back to the original source of the video. +The export dialog includes presets for common format & codec combinations (such as DVD, web-video,..). If in doubt use one of the presets. +
+ ++As last note: Every time a video is transcoded the quality can only get worse. Hence for the final mastering/muxing process always to back to the original source of the video.
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