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Whilst I am mostly editing films in OpenShot, I am not sure it has quite caught up with cinelerra in terms of features. Plus the currently installed version of OpenShot is still a little buggy and crashes sometimes.

However, I am having problems getting my footage into the correct format for cinelerra. I have the correct video codecs installed (mpeg-4), and I'm converting footage from various different camera devices into the quicktime container format with mpeg-4 video. However, the cinelerra documentation says it also wants mpeg-4 audio format which I believe is (als) when using avconv.

I have some m2v files with no audio (back from when I was using a mac and final cut to make dvds), and we would like to re-edit these. So I want to use something like in shell script:

for f in *m2v; do avconv -i "$f" -c:a als -c:v mpeg4 "${f/%m2v/mov}"; done

However if I call this the mov file produced has really poor quality (although both it and the source have 720x576x25), and if I look at its properties in Nautilus, it says that its video codec is 'ffodivx', and not mpeg-4.

Is there anything I can do to convert these videos into format desired without the quality loss? Other files I've converted (from .dv and .mts) convert fine using the same method. So I presume the issue is in decoding the source rather than encoding the result. In Nautilus the source file says its video codec is FFMPEG2, bitrate 7519 Kb/s.

The result only has 556 Kb/s, maybe this is the problem?

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Okay, I'm not sure if this is the best way to do it or not, but I've managed to convert the video without quality loss by specifying the bitrate when calling avconv as so:

for f in *m2v; do avconv -i "$f" -b:v 8000k -c:a als -c:v mpeg4 "${f/%m2v/mov}"; done
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  • Mark it as Answered then - I was going to recommend ffmpeg by the way =)
    – Wilf
    Dec 7, 2013 at 17:38
  • @wilf I've suggested it as an answer. It seems to work but before I mark it as answered I was waiting to see if someone had a better one and a good reason why not to do it this way... ;)
    – ToniWidmo
    Dec 7, 2013 at 19:15

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