Converting MJPEG AVI to MJPEG MOV on MacOS?

Just let it all out, buddy. You're among friends here.
Post Reply
User avatar
gpvillamil
Wants to marry Resolume, and Resolume said "yes!"
Posts: 550
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 03:33
Location: San Francisco, California

Converting MJPEG AVI to MJPEG MOV on MacOS?

Post by gpvillamil »

So I have a large collection of clips, encoded in PicVideo MJPEG in AVI format. I've been carting them around for years, they play back easily in Resolume.

Now I need to do some work on them, but I notice that Adobe After Effects, Media Encoder, etc don't want to recognize their existence at all.

I can convert them one by one to H.264 MOV using VLC, but surely there is a better way? Ideally I'd like to re-encapsulate them, port them from MJPEG AVI to MJPEG MOV without re-encoding.

Any thoughts on how to do this?

User avatar
gpvillamil
Wants to marry Resolume, and Resolume said "yes!"
Posts: 550
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 03:33
Location: San Francisco, California

Re: Converting MJPEG AVI to MJPEG MOV on MacOS?

Post by gpvillamil »

aha!

ffmpeg with the "-c copy" option copies the video streams into a new container without re-encoding.

MJPEG in particular is a codec that is well supported across both platforms.

User avatar
gpvillamil
Wants to marry Resolume, and Resolume said "yes!"
Posts: 550
Joined: Mon Apr 04, 2005 03:33
Location: San Francisco, California

Re: Converting MJPEG AVI to MJPEG MOV on MacOS?

Post by gpvillamil »

Quicktime player did NOT like my MJPEG files converted with straight across copy, however re-encoding with ffmpeg at a high quality setting worked well:

ffmpeg -i infile.avi -c:v mjpeg -q:v 3 outfile.mov

The default quality setting yielded very poor quality files that were about 1/4 of the size of the originals. Setting the quality value to 3 made files that were roughly the same size as the original. The highest quality value is 2, and that led to slightly larger files.

If you are using a GUI like ff-Works on the Mac, the extra-hiqh-quality codec option for MJPEG seemed to be rather close to q:v 3 on ffmpeg.

Post Reply