Using mencoder to convert from AVI to MPEG

I recently had a friend record a video clip of a performance and send it to me. The video turned out great, but it was a whopping 240 MB for 2 minutes and 15 seconds. Not only is that a bit of a nuisance, but it’s also beyond the upload limits of video hosting sites like YouTube.

I had a lot of difficulty trying to figure out how to use either ffmpeg or mencoder to do the conversion, but ultimately this command worked:

mencoder MVI_1195.AVI -of mpeg -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg1video -oac mp3lame -srate 44100 -o soulja-boy.mpg

I was able to modify someone else’s command (found here) to do the trick for me. I think something is still off though… as the mpeg thinks it’ll only 41 seconds long.. I’m guessing the perfect solution lies in some different bitrate/sampling settings… *shrugs*

But hey, it works! And the resulting video is only 14.5 MB (not to mention awesome)! 🙂