Transcode (software)

Transcode is a free audio/video transcoder with a command-line interface for Unix-like operating systems. It uses FFmpeg's libavcodec library, and supports numerous formats (such as DV, MPEG-2, MPEG-4 Part 2, H.264,^[1] PVN^[2] as well as all the formats supported by libavcodec). It also includes a variety of pre/post filters for denoising, deinterlacing, smoothing, sharpening, etc. As for container formats, transcode was designed around AVI, and support for output to more modern container formats is still limited. For example, current versions of transcode do not support multiplexing into the popular MP4 container format; external tools must be used instead.^[3] Besides the main transcoding tool (the transcode executable itself), the package also contains a number of tools (avimerge, avisplit, tccat, tcextract etc.) for (de)multiplexing, concatenation, and other similar operations on multimedia files and streams.

Transcode was first released in 2001. It was developed for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. There is no version for Microsoft Windows, and the developers have no plans to create one.^[4]

See also

• MEncoder — another free command-line transcoder
• MPlayer, the media player built from the same source code as MEncoder
• FFmpeg, similar to MEncoder
• MediaCoder, a media transcoding application for Microsoft OSs, also related to MPlayer
• RetroCode, an open source mobile content encoder/decoder
• Mplayer Wikibook- almost all decoding-related and filtering arguments are shared with mencoder

References

External links

• Transcode Wiki
• Transcode usage examples
• DVD::Rip, a graphical DVD ripper based on Transcode
• Transcode reviewed by LWN.net (2004)
• Another review in Linux Magazine (2005 issue 13)