How to create WebM files on a Mac? (alterntives to Miro Converter?)

[Daniel Carrera]

Hello,

I am making a website for my supervisor where he is going to put up
videos of some of his seminar talks. He is happy to include the videos
in a few formats to reach a wider audience and I am thinking of
including WebM in that list. He runs Mac OS X, so I need to find an OS
X program that is easy to use and will produce decent WebM files.

The only program I know for Mac is Miro Converter, but Miro makes very
large WebM files. For example, we made a 20-second presentation at
high resolution with Keynote and I used Miro to convert to MP4, Ogg
Theora and WebM. This is what I got:

MP4 => 368K
OGV => 748K
WebM => 1.2 M

It seems hard to justify including WebM when the file size is more
than triple the MP4 and is even much larger than Ogg Theora. WebM is
supposed to beat Ogg Theora and at least come close to MP4, but with
Miro Converter it doesn't.

I tested with the Linux-based transmageddon and that program gives
much better results:

OGV => 716K
WebM => 440K


Anyway, I think it would be hard to justify including WebM files if
they are so much larger than both MP4 and Ogg Theora. Right now every
browser and player that plays WebM also plays OGV and in fact, many
people can play OGV but not WebM. So, without a size advantage, I
don't see the point in having WebM on the site.

Can anyone think of another free Mac-based program that produces WebM
files along the lines of what Transmageddon can do? I've spent days
looking for an alternative and I've found nothing yet.

Thanks for the help.

Cheers,
Daniel.

[Lou Quillio]

On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 4:42 PM, Daniel Carrera <dcar...@gmail.com> wrote:

> It seems hard to justify including WebM when the file size is more
> than triple the MP4 and is even much larger than Ogg Theora. WebM is
> supposed to beat Ogg Theora and at least come close to MP4, but with
> Miro Converter it doesn't.

It's not that WebM transcode output is _necessarily_ larger than other
formats, rather that GUI tools don't yet expose optimized defaults and
a choice of encoder options for WebM output. For example, look here:

$ ls /Applications/Miro\ Video\ Converter.app/Contents/Resources/ffmpeg_presets/

You'll see that Miro ships with 30 FFMpeg presets that support the
various 264 options available through the GUI, but none for WebM/VPx.
It could, and we've discussed this with PCF (Miro's publisher). Same
goes for other GUI tools.

> Can anyone think of another free Mac-based program that produces WebM
> files along the lines of what Transmageddon can do? I've spent days
> looking for an alternative and I've found nothing yet.

Other than FFMpeg, not really, not yet. (NB: FFMpeg latest _does_
ship with five VPx presets.) But in terms of packaged GUI transcoder
tools for the OS X desktop, I'm not yet aware of non-commercial
options that grant the control you'd want. On the commercial side,
Sorenson Squeeze might be the richest choice at present, but it's
expensive.

A suggestion for the meantime would be to figure out an FFMpeg command
line that works well for your typical input and the output you plan to
serve. You'll only need to figure this out once. Might want to use
the sample FFMpeg libvpx-* presets [1] as a guide.

LQ

[1]: http://git.videolan.org/?p=ffmpeg.git;a=tree;f=ffpresets

--
Lou Quillio
Webmaster
WebMProject.org

[Changjian Gao]

FFmpeg is your friend, :)

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[Daniel Carrera]

On 08/20/2011 10:08 AM, Changjian Gao wrote:
> FFmpeg is your friend, :)

No, it isn't.

First, I tested with ffmpeg and the results weren't any better. It
consistently produced WebM files that were larger than the corresponding
OggTheora files with the same settings. Second, even if it produced good
files, ffmpeg is a command-line program making it completely unsuitable
as a simple solution that I can give to my supervisor. My supervisor is
happy to offer a few file formats, but he will not take a lot of time
out of his schedule or learn the flags to ffmpeg.

--
I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.

[Phillip]

Miro uses "near-lossless" conversions for WebM ('-sameq'), although
the documentation claims otherwise. For MP4 it uses x264 with the
option '-crf 22' which produces good but certainly not lossless
quality. Of course the exact numbers will depend on your source
material, but using these settings larger WebM files are to be
expected.

There is something you could try if quality is not absolutely critical
and you don't mind a less than elegant solution. Convert your files to
MP4 first, then convert those files - not your originals - to WebM and
check if the result is acceptable.

Phillip

[Ralph Kitchens]

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For more options, visit this group at

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--

I'm not overweight, I'm undertall.

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Hybrid can encode VP8 to mkv but could remux to webm and is suppose to run on Windows, Linux, and OSX. I've only tried on Linux and it works great but someone told me it immediately crashed on OSX I suspect they were missing some dependencies. It's still in the early stages development. http://www.selur.de/

[hower...@gmail.com]

Hi Daniel,

Have you tried Faasoft Video Converter? 

I used it to convert WebM to MP4, OGG, AVI, WMV, MKV, etc and vise versa for a while and works like a charm.

I'm not sure if it can solve your issue. Try it to get the answer.