Transcode is a free

Free software

Free software, software libre or libre software is software that can be used, studied, and modified without restriction, and which can be copied and redistributed in modified or unmodified form either without restriction, or with restrictions that only ensure that further recipients can also do...

 audio

Audio frequency

An audio frequency or audible frequency is characterized as a periodic vibration whose frequency is audible to the average human...

/video

Video

Video is the technology of electronically capturing, recording, processing, storing, transmitting, and reconstructing a sequence of still images representing scenes in motion.- History :...

 transcode

Transcode

Transcoding is the direct digital-to-digital data conversion of one encoding to another, such as for movie data files or audio files. This is usually done in cases where a target device does not support the format or has limited storage capacity that mandates a reduced file size, or to convert...

r with a command-line interface for Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 operating systems. It uses FFmpeg

FFmpeg

FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...

's libavcodec library, and supports numerous formats (such as DV

DV

DV is a format for the digital recording and playing back of digital video. The DV codec was launched in 1995 with joint efforts of leading producers of video camcorders....

, MPEG-2

MPEG-2

MPEG-2 is a standard for "the generic coding of moving pictures and associated audio information". It describes a combination of lossy video compression and lossy audio data compression methods which permit storage and transmission of movies using currently available storage media and transmission...

, MPEG-4 Part 2

MPEG-4 Part 2

MPEG-4 Part 2, MPEG-4 Visual is a video compression technology developed by MPEG. It belongs to the MPEG-4 ISO/IEC standards. It is a discrete cosine transform compression standard, similar to previous standards such as MPEG-1 and MPEG-2...

, H.264

H.264/MPEG-4 AVC

H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10 or AVC is a standard for video compression, and is currently one of the most commonly used formats for the recording, compression, and distribution of high definition video...

, 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

Audio Video Interleave

Audio Video Interleave , known by its acronym AVI, is a multimedia container format introduced by Microsoft in November 1992 as part of its Video for Windows technology. AVI files can contain both audio and video data in a file container that allows synchronous audio-with-video playback...

, 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

MPEG-4 Part 14

MPEG-4 Part 14 or MP4 is a multimedia container format standard specified as a part of MPEG-4. It is most commonly used to store digital video and digital audio streams, especially those defined by MPEG, but can also be used to store other data such as subtitles and still images...

 container format; external tools must be used instead. 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

Linux

Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...

 and other Unix-like

Unix-like

A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification....

 operating systems. There is no version for Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows

Microsoft Windows is a series of operating systems produced by Microsoft.Microsoft introduced an operating environment named Windows on November 20, 1985 as an add-on to MS-DOS in response to the growing interest in graphical user interfaces . Microsoft Windows came to dominate the world's personal...

, and the developers have no plans to create one.

See also

• MEncoder
  MEncoder
  MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. It is a close sibling to MPlayer and can convert all the formats that MPlayer understands into a variety of compressed and uncompressed formats using different codecs.MEncoder...
  
   — another free command-line transcoder
• MPlayer
  MPlayer
  MPlayer is a free and open source media player. The program is available for all major operating systems, including Linux and other Unix-like systems, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. Versions for OS/2, Syllable, AmigaOS and MorphOS are also available. The Windows version works, with some minor...
  
  , the media player built from the same source code
  Source code
  In computer science, source code is text written using the format and syntax of the programming language that it is being written in. Such a language is specially designed to facilitate the work of computer programmers, who specify the actions to be performed by a computer mostly by writing source...
  
   as MEncoder
• FFmpeg
  FFmpeg
  FFmpeg is a free software project that produces libraries and programs for handling multimedia data. The most notable parts of FFmpeg are libavcodec, an audio/video codec library used by several other projects, libavformat, an audio/video container mux and demux library, and the ffmpeg command line...
  
  , similar to MEncoder
• MediaCoder
  MediaCoder
  MediaCoder is a transcoding program for Microsoft Windows. It has been developed by Stanley Huang since 2005.MediaCoder uses various open source audio and video codecs, among several proprietary codecs and tools to transcode different audio/video formats and has many extra features...
  
  , a media transcoding application for Microsoft OSs, also related to MPlayer
• RetroCode
  RetroCode
  RetroCode is a universal mobile content converter originally created by Retro Ringtones LLC. RetroCode is able to read and write most common sample based ringtone formats including meta-data.- Overview :...
  
  , an open source mobile content encoder/decoder
• Mencoder Wikibook
• Mplayer Wikibook- almost all decoding-related and filtering arguments are shared with mencoder

External links

• Transcode Wiki
• Transcode usage examples
• DVD::Rip, a graphical DVD ripper
  Ripping
  Ripping is the process of copying audio or video content to a hard disk, typically from removable media. The word is used to refer to all forms of media. Despite the name, neither the media nor the data is damaged after extraction....
  
   based on Transcode
• Transcode reviewed by LWN.net
  LWN.net
  LWN.net is a computing webzine with an emphasis on free software and software for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems. It consists of a weekly issue, separate stories which are published most days, and threaded discussion attached to every story. Most news published daily are short...
  
   (2004)
• Another review in Linux Magazine
  Linux Magazine
  Linux Magazine is a European professional journal. It addresses itself to readers who work professionally with operating systems based around the Linux kernel. Linux Magazine is published by Linux New Media AG and was born after the great success of Linux-Magazin...
  
  (2005 issue 13)