Any ideas how to do that, preferably in a GUI program? I’m not good at CLI or scripts.
CONTEXT
I uploaded a video in Matroska mkv format (~1gb) to Internet Archive. IA added its own converted mp4 of much lower video quality (~500mb) & that’s the only video it will stream. The mkv only available by downloading.
As I’d prefer streaming availability, I used Handbrake (on Linux) to convert the mkv to mp4 myself, hoping to make a better quality mp4 that IA would stream.
Seems successful, plays fine locally, much better quality than IA’s mp4, & smaller file size (~800mb) than original mkv.
But I can’t upload it to IA as I get an error
There is a network problem
400 Bad Data
BadContent
Uploaded content is unacceptable.
Resource>video file has improper extension, try one of these: .mpv .mkv
Rule 5. Locking.
I usually do everything from CLI.
Are you wanting to re-encode it to a different codec or just change the container from mkv to mp4?
To remux the file (change the container format), you can simply do:
# The -f mp4 is technically optional as it can deduce it from the extension, but I like to be explicit ffmpeg -i file.mkv -f mp4 file.mp4That should go very fast as it’s just copying the streams as-is into a new container.
If you want to re-encode it to a different codec, then you’ll need to use a more complex
ffmpegcommand.CLI can be scary, but this is such a simple command to run. It should not be too intimidating.
If someone really needs a GUI, I believe VLC’s file conversion capability is basically just running an FFMPEG command like that in the background.
I am not sure file formats are like religions. I mean, some of them are cross compatible. Totally unlike religion.
According to: https://help.archive.org/help/movies-and-videos-a-basic-guide/
What encoding specifications are best for .mp4 files?
For your original mp4 to work in the online player we currently require the file to have:
audio: aac
video: h.264
moov atom: front
pixel format: yuv420pFFS, they’re not even on h.265 yet. Ugh.
H.265 requires hardware decoding
Not necessarily, but it does require a lot of computing power to decode in real time.
But good point, h.265 encoded video is not accessible for much of the world.
You can do it with ffmpeg (CLI) and I can give you the incantation for that if you want, but the IA’s transcoding pipeline should really do it automatically and I’m surprised if it doesn’t do it already. I wonder if it’s supposed to and something is going wrong. I assume you used .mkv extension and still got that error. So that sounds like a bug. Otherwise, try renaming the file and re-uploading.
If it’s a bug, you could try contacting the IA and asking what’s up. They do read the emails they get, though obviously a software fix is likely to take a while if they pursue it. https://archive.org/about/contact
