[mbeyer]

Hi,

I have a lot of old video footage around that, I am ashamed to say, I encoded with heavily proprietary codecs like DivX and such during the dark ages (aka. the Windows Times).

Now, I would like to redeem myself from the mistakes of my past by re-encoding everything into open formats.
Since those videos are often not of the best quality (poor camera, poor codecs, poor knowledge), I do not want to loose more quality in the process.

So, to avoid any more mistakes in the future, I would be glad if someone could answer me some of the following questions:
1. Is it even possible to re-encode those movies into something like x264/vp8/theora without loosing any more quality?
2. What tools should I use for that? Command line is actually preferred.
3. What would be the most desirable format to have? I'm thinking about x264 in Martroska with ogg Auto. Is there anything better suited?

Thanks,
Markus

[theuni]

1. No. Not without using the original source.

TheUni

[mbeyer]

Damn.
Maybe you can clarify something for me: as I understand it, x264 has the option of video passthrough. Shouldn't that just copy any video data without compressing it any further?

[Flain]

You can re-mux if you like. Which would basically take the old file and stick it in a mkv container without re-encoding. It would be the same format video/audio and same quality but just in a .mkv. Advantage to this is you can combine the subtitles when remuxing.