January 16, 2013

Transcoding a Movie Library with Python

Filed under: Home Theatre,Programming,Python — pj @ 10:18 pm

Like many a fellow geek, I have a Ubuntu server with shared folders that hold my collection of photos, music, movies, etc.. To show the movies on my TV, I started off with ASUS O!Play media player. Eventually, I bought a Samsung Blu-ray player with built-in media player. While the ASUS box supported CFS (Windows file sharing), the  Samsung could only see DNLA servers. I installed a DNLA service on my Ubunto and that worked fine until recently. Last summer, I moved to a new house. My new place doesn’t have CAT5 run all over, so I needed a new Blu-ray player with WiFi. I bought an inexpensive Panasonic unit from Costco because the Panasonic supported Amazon Instant Videos. Unfortunately, the Panasonic was much more picky about the supported video formats. While it can play modern .mkv files, it can’t play .avi files at all. I had a choice: I could buy another Media Player (the Western Digital WD TV Live was recommended for wide codec support) or I could figure out how to transcode videos.

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