Convert video to exactly the same format as another video

Question

Suppose I have two video files A and B.

Now I want to convert A to the same format (i.e. same container, same audio and video codec), same bitrate, size etc. as B.

Is there a way to do this automatically (i.e. without extracting the information manually and giving it manually as input parameters) using a command line tool (or even a GUI tool)?

Answer 1

I think if you parse ffmpeg output you could achieve this in part, but beware the labyrinthe documentation on how to encode for best results. It's a little tricky.

Perhaps an alternate approach is to find a common standard whose parameters can be set one, and leave your transcoder job running on all A, B, etc.

Answer 2

No It is not possible to have all the parameters same as B. We need to compromise or adjust some attribute of the Video A, so that the other attribute of the video A matches with the video B.

Answer 3

You are making your own analyzer then.

You can use ffmpeg (path to ffmpeg is $exe) with grep/sed/awk piping to extract information into variables, use if-elif constructs ($A is path to file A)

Here is example to get video codec, video resolution, frame rate and reset to be not greater than 24 fps, and get audio encoding frequency.

videoa=`$exe -i $A 2>&1 | grep Stream.*Video | sed -e 's/.*Video: //' -e 's/[, ].*//'`
if [ $videoa = "h264" ];then videob="-c:v libx264"
elif [ $videoa = "hevc" ];then videob="-c:v libx265"
fi

resolution=$($exe -i "$f"  2>&1 | grep -oP 'Stream .*, \K[0-9]+x[0-9]+')
crop="crop=960:544:0:2,"
if [ $(echo $($exe -i "$f" 2>&1 | sed -n "s/.*, \(.*\) fp.*/\1/p") | awk  '{printf "%.0f\n", $1}';) -gt 24 ];then r="-r 24";else r=""; fi
if [ $(echo $($exe -i "$f" 2>&1 | sed -n "s/.*, \(.*\) Hz.*/\1/p") | awk  '{printf "%.0f\n", $1}';) -gt 44100 ];then af="-ar 44100";else af=""; fi

video="-map_chapters -1 -map_metadata -1 -vf ${crop}scale=${resolution},setsar=1/1,setdar=16/9 $videob -an $r"
$exe -y -ss $ss -i "$f" -t $t -map 0:v:0 $video $v