jAlbum/Settings/Videos

Revision as of 17 May 2018 22:45 by RobM (Comments | Contribs)
settingsVideoTop.png


Videos Settings give you control of the conversion process, which uses FFmpeg, from virtually all video formats to the MP4 HTML5 standard.

Quality

Sets the compression level and is a compromise between video quality and file size. Start with the default setting and if the quality is not good enough raise the setting and try making the album again.

resolution.png

Resolution

A drop down menu lets you choose from a range of standard video resolutions such as Full HD, HD, 480p, 360p, 240p or the image bounds as set in Settings/Images. If you want a different size to any of those then you can enter values in place of $videoWidth and $videoHeight (each in two places) in ‘Use custom settings’.

Use custom settings

SettingsVideoBottom.png

If you check the 'Use custom settings' box then you can configure the video conversion process, to mp4, as you want.
There are variables that you can use to aid conversion, they are:

Video variables
Name Explanation
clipLength The length of the selected portion of the video or the full length if not clipped
clipStart The starting position of the clipped video or the beginning if not clipped
fileName The filename of the video being processed
inputDirectory The directory within which the video being processed is
inputPath The path to the video being processed
label The name, without the extension, of the video being processed
normalizeOrientation Rotate the video if required, e.g. if the video is taken in portrait mode
outputDirectory The directory in which the processed video will be created
outputPath The path to the output directory
projectPath The path to the project's root image directory
videoHeight Width of the video being processed
videoWidth Height of the video being processed
videoQuality Quality as set using the video quality slider

Lets now look at the default switches used with ffmpeg

ffmpeg settings
Name Explanation
-y If the output file already exists then overwrite it, removing this switch will prevent overwriting the generated video.
-i Used to indicate an input file follows
-vf Create the filtergraph specified by filtergraph and use it to filter the stream. hqdn3d is a high quality de-noise filter, scale ensures the generated video is scaled to the correct aspect ratio whilst keeping within the lowest image bounds value, unsharp sharpens (can also be set to blur) the output video,
-ss Ensures the output starts at the point set by the video scrubbers (video edit mode) start position
-t Sets how long the video plays from the start point above.
threads 0 allows the ffmpeg process to use as many threads are available, to speed up video creation as much as possible.
-b:a Sets audio input sampling rate to 96K bits per second
-ac Sets the audio channels to 2 (stereo)
-ar Sets the audio output sampling frequency to 44100Hz
-vcodec Selects the video codec to be used, libx264
-crf allows the quantization parameter to change depending on the amount of motion between frames
-metadata:s:v:0 Rotate the video if indicated by embedded metadata.
-movflags Quality as set using the video quality slider

As an example of custom settings let's add a water mark to all videos in the album. Make your watermark image the same size as the video file (for example 560 x 320 pixels).

To add the watermark image do the following:

1) Add a new line below the existing "-i $inputPath" entry by right clicking and selecting "Insert row".

2) Name this line "-i " (Note the space after the i, otherwise it will not work)

3) The value for this line should be the full path to the watermark image (Mac users for example "/Users/username/My Albums/Album name/WatermarkFile.png").

4) Add another line below this one and name it "-filter_complex" and set its value to "overlay"

5) Click 'Make All' and then preview your videos complete with a watermark.

Some settings, such as the number of threads as shown above start with an indice of 0 which represents one thread.

Tip: if you just want to see how videos look with a skin then you could set -t to 1, to reduce all videos to 1 second length for the first time you make your album.

FFmpeg documentation

The documentation on the options available for configuring FFmpeg is available from ffmpeg.org. There is a link, FFmpeg documentation, to that page at the bottom of the custom settings.

jAlbum uses a static version of ffmpeg, deleting the ffmpeg file from the jAlbum configuration directory and letting jAlbum re-install it will not normally result in an updated version. See this forum post. You can manually update ffmpeg from here

Starting with version 13.3 users may switch to the system version of ffmpeg while using the default video settings by replacing ffmpeg in the user's jAlbum bin directory by a link to the system ffmpeg