Old post detected!
This post is roughly 15 years old; originally published on April 23, 2009! The information presented here may be out of date and inaccurate.
Please read this page but do keep its age in mind.
I recently discovered that tcrequant (part of the
transcode suite of tools) has been
deprecated. Worst still I found that when I ran tcrequant on my 64-bit Linux
workstation is was corrupting the video. See the links below for details.
Therefore I decided to get the M2VRequantiser
code from Metakine working on both 32-bit and 64-bit
Linux as a replacement for tcrequant. M2VRequantiser accepts the raw MPEG2 video
data (not VOB) from the standard input and writes the recompressed frames to
the standard output. M2VRequantiser takes two arguments. The first one is a
floating point value specifying the ratio of compression. The second is the
size of the M2V, since the data is streamed to M2VRequantiser it cannot know
the M2V size. The following command would recompress ‘original.m2v’, whose
size is 1024000 bytes, by a factor of 1.25.
M2VRequantiser 1.25 1024000 < original.m2v > requantised.m2v
I’ve only tested on 32-bit and 64-bit Linux, specifically Ubuntu 8.10. It works for me but I’d be interested to get your feedback.