How to Convert Videos on VLC batch/CLI?

command command-line-interface line vlc video-conversion
Olivier Gerault picture Olivier Gerault · Jun 21, 2015 · Viewed 32.8k times · Source

I need to do a mass-conversion of videos from a video recorder in the .mod format, to other file formats, e. g. .mp4.

How and where can I find detailed specifications and information about VLC's various CLI options and commands, required for converting between specific video and audio codecs, or formats, by means of an appropriate, tailored CLI command or a batch script?

Answer

Chris Whyley picture Chris Whyley · Jun 22, 2015

To use VLC to convert from MOD to MP4 you can use the following command:

vlc -I dummy -vvv "MyVid.mod"
--sout=#transcode{vcodec=h264,vb=1024,acodec=mp4a,ab=192,channels=2,deinterlace}:standard{access=file,mux=ts,dst=MyVid.mp4}

... where:

-I dummy - Does not show the VLC GUI
-vvv - Gives you verbose output
--sout - Specifies the options to use when encoding to MP4

You can see a full list of VLC command line options by running vlc -H from the command line. There is also a comprehensive list online at https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_command-line_help

If you don't have VLC installed locally or you want to outsource bulk video conversions you could always consider using a file conversion API such as https://developers.zamzar.com. This service provides a REST'ful API for file conversion, and mod to mp4 is a supported conversion.

Full disclosure: I'm the lead developer for the Zamzar API.

Related questions

Color ouput with Swift command line tool

I'm writing a command line tool with Swift and I'm having trouble displaying colors in my shell. I'm using the following code: println("\033[31;32mhey\033[39;39m") or even NSFileHandle.fileHandleWithStandardOutput().writeData("\033[31;32mhey\033[39;39m".dataUsingEncoding(NSASCIIStringEncoding, allowLossyConversion: true)!) It works when I …

Read More
How to call an external command?

How do you call an external command (as if I'd typed it at the Unix shell or Windows command prompt) from within a Python script?

Read More
Command to list all files in a folder as well as sub-folders in windows

I tried searching for a command that could list all the file in a directory as well as subfolders using a command prompt command. I have read the help for "dir" command but coudn't find what I was looking for. …

Read More