Help: Video Transcoding Problems

[ngrieb]

I just got a new portable media player, that has some great picture and video quality, however, many of the music videos and movies I have are having trouble transcoding properly. I have tried avidemux, transmaggedon, mencoder...etc, but the problem seems to be that the original movie files seem to be missing the codec information. I can view the content, but when I try and transcode it it doesn't know what to do.

Is the lack of codec info a problem, and if so, is there any way to edit the video metadata or something and tell it what kind of codec it is? I'd surely appreciate the help.

Thanks in advance.

[handy]

Out of interest, which formats are you transcoding from & to?

[ngrieb]

Well the one very persnickety format I am dealing with is H.264. I have yet to find a program that can adequately handle it in the transcoding process. It plays natively just fine, but avidemux and others have serious problems during transcoding. I also have a few mov files that were not recognized by Linux. I have a few more like this that seem to lack codec info, and won't transcode because of it, they somehow play correctly.

I just got a Cowon J3 for my birthday, and at the moment it is wmv, avi, and divx3 compatible, and I wanted to downsize some movies I own to play on it.

Is there another lib that I am missing for this? (The proprietary nature of all of these codecs makes this hard, and even worse they keep refurbishing them and copyrighting new versions.)