Converting MJPEG AVI to MJPEG MOV on MacOS?

[gpvillamil]

So I have a large collection of clips, encoded in PicVideo MJPEG in AVI format. I've been carting them around for years, they play back easily in Resolume.

Now I need to do some work on them, but I notice that Adobe After Effects, Media Encoder, etc don't want to recognize their existence at all.

I can convert them one by one to H.264 MOV using VLC, but surely there is a better way? Ideally I'd like to re-encapsulate them, port them from MJPEG AVI to MJPEG MOV without re-encoding.

Any thoughts on how to do this?

[gpvillamil]

aha!

ffmpeg with the "-c copy" option copies the video streams into a new container without re-encoding.

MJPEG in particular is a codec that is well supported across both platforms.

[gpvillamil]

Quicktime player did NOT like my MJPEG files converted with straight across copy, however re-encoding with ffmpeg at a high quality setting worked well:

ffmpeg -i infile.avi -c:v mjpeg -q:v 3 outfile.mov

The default quality setting yielded very poor quality files that were about 1/4 of the size of the originals. Setting the quality value to 3 made files that were roughly the same size as the original. The highest quality value is 2, and that led to slightly larger files.

If you are using a GUI like ff-Works on the Mac, the extra-hiqh-quality codec option for MJPEG seemed to be rather close to q:v 3 on ffmpeg.