How to encode to OGG (Theora / Vorbis) with VLC

Since we've been asked this quite a lot, I'm just going to make a little tutorial. The images should explain mostly everything. To do this you're going to need a relatively recent version of VLC. Just get the newest version available (1.0.0 as of this writing.) So let's proceed.

First you need to open up VLC and click Convert/Save. >:O


Step 1: You need to pick a file (as illustrated below :3) Step 2: Hit Convert Save after you pick a file


This is just illustrating Step 1 above :3


Step 1: Pick a Destination. Step 2: Change the Profile to Theora + Vorbis. Step 3: Hit the tools icon and follow the steps illustrated below. Step >L4: Hit start.

The rest of the images are just to illustrate these steps:


When you pick a destination in Step 1 above, make sure you include the extension for the file. Or else it will save it as a ps file because VLC thinks postscript is a perfectly logical container for a video.


In Step 3 above (selecting the tools icon) you're going to need to go to the Video codec tab and change the bitrate to 500kbps. If the source is HD, you're going to want to change the width to something between 600-700 (I'd go with 600 if the video is 16:9 and 700 if it was 2.21:1.)


Following up as part of Step 3, you need to go to the audio codec tab and change the bitrate to 64kb/s. Vorbis has better compression than mp3, so it can tolerate this drop decently. However, if you're encoding a music video or something, you can raise it as high as 112, but you may need to adjust the video bitrate to something like 450.


Then, on Step >L4 above, you just hit Start, and this is what it says. It pretends it's streaming, but it's rly just converting your file.

And there you go.