[SGVLUG] linux based video conversion

[Dustin]

On Fri, 22 Jul 2005, Michael Proctor-Smith wrote:

> On 7/22/05, John Riehl <jcriehl at mail.jpl.nasa.gov> wrote:
> > 
> > Are there any tool recommendations to convert quicktime to avi format?
> > I dont know the exact format (qt4, qt5, etc), other than quicktime.
> > googling about, I see a whole lot of ads for the same windows shareware
> > on different sites, on the same page as some linux software.

I seem to recall that transcode is supposed to convert most anything to
most anything and is the command-line tool used by many graphical tools. I
have not used it myself. Naturally, it isn't available in stock Debian
because they're worried about legal problems.  There are other programs,
like mpeg2enc, but I think they tend to be specific to a particular
format.

> > what are the major open-source video programs out there?
> > I see players such as xine included in my suse installation.
> > 
> Xine and mplayer are the players. If mplayer can play a clip you can
> use memcoder to convert it to some other format.

Xine and I think maybe mplayer are often the core of prettier programs. At
least, if you run Gnome then the totem player is Xine with a Gnome
interface.  I think maybe vlc (Video Lan Client) is actually independent
of either of them and would qualify as an independent third choice.

I used mplayer on Gentoo, it was generally good but slightly unstable and
would freak out once in a while.  The Debian debs have a bitter hatred of
mplayer so they don't ship it, but Totem has been rock-solid.  I tried a
third-party build of mplayer on Debian once and it was just unusable, and
I didn't care enough to roll my own build from source.  I also have VLC 
installed and it's OK, but I find I usually use totem anyway.

mplayer theoretically understands more formats, I think, but I haven't 
actually had any problems with totem once I installed the <ahem> win32 
codecs.  They aren't in Debian but they're available elsewhere.

Dustin