I wanted to extract audio from a movie to use as a soundtrack of sorts. For some movies, the obvious ones being Eddie Murphy's Delirous and the less obvious ones being Snatch, my wife and I love repeating the lines over and over again. They make us laugh and I'd like to burn an audio CD for our car so that we can listen to these movies over and over. Hours of research on google pointed me to mencoder.

I wanted to test on a small file so I picked Luxo Jr from Pixar. I had already ripped to mpeg before on windows so I typed the following:

After about 2 minutes (if that much) the file had been output. The program complained a little about lack of a frameno.avi (what it normally calls an audio extract), but I played the file in xmms with no problems.

However, when I type

I am told

Since a file can be named *.anything in Linux unlike windows where text must be .txt, etc I am worried that since file says this is an mp3 file that I won't be able to use it in my audio CD. Also, mp321 doesn't like the file too much. I am on my laptop and I don't have my external CD-burner with me or I'd just test it now.

Can someone help me either to extract the audio properly or whatever I need to do to be able to burn this onto either a regular audio CD format or an mp3 format that my car's player (which plays mp3s and wmas) will like.

Thanks!

I don't think MEncoder is the best program to do that (though it might be possible). I recommend you either use tcextract from Transcode or Avidemux2, whereas I prefer Transcode.

If you decide to use Transcode (which can help you in many situations like that):

tcextract -i movie.avi -x mp3 > soundtrack.mp3

If you got an MPEG file:

tcexract -i movie.mpg -x mp3 | lame --mp2input - soundtrack.mp3

Both should work on your car's MP3 player, but no guaranty.

Thanks, I'll definitely check that out

that worked perfectly - freshrpms had the necessary files and dependencies (I chose Transcode)

Thanks a million

If I wanted to change the kbps or the volume of the mp3, would that be from the lame options?

Thanks!

Ok, I found out how to change the kbps in lame, although nothing about volume. How would I record stereo sound? The sound always seems to be mono.

Um... I just tried it with an MPEG file, and the soundtrack is in stereo. Are you sure it's mono? Cause if you're not, just play it with MPlayer, it shows you the channel count.

About changing the volume:
If you use Transcode instead of Lame, you have the option to change the volume. I don't know how exactly to do this, but I think something like

transcode -i soundtrack.mp2 -x null,mpeg2 -s volumegain -o soundtrack.mp3 -y null,lame -b bitrate

should work. Just take a look at man transcode, if it doesn't.