Looking for mp4 to mpeg/avi or wmv converters
 

I took some mp4s with my cellphone and they play fine with a number of
packages on slack. The only issue is I want to share them with some
friends who only have windows, so their media player does not play mp4s
and I want to convert to some format they can play, like mpeg, avi or wmv. Any suggestions?


On another issue, any recommendations for downloading things like Youtube videos?

Hi svar,

Avidemux ... Hyper Video Converter ... or (CLI tool) alltoavi, all work for me to accomplish that task.

Cheers

Orbit

avidemux if you prefer GUI, ffmpeg if you prefer CLI. For downloading youtube videos you can either check in your '/tmp' directory after the video has finished loading completely for a 'Flash??????', that would be the flv, or there's a firefox extension that will download them.

Let your Windows friends download and install Media Player Classic and some other codecs. There is no excuse to ever want to use Windows' own Media Player.

For facilitating youtube video downloads you can look at Downloadhelper.

Eric

I think that "Light Alloy" video player and "K-Lite Mega Codec Pack" should solve all problems with viewing videos on Windows machine.

For linux video conversion, use mencoder.

Although your friends could install additional software, I don't think that is a fair or reasonable expectation of them. You can help them install codecs or software, but I think converting files is easier because you don't know how each friend has his or her computer configured.

I asked a similar question in this thread. Although many people have WMP 9 or 11 installed, I think the lowest common denominator is a generic Windows Media Player (WMP) 6.4.

WMP 6.4 is less picky with audio files, but I have not found a successful formula for converting video files. Every resulting AVI combination I have tried has failed with WMP 6.4. The problem is my ignorance about file conversions and nothing more --- I'm still learning my way around this topic.

Know that mencoder is part of mplayer, which is not part of the stock Slackware. An mplayer build script is available at slackbuilds.org.

Although I have not yet toyed with converting mp4, I have had good success with ffmpeg. There is a slackbuild script at slackbuilds.org. There are dependency packages that must be built and installed.

Someone mentioned converting youtube videos. With Firefox this is straightforward if a disk cache is used and no extension is required:

1. Play the entire youtube video.
2. Close firefox to force the memory cache to move to the disk cache.
3. Open a file manager and sort the firefox disk cache directory by recent date.
4. Find the most recent large file with an unknown file format.
5. Copy the file to a different directory.
6. Rename the file to something more readable and add the .flv file extension. This step is not necessary, however.
7. Verify you have copied (and optionally renamed) the desired file by playing the file in xine (comes with the stock Slackware).
9. Convert the file. I use ffmpeg: ffmpeg -i filename -ac 2 firefly.avi. Although I use the stereo option (-ac 2), the file is still in mono because that is the default format with youtube. Run ffmpeg -i filename to see the file formats.

Thanks all, I used slackbuilds for both avidemux and ffmpeg
(because I included qt4, the slackbuild took over 4 hours(!) for avidemux

Anyway with ffmpeg I got a bunch of errors:
ffmpeg -i 07062008023.mp4 -ac 2 pao1.avi
FFmpeg version SVN-r10652, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/man --disable-debug --enable-shared --disable-static --enable-pthreads --enable-libogg
--enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-x11grab --enable-libmp3lame --enable-lib
faac --enable-libfaad --enable-libxvid --enable-liba52 --enable-libx264
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.44.0
libavformat version: 51.14.0
built on Sep 25 2008 22:41:04, gcc: 4.1.2

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 30000.00 (30000/1) -> 15.00 (15/1)
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '07062008023.mp4':
Duration: 00:12:32.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 557 kb/s
Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 352x288, 15.00 fps(r)
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 32000 Hz, stereo
Output #0, avi, to 'pao1.avi':
Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 352x288, q=2-31, 200 kb/s, 15.00 fps(c)
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: mp2, 32000 Hz, stereo, 64 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d64450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d64450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d64450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d64450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d64450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1


BUT it did produce a playable avi file, though not of very good quality

With avidemux
/usr/bin/avidemux2_cli --force-alt-h264 --load "07062008023.mp4" --save "07062008023.avi" --output-format AVI --quit

produced a very small and unplayable avi file(crashes mplayer)
Any ideas what to check?
AAlso, is it possible to create other type of files(except avi)?

Try this command instead:

Thanks this created a file of 569 M(avi) out of some 50M (mp4).
This looks like it plays in slow motion(my CPU is 1.4)


I still get on conversion error(warning?) mesages,

ffmpeg -i 07062008023.mp4 -b 557k -vcodec copy -r 15 -ab 128k -ar 32000 -acodec libmp3lame pao2.avi
FFmpeg version SVN-r10652, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/man --disable-debug --enable-shared --disable-static --enable-pthreads --enable-libogg --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-x11grab --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libxvid --enable-liba52 --enable-libx264
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.44.0
libavformat version: 51.14.0
built on Sep 25 2008 22:41:04, gcc: 4.1.2

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 30000.00 (30000/1) -> 15.00 (15/1)
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '07062008023.mp4':
Duration: 00:12:32.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 557 kb/s
Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 352x288, 15.00 fps(r)
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 32000 Hz, stereo
Output #0, avi, to 'pao2.avi':
Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 352x288, q=2-31, 30000.00 fps(c)
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: libmp3lame, 32000 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d95450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d95450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d95450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1

....

Converting files is very easy with the online application zamzar.
Good quality and no hassle for yourself.

Weird, it's outputting at 30000 FPS, crazy. Try this instead:

yes, this is decent and only 60M, which looks about right
I still get the errors/warning:


ffmpeg -i 07062008023.mp4 -b 557k -vcodec mpeg4 -r 15 -ab 128k -acodec libmp3lame pao3.avi
FFmpeg version SVN-r10652, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/man --disable-debug --enable-shared --disable-static --enable-pthreads --enable-libogg --enable-libtheora --enable-libvorbis --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-x11grab --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaac --enable-libfaad --enable-libxvid --enable-liba52 --enable-libx264
libavutil version: 49.5.0
libavcodec version: 51.44.0
libavformat version: 51.14.0
built on Sep 25 2008 22:41:04, gcc: 4.1.2

Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 30000.00 (30000/1) -> 15.00 (15/1)
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from '07062008023.mp4':
Duration: 00:12:32.2, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 557 kb/s
Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 352x288, 15.00 fps(r)
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: mpeg4aac, 32000 Hz, stereo
Output #0, avi, to 'pao3.avi':
Stream #0.0(und): Video: mpeg4, yuv420p, 352x288, q=2-31, 557 kb/s, 15.00 fps(c)
Stream #0.1(und): Audio: libmp3lame, 32000 Hz, stereo, 128 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
Press [q] to stop encoding
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d60450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1
[mpeg4aac @ 0xb7d60450]faac: frame decoding failed: No standard extension payload allowed in DRM
Error while decoding stream #0.1

Regarding zamzar: I don't know too many people whose email can handle some 60M files....

Make a split 7zip or rar out of it.

but the way they present it is that you upload your file and they email it back to you converted