Video Conversion Question
 

Okay, I'm sure this topic has been hit before, but I'm having a tough time trying to find a good solution. I was wondering if anyone knows of a decent video converter for linux. I've tried to find software, but am having a hard time. I am aware that this is a field in which linux is lacking thus far. I have a DVD player that plays DivX and whatnot, but the file I want to use is named xxxxxxx.xvid.avi and the player will play them sometimes....but sometimes not. One movie plays, the next does not....I dunno what the problem is. I know nero will convert .avi files to vcd's. However, I don't think K3B supports this yet. Is there a way to make nero work in linux if you could point it to the proper codec files??? I've heard of this being done. Either way, if anyone has any suggestion on how to get the .avi files into a format I can play on my home DVD player, I'm up for suggestions. Thanks in advance!

There must be 100 how-tos on this topic. Search google. converting .avi to mpeg1 and burning it to DVD is very commonplace and it can be done with an assortment of free tools available in the linux community.

Nero do a CD burner for Linux now, I don't know if that helps.


Try ffmpeg (ffmpeg.sourceforge.net) as a converter, the codec name for divX is mpeg4

I read several problems with the Linux version of Nero. The Linux utilites are by far better and a lot cheaper.

There are many programs that you can use. There is mplayer's mencoder, ffmpeg, and transcode. transcode is the slowest because it pipes its streams through several utilities that it comes with. ffmpeg is easy to convert to vcd, svcd, dvd but it does not provide you flexibility. mplayer's mencoder gives you a lot of flexibility of how your final video is encoded. mplayer has documentation on their site that tells you the encoding specifications for vcd, svcd, and dvd. With mplayer's mencoder it can take two channels and copy them to six channels. It can also zoom out of the video so the quality does not suffer because some videos are smaller than 720 X 480 for NTSC and 720 X 576 for PAL. mencoder can be as slow as transcode if you use the video quality enhance options.

Thanks guys, I appreciate your help! I know it's a dumb question, and yes I've tried google (sir-go-slap-yourself). But rather than sift though pages of junk, sometimes it's just easier to ask a stupid question.....asking questions is what this is for....right? But thank you Electro, I think I'll give mencoder a shot.

Quite right - the biggest problem with Google is the enormous amount of "hits".
Anyway, I've had the same problem with movies, finally found some decent solutions.
Mplayer/mencoder are very good, you can do anything you want with them - which also means it'll take you a year just to read the manpages... :-)
I suggest you take a look at 'tovid', it's a script that uses mplayer, mencoder and a few more tools to create a movie (DVD, VCD or SVCD).
Best of all is it's very easy to modify that script to suite your needs!!
Transcode is very capable, but I never got it to function properly - it's not that easy to use. There is at least one frontend "gtranscode" haven't tried it.
Nero for Linux - I tested it, but the Linux version doesn't burn DVD-movies.

Another possibility is 'streamer', it's actually a tool for capturing video (from TV/analog) so you don't really need the program in itself - but it gives you some examples, like this:Finally, you could try GUI-tools like dvdstyler or qdvdauthor - I have no xvid's myself so I don't know if they can be handled.

Thank you pingu for your input...I've also tried nero for linux and it was a no go. I really appreciate your taking the time to respond. I'll give some of these options a shot. Although I did figure out why some of the avi files would play and some wouldn't......it had to do with the naming of the files. Once I renamed them, they all play. So really, that solved my problem. But this info is very helpful to others with the same problem and I'm sure I'll use it myself. Thanks again!

Cheers