Multimedia in Linux
Today was a mutlimedia day to me. In the afternoon, I was searching the linux counterpart of iphoto (from Apple, as recognized by the renowned initial “i” as in ipod). There is a package available called lphoto from linspire, a linux vendor/distro (interestingly there are several programs/softwares from this Linspire linux with the names started as “l”, another example is “lsong”; while Apple/Mac does have a “i” series of applications, i.e., iphoto, isong and itunes, etc.) However, due to some depedency issues, I was not able to install the lphoto. But I will give a try again later, considering some cool features of iphoto (like slideshow and export movie), and I want to see whether I can easily have them in Lphoto as well.
In the evening, I got several quicktime movies exported by iphoto and I intended to convert them to mpg so that I can create a VCD/SVCD. There seems solutions around when I am googling. However, I don’t want to use those CLI(command line) solutions because there seems too many options to choose for the “mencoder” command. And there was not a direct answer how to “convert .mov to .mpg”. So I want to use some gui/frontend for the “mencoder”, a sibling of mplayer.
I tried a lot of programs listed at “MEncoder Frontends“, and decided to go with avidemux. However, it failed during installing/compiling, as “SpiderMonkey” is required. This is the first time I saw “SpiderMonkey“, too spammer/virus-like to me. After consulting google, I learned it is the javascript engine, then no wonder the famous javascript control extension of firefox is called greasemonkey. And what you need to install in linux is actually the js, js-devel package, and I feel js/js-devel sounds much more friendly than “SpiderMonkey”. However, when compiling, a little extra step is still needed, as you need to specify the library path as following:
yum install js, js-devel
./configure –with-jsapi-include=/usr/include
make
make install
While the avidemux looks friendly, it couldn’t handle the audio track of the .mov file (as I checked later by qtinfo, the audio is mp4a format). I had to resort to some other ways …
Multimedia in Linux (II) - video conversion at OHeHLium liang~ on 23 Oct 2006 at 10:18 pm
[...] So after the failure of the initial attempt, I have to go back to the command line for video converting. Actually, it is pretty easy to convert the quicktime movie to mpeg just by issueing the following command: ffmpeg -i input.mov -target ntsc-svcd output.mpg [...]