Free Software Linux

Want to create an animation on GNU/Linux and then convert it to a video file? read more

Recently, and it's hard to say exactly which SVN snapshot this occured in, the FFMpeg project changed the location of a number of its header files. This has caused soem havoc with other applications that use FFmpeg for video decoding or encoding. Amongst other things, Open Movie Editor complained that certain libraries were not installed, which they plainly were. This could be seen from running a simple "ffmpeg -i" command to see what which libraries FFmpeg had been configured again. Trying to re-compile Open Movie Editor from source struck some problems, in that OME was looking for FFmpeg headers in the wrong place. To overcome this issue, so that OME would compile and then install correctly, I made the following changes.

FFMpeg is a complete and free Internet live audio and video broadcasting solution for Linux/Unix. It also includes a digital VCR. FFMpeg can encode in real time in many formats including MPEG1 audio and video, MPEG4, h263, ac3, asf, avi, real, mjpeg, and flash. FFmpeg can generate a lot of... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Having recently installed Xubuntu Hardy Heron on a laptop, I also needed to install FFmpeg. This post is really just a couple of notes for myself, updating my earlier How-To post regarding installation of FFmpeg on Ubuntu Gutsy. New apt-get install line: sudo apt-get install liblame-dev libfaad2-dev libfaac-dev libxvidcore4-dev liba52-0.7.4 liba52-0.7.4-dev libx264-dev libdts-dev libswscale-dev checkinstall build-essential subversion Here I've added the swscale development libraries. Swscale is used for scaling videos.

Yesterday a new version of popular Linux video editing tool, Kino, was released. The new version is 1.3.0 and contains the following changes:

• Updated export scripts for FFmpeg changes (x264, mp3)
• Improved speed on SMP systems by enabling FFmpeg multi-threaded codecs
• Improved import (DV conversion) progress dialog
• Added gstreamer-based Ogg Theora to the blip.tv publishing script
• Added quality level option to the blip.tv publishing script
• Updated Hungarian translation
• Added Ukranian translation by Yuri Chornoivan

Congratulations to Dan Kennedy and the team.

A short while ago I wrote a review about Open Movie Editor. Essentially this review was written after a couple of hours testing various video clips and assessing the functionality within OME. Now, I can write about what OME is like on a real editing assignment. Recently I was given a DVD full of PAL DV material and asked to create a compilation from the individual clips. A fun little project that should only take a day or two. Open Movie Editor was the obvious tool for the job. The good news I can report is that even after 10 to 12 hours of constant video editing, OME is still a very stable piece of software.

A short while ago I wrote a review about Open Movie Editor. Essentially this review was written after a couple of hours testing various video clips and assessing the functionality within OME. Now, I can write about what OME is like on a real editing assignment. Recently I was given a DVD full of PAL DV material and asked to create a compilation from the individual clips. A fun little project that should only take a day or two. Open Movie Editor was the obvious tool for the job.

Unfortunately my Linux based non-linear editing tool of choice, Open Movie Editor, doesn't currently support directly altering video playback speed. For example, if you wanted a portion of your new compilation to run at 200% of original recorded speed, it can't be done within OME. This exact functionality was something I needed for an existing editing project.

Extracting all frames from a video file is easily achieved with FFmpeg. Here's a simple command line that will create 25 PNG images from every second of footage in the input DV file. The images will be saved in the current directory. ffmpeg -i input.dv -r 25 -f image2 images%05d.png The newly created files will all start with the word "images" and be numbered consecutively, including five pre-appended zeros. e.g. images000001.png. From a video that was 104 seconds long, for a random example, this command would create 2600 PNG files! Quite messy in the current directory, so instead use this command to save the files in a sub-directory called extracted_images: