FOSSwire

In KDE 3, extracting archives, such as zip and tar files, is pretty simple. You just find the relevant file in Konqueror or Dolphin, right-click it and choose Extract for a list of extraction options.

For some reason, that functionality hasn't been copied over to KDE 4. Now, you must open up Ark for each archive and use the extraction wizard from there.

Extract and Compress KDE4 is a service menu for KDE 4 that restores the right-click extract functionality and once again makes it simple and quick to extract archive files. It also restores the functionality to make archives from the right-click menu.

Go ahead and download the tar.gz file from the website and extract it (yes, using the slow method this last time).

Double-click install.sh in this folder to start the installation of the service menu.

You will first be asked whether to perform this installation for just your user, or for the whole system. Choose whatever you prefer - obviously you can only do the whole system if you have the administrator rights and the right password.

You'll be asked for the password if necessary and then a folder selection box will come up. Here, you have to select the directory to install in, which must be where your KDE 4 service menus are stored.

On my Kubuntu 8.04 system, the right place for all users is /usr/lib/kde4/share/kde4/services/, so I choose that folder in the selector.

To find out where your service menu directories are, you can run this command in a terminal:

$ kde4-config --path services

That will spit out a list of the directories you can install in, separated by colons (:). In most cases there will be two entries, one in your home folder and one elsewhere. Choose the one in your home folder if you're doing a single user install, or the other one for all users.

Once you know the right directory to install in, choose it in the folder selector dialogue and click OK to install.

The program will now disappear for a few seconds while it installs, so have a little patience until you are notified the install is done.

That's it, the new service menu for extracting and compressing files is installed. You will need to close and re-open any applications, such as Dolphin and Konqueror, before the new options will show up in the right-click menu.

KDE users, here's a neat application that creates a 'service' in your file manager that allows you to easily convert videos to other formats using ffmpeg.

ffmpegmenu is what you need. After copying the simple script into the right directory, an action will appear in the sidebar of either Konqueror or Dolphin (your choice), which easily allows you to convert selected video to DVD, MPEG or into iPod format with a couple of clicks.

The script itself is very simple, such that it's definitely possible to edit it to customise the commands it runs to make your own ffmpeg conversion options. It does require you have ffmpeg and the necessary codecs to convert to DVD, MPEG and iPod already installed, as it is just a loader which calls ffmpeg. But enough of that, how do you actually install the script?

Well, first of all, download it from KDE-Apps, direct download link here.

When that file opens, save it as ffmpegmenu.desktop and put it on your desktop. All we now need to do is to copy the file into place.

You'll probably need to be root to do this, so run su - first (or Ubuntu users, prefix the cp command below with sudo).

# cd /home/yourusername/Desktop
# cp ffmpegmenu.desktop /usr/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus
# cp ffmpegmenu.desktop /usr/share/apps/d3lphin/servicemenus

Feel free to omit either the Konqueror or Dolphin command depending on whether you want this installed in one, the other, or both. Once installed, highlighting a .avi file should show the following in the sidebar (this screenshot from Dolphin):

And it's done!

If you want to uninstall, simply remove the ffmpegmenu.desktop files as root, like so:

# rm /usr/share/apps/konqueror/servicemenus
# rm /usr/share/apps/d3lphin/servicemenus