FOSSwire

Encoding video from one format to another isn't generally considered the most fun job in the world.

One of the video encoding tasks we need to do here for FOSSwire video posts is converting recordMyDesktop Ogg Theora video files into Flash format for the inline player (unfortunately, a necessarily evil).

Traditionally, this would mean dropping to the command line and hand-feeding the encoding instructions to a program like ffmpeg or mencoder.

Ubuntu user JeanClaude (also known as siafulinux) has put together a script for GNOME's File Manager (Nautilus) that makes the Theora to FLV encoding process really simple.

The script can be downloaded here and requires GNOME, Zenity and the video encoding tool mencoder to be installed.

Once you've downloaded the script, you simply extract the file, and double-click install in the extracted folder (choose Run if asked). This drops the script into the right folder.

Now, to convert an Ogg Theora video file to Flash, with default settings, you simply do the following.

Browse to the Ogg Theora source video.

Right-click the source video. On the menu, choose Scripts > Ogv to Flv Converter.

Wait while the conversion happens. When it's done, you will have a nice shiny Flash video file, ready for distributing via the web.

It really is an extremely simple and handy way to very quickly convert a video to Flash video and could easily save a lot of time if you're frequently working with video on Linux.

There are, obviously, plenty of situations where you want more control over the conversion settings, but as a quick two-click solution, Ogv to Flv is a win.

Kudos should go to the developer for making this little script not only really easy to use, but also very simple to install.

If you want to see Ogv to Flv Converter in action, watch this YouTube video made by the author.

Peter walks you through the process of installing the new Adobe AIR beta, installing AIR apps and how to uninstall everything too.

NOTE: Adobe AIR isn't an open source product, but I think it's worthy of covering anyway due to its potential for bringing greater application compatibility to open source platforms.

Building applications that work across multiple platforms is always a challenge, but the web has provided a solution for some of those problems, by inherently being a cross-platform medium.

Sometimes the web isn't powerful enough, however, and there is no replacement for a desktop application.

Adobe's AIR platform is designed to bring the ease of development and cross platform support of the web and combine it with the benefits of desktop applications.

AIR is a framework for Windows, Mac OS X and now Linux that allows you to build lightweight desktop applications. It is worth mentioning that AIR isn't open source, and is obviously designed in part to push Adobe's platforms, such as Flash, which also aren't free and can be troublesome on Linux and Unix systems.

Ignoring that, Adobe AIR for Linux 1.1 Beta was released a few days ago and allows you to run pretty much any AIR application already written on your Linux system.

Unfortunately, the installation is a little cumbersome and could be a stumbling block unless you know how to use the command line.

The installation does work, however, and AIR applications then seem to run pretty well (I tried Twitter client TweetDeck and it appears to work just as it does on Windows and Mac OS X).

In my book, anything that opens up the Linux platform to more application support can only be a good thing, and despite AIR not being free software itself (it is free of charge, but doesn't meet the FSF definition of free software), I think this is a positive step and definitely worth it if you're already a user of AIR apps on other platforms.

You may want to take a look at the release notes and then download the beta.