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.

MPlayer is one of the many available media playback systems for Linux and Unix-like operating systems and is particularly useful to many people thanks to its support of proprietary and non-standard video formats.

While the use of these formats will undoubtedly be controversial, the pragmatic Linux user will often still want to be able to enjoy media in these other formats, which makes MPlayer a good solution.

Inside your web browser, however, MPlayer's default plugin interface does not feel very integrated visually with the rest of the system.

Gecko-MediaPlayer is a custom browser plugin which uses MPlayer and its GNOME bindings to provide a better user interface for playing audio and video inside your browser. Any media playable by MPlayer that you come across online can be played back through the plugin, just like the mplayerplug-in package, but with a vastly improved user interface that feels integrated with the GNOME desktop.

Installing the Gecko-MediaPlayer plugin is generally as simple as installing the gecko-mediaplayer package. You may want to remove the mplayerplug-in package first if it is installed, to avoid conflicts between the two browser plugins.

Once you've installed and restarted your browser, any media that MPlayer can handle will show up in the new interface.

If you're a GNOME user that also chooses MPlayer as their media solution for the web, installing this package is a quick and easy way to improve your online viewing experience, through a better integrated UI.

There are lots of sites that offer streaming audio and video services these days. A lot of these use Flash video, but some older sites use other streaming technologies, including Real, Windows Media and QuickTime to deliver the content.

Downloading these streams so you can save them for later is almost always possible. It's worth pointing out at this point that you should check as to whether you have the legal right to dump streams to your machine, but I'll leave it to you to do this responsibly.

One of the ways you can dump this type of stream to your computer is to use the media player Mplayer.

With Mplayer already installed, you simply use the -dumpstream command line option to tell it to read the stream and save it to a file (by default, called stream.dump).

$ mplayer -dumpstream streamurl

streamurl in this example is the URL of the stream, which usually begins with rtsp:// or mms://. The hardest part of actually ripping a stream in this way is discovering this URL, as sites often don't make this immediately available.

I'd recommend the Firefox extension UnPlug for this purpose, as it can often discover the stream URL for you, even if it is unable to do the whole ripping process. You can then copy and paste that URL into your mplayer -dumpstream command, and you'll get the media file.

Again, though, do this responsibly and legally. ;)