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.

Advance warning: While this application does look like a cool program, I haven't been able to get it to actually work (everything is fine up until typing flickr:/// in Nautilus), on either Fedora 8 or Ubuntu Hardy. There have been reports of it working on older distros, for example you might have more luck if you are still running Ubuntu Edgy.

I'll leave this tutorial up in the hope that it is useful to someone, but I can't say that this will work for you, because I have had no luck at all. Try it at your own risk.

While this program is fairly old and hasn't been updated in a while, it's a pretty neat concept if you're into photo sharing site Flickr.

What Gnickr does is that it gives you access to Flickr through your filesystem, so you can drag and drop files between your desktop and Flickr through Nautilus.

So, let's install Gnickr. On my Fedora 8 system, I had to install the gnome-python2-devel package from yum in order to get Gnickr to compile. Head to the Download page and grab the tarball of the latest release.

Once you've got that, extract it and open a terminal into the directory where it has been extracted.

$ ./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc
$ make
[[become root]]
# make install

On my test system, I had the issue that Gnickr's FlickrLib installation wasn't getting put in the right Python directory, which meant it wasn't working. If you get errors at the next stage, you might also need to try this:

# ln -s /usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages/flickrlib.py /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages

Once you're installed, you need to complete one final step, which is to authorise Gnickr to access your Flickr account. In the terminal (but not as root anymore), run this:

$ gnickr-auth.py

You'll then be sent to Flickr in your browser to give Gnickr access.

Once that's done, go back to the window on your desktop and Complete Authorisation. One more step to complete is to manually quit Nautilus, so that it loads back up and is ready to access Flickr. Your desktop and any File Browser windows open will disappear briefly.

$ killall nautilus

Now, to access your Flickr account through Gnickr, go to any File Browser window. Press Ctrl+L to bring up the location bar and enter flickr:/// to start browsing Flickr.

A really quick look at how to switch the GNOME File Manager into a browser mode rather than its default spatial mode. The setting is quite hidden in menus and dialogues, so if you\'ve lost it - here\'s where it is!