Tag Archives: technology

Video Tools for Linux

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Free tools for video manipulation and editing in Linux aren’t that hard to find if you know where to look.

Here are my favorites:

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports many file types, including AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, using a variety of codecs. Interestingly, it’s available for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows under the GNU GPL license. I haven’t tested Mac OS X and Windows versions, but the program runs fine under Ubuntu Linux (Dapper Drake).

http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/

For file conversion, there’s FFMPEG, which is free–but you’ll have to learn to use it through the command line. Unfortunately, the MAN page for the program isn’t very clear.

To save some of you the trouble of figuring it out, here’s a quick tutorial.

Let’s say you want to convert a file called MYVIDEO.AVI to the mpg format, which is the format supported by the K3 CD burning program. After installing FFMPEG (you can use Synaptic Package Manager), fire up Terminal.

From the command line, navigate to the folder where the file is kept. So you might type:

cd /home/user/Converts

to go to the folder where the file is kept.

Then type the following at the command line:

ffmpeg -i MYVIDEO.avi -target ntsc-vcd MYVIDEO.mpg

and hit Enter. That should get the conversion program started, and you ought to see some text scroll by in the Terminal window. Don’t accidentally close the window, because that will stop the conversion. You can minimize it, however.

To convert an avi file to SVCD format, you would type:

ffmpeg -i MYVIDEO.avi -target ntsc-vcd MYVIDEO.mpg

There’s a GUI front-end for FFMPEG on Mac OS X, but I haven’t found one for Linux.

For ripping DVDs, I use AcidRip. Very simple but fast and efficient.

From Digital Life by Chin Wong

http://www.chinwong.com

Chin Wong has been covering the technology industry since the 1980s, starting as a reporter for Business Day, Southeast Asia’s first daily business newspaper. He is now a lecturer in journalism at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines and associate editor for the Manila Standard Today. Before that, he also served as technology editor of the Manila Times until October 2004.

Article Source:

http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Chin_Wong

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Next Generation Web Cam Chat Rooms

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Some of you may still remember Netmeeting. It is still a component of Microsofts operating systems, but not a very well known much less popular one nowadays. It was the first mainstream method to communicate online with a web cam. It was designed as a point-to-point application and directories to find others were spread out over the internet without any central database.

Fast forward, almost ten years later. It’s rarely called video conferencing now, but web cam chat. It’s still the same thing, it just has a different name and has become quite a hype.

Most cam chat rooms utilize Adobes Flash for the chat front end with the Flash Application server as back end. The technology is good, but expensive, as the flash application server does not run very cheap and needs quite a bit of server power to do its job. There are several large cam chats working with that technology already, providing decent resolution real time video.

However, not long ago a new player entered the ring: Red5. Red5 is an open source flash application server much faster and more accessible than the monster created by Adobe. It is in beta state, but already is so stable that several sites have been launching self-made video chat rooms.

Once a technology becomes available to the open source community, commercial products often need to step back. Red5 proves this on one site in particular: Vagipe. Vagipe is a completely free web cam chat site allowing users to view up to five high resolution video streams at once, something unthinkable before. No cost for the application, very low resource use, and one lonely hobbyist can give away for free what needed quite a lot of money and manpower before.

Red5 is still not too well known, but it will be interesting to see what others come up with once the developer community starts to focus on this new piece of software.

See the article here: Next Generation Web Cam Chat Rooms

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