Converting video is not that hard of a task if you have the right tools.  On UBUNTU the right tool is Mplayer which includes mencoder which will convert video for you straight from the command line.

The first step is to install Mplayer.  Open Terminal and type;

sudo apt-get install mplayer libxine-extracodecs

To install the extensions in Firefox type;

sudo apt-get install mozilla-mplayer

Once installed you can use MPlayer and the companion program mencoder installed on your machine.  mencoder is an extremely powerful program that can record analog and digital television, post-process recorded videos, apply vari¬ous filters and so on. More information is available in the on-line man pages and HTML documentation that comes bundled with the source. 

Let’s say we just want to convert a color movie to black and white. This line will do it for you:

mencoder color-video.avi -o black-white-video.avi -vf hue=0:0 -oac copy -ovc lavc

If you are interested in trying out various values for hue and saturation, you can invoke MPlayer with:

mplayer -vf hue color-video.avi

Press and hold the 5 or 7 keys to reduce hue or saturation.

Tags | General, Linux, Ubuntu