Media Format Conversion

[laofzu]

I would like to be able to use open formats for music, video, etc. Does anyone know of a program I can use with Cassandra to easily change the formats of my avi, mp3, mov and wmv files to open formats. Also, wouldn't it be a good idea for Linux if when you tried playing one of these files, it simply prompted you to make the conversion and save the file, much like what you do with OpenOffice when opening a file created with MS Office.

[nick]

Hi - For sound

In Synaptic: soundkonverter

KDE frontend to various audio converters
With soundKonverter you can convert between various audio
file formats. Supported formats are: (encode/decode)
- ogg (e/d)
- flac (e/d)
- mp3 (e/d)
- wav (e/d)
- wma (d)

Currently supported backends are oggenc, oggdec, flac, lame,
ffmpeg (partly), mplayer (partly).

I would reccomend installing lame and ffmpeg with it
It is KDE but should appear on menu
Nick

[D1Wayne]

There is a cl utility by the name of mencoder that i believe is Mplayer related, that can be installed via synaptic (Install Software - in MintMenu)

Here are some links to Mplayer ands docs for mencoder

http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/projects.html
http://gentoo-wiki.com/TIP_MEncoder_Tips_and_Tricks
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/encoding-guide.html

hope this helps

[laofzu]

Thanks for the help. I will give your suggestions a try, and see what happens. I would like to add that I really like the Linux Mint forums. I used to be a Xandros user, but that is not a good place to be right now. They lost me when I couldn't use the later versions of GnuCash for my accounting, not to mention their activation fiasco last year. I really like that you use the same Forum application that they do. Makes it easy to find my way around. And, everyone here is just as friendly and helpful as there, so I feel right at home. I have already converted 5 of my friends and relatives over to Linux Mint. They all love your distribution, and thank me for introducing it to them.

[Husse]

I'm not sure but don't Audacity do some converting like that - at least with Lame
This laptop does not have Audacity installed so I can't check in there //edit/ there = Audacity