MEncoder
From Luke Jackson
Contents |
Summary
MEncoder is a free command line video decoding, encoding and filtering tool released under the GNU General Public License. It is a close sibling to MPlayer and can convert all the formats that MPlayer understands into a variety of compressed and uncompressed formats using different codecs.
Installing
yum install menencoder
Joining the video clips together
Mencoder doesn't have a fancy gui for you to get used to, but is a command line application, meaning we just type the commands in on a command line.
To join the files "1.avi" and "2.avi" into the joined file "joined.avi" simply type in the following command
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -o "joined.avi" "1.avi" "2.avi"
In the above command -oac copy means "copy the audio stream", -ovc copy means "copy the video stream", and -o "joined.avi" means "output to file joined.avi".
If you want to join more than two clips, then just list as many clips as you want, in the order you want them joined.
Note: Files need to be encoded exactly the same, otherwise MEncoder won't work.
If your joined clip is going to be larger that 1024Mb ( 1 gigabyte ) then when you come to play back the joined clips, some media players get confused as to how long the clip lasts, so add -noodml to the command line, eg.
mencoder -oac copy -ovc copy -noodml -o "joined.avi" "1.avi" "2.avi"
Also note that most movie players cannot play videos that are larger than 2GB (2048MB) in size, irrespective of whether they are .avi, .mpg or .vob.
Trim or split videos with Mencoder
Mencoder makes it easy to trim the end or the beginning of a file, or split it in several parts.
Start from...
mencoder -ss 01:30:24 -oac copy -ovc copy in.avi -o out.avi
Replace 01:30:24 (1 hour, 30 minutes, 24 seconds) with the desired start time position.
End at...
mencoder -endpos hh:mm:ss -ovc copy -oac copy in.avi -o out.avi
Replace 00:45:00 (45 minutes) with the desired end position.
Split the movie
With the two commands above, you can for example split a movie in two bits:
mencoder -endpos 01:00:00 -ovc copy -oac copy movie.avi -o first_half.avi
mencoder -ss 01:00:00 -oac copy -ovc copy movie.avi -o second_half.avi
Replace 01:00:00 (1 hour) with the time when you want the split to occur.
Examples
Record from capture card to file for a duration of 1 hour:
mencoder -vf pp=fd,scale -oac copy -ovc copy /dev/video0 -endpos 01:00:00 -o family_guy.mpg