Posts Tagged ‘convertion’
Wednesday, January 9th, 2013
Some time ago I've written a tiny article, explaining how converting of HTML or TEXT file content inside file can be converted with iconv.
Just recently, I've made mirror of a whole website with its directory structure with wget cmd. The website to be mirrored was encoded with charset Windows-1251 (which is now a bit obsolete and not very recommended to use), where my Apache Webserver to which I mirrored is configured by default to deliver file content (.html, txt, js, css …) in newer and more standard (universal cyrillic) compliant UTF-8 encoding. Thus opening in browser from my website, the website was delivered in UTF-8, whether the file content itself was with encoding Windows CP-1251; Thus I ended up seeing a lot of monkey unreadable characters instead of Slavonic letters. To deal with the inconvenience, I've used one liner script that converts all Windows-1251 charset files to UTF-8. This triggered me writting this little post, hoping the info might be useful to others in a similar situation to mine:
1. Make Mass file charset / encoding convertion with recode
On most Linux hosts, recode is probably not installed. If you're on Debian / Ubuntu Linux install it with apt;
apt-get install --yes recode
It is also installable from default repositories on Fedora, RHEL, CentOS with:
yum -y install recode
Here is recode description taken from man page:
NAME
recode – converts files between character sets
find . -name "*.html" -exec recode WINDOWS-1251..UTF-8 {} \;
If you have few file extensions whose chracter encoding needs to be converted lets say .html, .htm and .php use cmd:
find . -name "*.html" -o -name '*.htm' -o -name '*.php' -exec recode WINDOWS-1251..UTF-8 {} \;
Btw I just recently learned how one can look for few, file extensions with find under one liner the argument to pass is -o -name '*.file-extension', as you can see from example, you can look for as many different file extensions as you like with one find search command.
After completing the convertion, I've remembered that earlier I've also used iconv on a couple of occasions to convert from Cyrillic CP-1251 to Cyrillic UTF-8, thus for those who prefer to complete convertion with iconv here is an alternative a bit longer method using for cycle + mv and iconv.
2. Mass file convertion with iconv
for i in $(find . -name "*.html" -print); do
iconv -f WINDOWS-1251 -t UTF-8 $i > $i.utf-8;
mv $i $i.bak;
mv $i.utf-8 $i;
done
As you see in above line of code, there are two occurances of move command as one is backupping all .html files and second mv overwrites with files with converted encoding. For any other files different from .html, just change in cmd find . -iname '*.html' to whatever file extension.
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Tags: CentOS, character sets, convertion, converts, exec, file extensions, inconvenience, linux hosts, man page, page 3a, repositories, rhel, tiny article, unicode utf 8
Posted in Everyday Life, Linux, System Administration, Web and CMS | 1 Comment »
Friday, May 18th, 2012
A friend of mine, just mentioned about a program ASCIIPic – capable of converting graphic images in JPEG to plain text ASCII in Microsoft Windows OSes.
Yesterday I blogged about caca-utils (img2txt) – console tool to convert picture graphics to plain text ASCII , so knowing of the Windows freeware ASCIIPic existence catched my attention and I decided to give it a try to get idea what is situation with Images to ASCII text convertion in Windows? 
.
1. Generating ASCII from JPEG images with ASCII Pic
As I don't have a Microsoft Windows OS at hand, I downloaded it and run it on my Debian notebook with WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) MS-Windows emulator.
For my surprise the program run succesfuly its GUI interface and worked pretty smooth even emulated on Linux.
As of time of writting, the latest version of the freeware program available is 2.0. You see in above screenshot the program is pretty intutive to use. You select an Input file, an Output file and you're ready to Process the image to TXT.
One small note to make here is the program couldn't recognize as Input files images in PNG or GIF formats, it seems the only image formats the program recognizes as input are JPEG and BMP.
The converted images to ASCII results are quite unsatisfactory, I tried converting few pictures originally in size 1024×768 but the produced ASCII was messy huge (the program didn't automatically set height / width dimensions to 60×80 and therefore, when I revied the produced pictures, they were very ugly and hardly readable. It could be the same image looks better if reviewed in MS-Windows Notepad but I seriously doubt that …
I thought some improvement to the produced ASCII image might be possible from the app options so I played around with the Zoom, Negation, Brightness and Monochrome options, none of them had a drastic change on the output. Using any of the program options didn't make the output TXT "image" to look closer riginal JPEGs..
ASCII Pic official website contains a number of other tiny tools, like WinKill and RemoteShut, however most of the tools are already too obslete and useless just like ASCII Pic
If I have to compare ASCIIPic produced ASCII Images to libcaca's Linux img2txt, asciipic's ASCII images are a piece of crap.
2. jp2a command line tool image to ASCII generator
As of time of writting a good alternative program I found for Windows is jp2a
jp2a is a free GPL-ed software available for all major operating system architectures Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows.
jp2a is a command line tool and lacks any GUI interface but if compared to ASCII Pic the output ASCII image is awesome.
jp2a Windows binary can be downloaded from here , also I've made a mirror of windows jp2a bin in case if it disappears here
3. ASCII Generator 2 (asc2gen) – Windows GUI Images to ASCII generator
ASC 2 Gen is actually the best I can find program to convert images to ascii in Win as of time of writting.
Just like img2txt it generates pretty decent looking text images.
ASC2Gen failed to run emulated on my Linux host with wine version 1.0.1, hence to test it I used a a Windows host via teamviewer.
Below are few screenshots illustrating most of the options ASCII2GEN provides:
asc2gen penguins in inverted color set (black color text background)
ASC2GEN flipped backhed generated image to ASCII
Picture to ASCII text converted with ASCII colors
ascii2gen dithering level option shot
asc2gen contrast / brigthness atune shot
asc2gen save as options shot
Something else nice is it supports a lot of image file formats as input including (BMP and GIF) images.
I've also made a mirror of asc2gen v. 2.0.0 here
While researching online, I found plenty of other Image to ASCII geneartors, however as I didn't tested them I can't say if they are better ones.
Anyways I will be happy to hear if anyone knows other good ASCII generator alternative progs for Winblows?
Tags: ascii art, ascii image, ascii text, Auto, convertion, Draft, drastic change, emulator, existence, file, freeware, freeware program, GIF, gif formats, graphic images, gui interface, host, Image, image formats, images, img, input files, jpeg images, Microsoft, microsoft windows 2000, microsoft windows os, ms windows notepad, negation, Output, Pic, PicAs, picture, png, process, program options, quot, screenshot, shot, shotasc, text, text ascii, time, tool, width dimensions, wine, wine wine
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Various, Windows | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, May 8th, 2012
I'm starting to learn some video editing, as I need it sometimes for building client websites.
As a Linux user I needed to have some kind of software for amateur video editing.
For Microsoft Windows OS, there are tons of video editor programs both free and proprietary (paid).
Windows users can for instance use the free software program VirtualDub (licensed under GPL license) to easily cut movie scenes from a video.
Unfortunately VirtualDub didn't have a Linux or BSD version so in my case I had to look for another soft.
I consulted a friend of mine who recommended a video editor program called LiVES.
If you haven't done any video editing previously on Linux (like my case was), you will certainly be happy to try LiVES
LiVES can extract only sound from videos, cut selected parts (frames) from videos and do plenty of other nice stuff. It is just great piece of software for anyone, who needs to do simply (newbie) video editting.
With LiVES even an amateur video editor like me could, immediately learn how to chop a movie scenes …
To master the basics and edit one video in FLV format it took me about 1 hour of time, as in the beginning it was confusing to get confortable with the program scenes selector.
One downside of LiVES it failure to open a FLV file I wanted to edit.
In order to be able to edit the flv movie hence I first had to convert the FLV to AVI or MPEG, as this two (video multimedia formats) are supported by LiVES video editor.
After completing my video scenes chopping to the AVI file I had to convert back to FLV.
In order to complete the convertion between FLV to AVI format on my Debian Linux, I used a program called avidemux
Avidemux has a nice GUI interface and also like Lives has support for video editting, though I have never succesfully done any video edits with it.
Avidemux IMHO is user (completely intuitive). To convert the FLV to AVI, all I had to do was simply open the file FLV file, press (CTRL+S) select my FLV video file format and select the output file extension format to be AVI.
Further on, used LiVES to cut my desired parts from my video of choice. Once the cuts were complete I saved the new cutted version of video to AVI.
Then I needed the video again in FLV to upload it in Joomla, so used ffmpeg – command line tool to do the AVI to FLV file converstion, like so:
hipo@noah:~$ /usr/bin/ffmpeg -i my_media_file.avi my_video_file.flv
Hope this article helps someone aiming to do basic video editting on Linux with LiVES and just like needed FLV to AVI and AVI to FLV convertions.
Tags: Auto, avi, avi file, avi format, avidemux, BSD, client, client websites, convertion, debian linux, downside, Draft, editing, editor, failure, file, flv file, format, free software program, gui interface, how to convert flv to avi, IMHO, instance, Linux, linux user, Microsoft, microsoft windows os, multimedia formats, nice stuff, piece, selector, simple, software, support, time, video, video editing, video editor, video editting, video multimedia, video scenes, Videos, windows users
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop | 1 Comment »
Sunday, February 26th, 2012
In my last article, I've explained How to create PNG, JPG, GIF pictures from one single PDF document
Convertion of PDF to images is useful, however as PNG and JPEG graphic formats are raster graphics the image quality gets crappy if the picture is zoomed to lets say 300%.
This means convertion to PNG / GIF etc. is not a good practice especially if image quality is targetted.
I myself am not a quality freak but it was interesting to find out if it is possible to convert the PDF pages to SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) graphics format.
Converting PDF to SVG is very easy as for GNU / Linux there is a command line tool called pdf2svg
pdf2svg's official page is here
The traditional source way compile and install is described on the homepage. For Debian users pdf2svg has already existing a deb package.
To install pdf2svg on Debian use:
debian:~# apt-get install --yes pdf2svg
...
Once installed usage of pdf2svg to convert PDF to multiple SVG files is analogous to imagemagick's convert .
To convert the 44 pages Projects.pdf to multiple SVG pages – (each PDF page to a separate SVG file) issue:
debian:~/project-pdf-to-images$ for i in $(seq 1 44); do \
pdf2svg Projects.pdf Projects-$i.SVG $i; \
done
This little loop tells each page number from the 44 PDF document to be stored in separate SVG vector graphics file:
debian:~/project-pdf-to-images$ ls -1 *.svg|wc -l
44
For BSD users and in particular FreeBSD ones png2svg has a bsd port in:
/usr/ports/graphics/pdf2svg
Installing on BSD is possible directly via the port and convertion of PDF to SVG on FreeBSD, should be working in the same manner. The only requirement is that bash shell is used for the above little bash loop, as by default FreeBSD runs the csh.
On FreeBSD launch /usr/local/bin/bash, before following the Linux instructions if you're not already in bash.
Now the output SVG files are perfect for editting with Inkscape or Scribus and the picture quality is way superior to old rasterized (JPEG, PNG) images
Tags: Auto, bash shell, bsd users, command line tool, Convert, Converting, convertion, crappy, deb, deb package, debian project, debian users, document, documentConvertion, Draft, editting, format, freak, GIF, gnu linux, graphic formats, Graphics, graphics format, graphics graphics, homepage, Image, image quality, ImageMagick, inkscape, issue, JPG, jpg gif, line, Linux, nbsp, number, package, page, pdf document, picture, png, png images, Projects, raster graphics, rasterized, Scalable, scalable vector graphics, Scribus, Shell, svg file, svg files, tool, traditional source, use, vector, way
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, System Administration | No Comments »
Saturday, February 25th, 2012
I've received a PDF file with a plan for development of a bundle of projects, My task was to evaluate this plan and give feeback on the 44 pages PDF document.
Since don't know of program to directly be able edit PDF files on GNU / Linux ?, my initial idea was to open and convert the PDF to ODT / DOC with OpenOffice (Libre Office) and then edit the ODT file.
Unfortunately Open Office oowrite program was unable to open / visualize the PDF file. My assumption is OO failure to open the PDF is because the PDF was generated on Microsoft Windows with Adobe illustrator or smth.
The idea that came to my mind as alternative, way to edit the PDF file was to convert it in pictures edit and then convert the pictures to PDF.
In other words to follow these 3 steps:
1. Convert the PDF document to multiple images
2. Edit each of the images with GIMP or Inkscape
3. Convert back all images to a single PDF file
Some time ago, I've written an article how to create PDF file from many image files in JPEG, PNG or GIF on Linux
. This prior article was exactly describing how to complete Step 3.Therefore all left was to find a way to convert the PDF file to multiple JPEG / PNG / GIF images.
convert command to convert PDF document to multiple pictures which you can take from my earlier article is:
$ convert *.jpg outputpdffile.pdf
Actually in Step 1 I was aiming to do the opposite of what I've previously done.
Hence, in order to convert the singe Project.PDF file to multiple PNG images, I just switched convert IN / OUT arguments order.
hipo@noah:~/project-pdf-to-images$ convert Project.pdf Project.png
...
I've done the PDF to pictures conversion on my notebook running Debian Squeeze (6.0.2) GNU / Linux.Convertion of the PDF file to 44 images, took 25 seconds on my dual core 1.8 Ghz / 2GB RAM Thinkpad r61.
Afterwards, I've had at hand 44 PNG files generated, e.g.:
hipo@noah:~/project-pdf-to-images$ ls -al Project-*.png |wc -l
44
convert was also smart enough to produce correct file naming. The output file names were:
Project-1.png
Project-2.png
etc.
Nicely each number (-1.png) was corresponding to the respective PDF page. For instance Project-10.png was corresponding to page 10 of the Projects.PDF file
Rather ironically, after convertion of the PDF to pictures, while opening the Project-1.png, I've noticed The GIMP – (The GNU Image Manipulation Program) is capable of directly reading PDF files. GIMP has both the option to open files in layers or separate images 
Anyways even if GIMP is used to modify the different PDF pages as layers, once completed GIMP doesn't have the ability to save the file as PDF and therefore once saved the file if merging of layers is done the resulting picture becomes ONE BIG MESS.
Therefore it seems my the 3 steps way e.g.:
1. convertion PDF to pictures
2. picture edit with GIMP or Inkscape
3. convertion of pictures back to PDF
is still the only way to "modify PDF" in Linux or BSDs. I will be glad to hear if someone has come up with a better solution?
Tags: adobe illustrator, alternative, assumption, Auto, bundle, conversion, Convert, convertion, DOC, Draft, dual core, file, GIF, gif images, GIMP, hipo, how to create pdf file, illustrator, image files, initial idea, JPG, jpg gif, Libre, microsoft windows, multiple images, noah, noah project, odt, Open, open office, OpenOffice, page, pdf files, png, png files, png images, RAM, singe, smth, step 1, step 3, time
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, System Administration | 3 Comments »
Thursday, December 8th, 2011
I'm realizing the more I'm converting to a fully functional GUI user, the less I'm doing coding or any interesting stuff…
I remembered of the old glorious times, when I was full time console user and got a memory on a nifty trick I was so used to back in the day.
Back then I was quite often writing shell scripts which were fetching (html) webpages and converting the html content into a plain TEXT (TXT) files
In order to fetch a page back in the days I used lynx – (a very simple UNIX text browser, which by the way lacks support for any CSS or Javascipt) in combination with html2text – (an advanced HTML-to-text converter).
Let's say I wanted to fetch a my personal home page http://www.pc-freak.net/, I did that via the command:
$ lynx -source http://www.pc-freak.net/ | html2text > pcfreak_page.txt
The content from www.pc-freak.net got spit by lynx as an html source and passed html2pdf wchich saves it in plain text file pcfreak_page.txt
The bit more advanced elinks – (lynx-like alternative character mode WWW browser) provides better support for HTML and even some CSS and Javascript so to properly save the content of many pages in plain html file its better to use it instead of lynx, the way to produce .txt using elinks files is identical, e.g.:
$ elinks -source http://www.pc-freak.net/blog/ | html2text > pcfreak_blog_page.txt
By the way back in the days I was used more to links , than the superior elinks , nowdays I have both of the text browsers installed and testing to fetch an html like in the upper example and pipe to html2text produced garbaged output.
Here is the time to tell its not even necessery to have a text browser installed in order to fetch a webpage and convert it to a plain text TXT!. wget file downloading tools supports source dump as well, for all those who did not (yet) tried it and want to test it:
$ wget -qO- http://www.pc-freak.net | html2text
Anyways of course, some pages convertion of text inside HTML tags would not properly get saved with neither lynx or elinks cause some texts might be embedded in some elinks or lynx unsupported CSS or JavaScript. In those cases the GUI browser is useful. You can use any browser like Firefox, Epiphany or Opera 's File -> Save As (Text Files) embedded functionality, below is a screenshot showing an html page which I'm about to save as a plain Text File in Mozilla Firefox:
Besides being handy in conjunction with text browsers, html2text is also handy for converting .html pages already existing on the computer's hard drive to a plain (.TXT) text format.
One might wonder, why would ever one would like to do that?? Well I personally prefer reading plain text documents instead of htmls
Converting an html files already existing on hard drive with html2text is done with cmd:
$ html2text index.html >index.txt
To convert a whole directory full of .html (documentation) or whatever files to plain text .TXT , cd the directory with HTMLs and issue the one liner bash loop command:
$ cd html/
html$ for i in $(echo *.html); do html2text $i > $(echo $i | sed -e 's#.html#.txt#g'); done
Now lay off your back and enjoy reading the dox like in the good old hacker days when .TXT files were fashionable
Tags: advanced html, character mode, command lynx, content, convertion, course, CSS, drive, file, freak, full time, glorious times, gnu linux, html pages, html source, HTML-to-text, html2text, index, interesting stuff, javascipt, Javascript, Lynx, necessery, nifty trick, page, page txt, pcfreak, PDF, personal home page, Shell, shell scripts, spit, support, terminal, text, text browser, text converter, time, trick, TXT, unix text, wget
Posted in Everyday Life, FreeBSD, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Various | No Comments »
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
I've playing trying to learn InkScape – The Open Source vector graphic editor .By so far I'm quite impressed on how easy this program is learned and how easy graphical manipulation with this nifty program can be done.
The default format in which InkScape saves its files is SVG (Scalable Vectors Graphics). For all those unfamiliar with SVG – SVG is an open (free format) format developed in 1999 which insetad of containing binary data like PNG or JPEG does contain plain XML content. SVG being consisted of plain XML has multiple advantageous, the most important one makes it easy for text and visual data to be displayed among different program svg readers in absolutely identical way. Besides that the format if read with plain text editor like vim or emacs can be altered directly via the source.
Being multi system interoperable makes SVG as a great format for text and visual data storage in HTML5, actually SVG is already a part of the HTML5 html coding standard. And most probably its adoption rate will raise up drastically as soon as HTML5 starts substitute HTML4 and lower web standards.
Anyways I'm slipping away from the aim of this post so I'll stop blabbering on how great SVG is and let people check it out for themselves (if not already).
Going back to the aim of my article to show How to convert SVG to PNG graphical extension on GNU / Linux and FreeBSD
After producing a bunch of files with InkScape I realized the default format in which Inkscape stores its files is SVG , this was okay with me but since I wanted to have my experimental produced content in PNG I needed a way to convert SVG to
My first logical guess was that The Gimp will be able to handle the situation and after opening my SVG file with GIMP and used the gimp File -> Save As option and give the SVGfile an extension of PNG , Gimp succesfully converted the file to PNG.
However I wanted to dig further and check out what is the standard accepted way to convert SVG files using a plain command. This will possibly be handy to me if I had to do something online (let's say a website) which will accept SVG and will require the SVG files to be converted and also stored in PNG or other Graphic file formats.
After checking online, I've found a post which pointed me to librsvg2 which contains RSVG – (Turn SVG files into raster images.)
librsvg is available as a package in most mainstream Linux distributions nowdays, Fedora, Debian etc., as well as contains a port inside the FreeBSD ports system. Since I'm using Debian on my notebook where I installed and tested the command line SVG to PNG convertion the way I did it is:
noah:/home/hipo/Desktop# apt-get --yes install librsvg2-bin
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following NEW packages will be installed:
librsvg2-bin
0 upgraded, 1 newly installed, 0 to remove and 16 not upgraded.
Need to get 72.5 kB of archives.
After this operation, 180 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Get:1 http://ftp.nl.debian.org/debian/ squeeze/main librsvg2-bin amd64 2.26.3-1 [72.5 kB]
Fetched 72.5 kB in 0s (184 kB/s)
Selecting previously deselected package librsvg2-bin.
(Reading database ... 376046 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking librsvg2-bin (from .../librsvg2-bin_2.26.3-1_amd64.deb) ...
Processing triggers for man-db ...
Setting up librsvg2-bin (2.26.3-1) ...
Afterwards the exact convertion of my Inscape SVG file drawing.svg to drawing.png using rsvg I've done like so:
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ rsvg drawing.svg drawing.png
The convertion results for me was 100% uniqueness between the file converted and the output PNG. Some people might wonder why I didn't used Inkscape's Export to Bitmap function and then use convert command part of ImageMagick in order to convert the produced Inkscape bitmap to PNG.
One other thing worthy to mention is on Debian, librsvg2-bin contains 2 more executable besides rsvg. One is the rsvg-view command which allows one to view SVG files using command line or Graphic enviroment, the other one is rsvg-convert which supports again SVG convertion to PDF and to PNG
Before proceeding with the other described ways to convert SVG to PNG earlier in this article, I give a try to Inkscape's Export to Bitmap embedded function but the produced bitmap did not resembled the original SVG file so I decided to completely abandon this method
Maybe there is some particular reason of the chaotic way I've tested Inkscape to place random images sometimes going out of the field of a paper etc. which influenced the improper generation of Bitmap using Inkscape, despite that it seems InkScape needs some more development until the bugs in Bitmap producing get fixed and it can be freely used to produce Bitmaps.
Maybe there is some particular reason for the failure of Inkscape to produce a good BMP file, like for example the chaotic way I've tested Inkscape to place random images sometimes going out of the field of a paper borders etc.This should have influenced the improper generation of Bitmap using Inkscape, anyhow it seems InkScape needs some more development until the bugs in Bitmap creation get fixed.
By the way if you're wondering how to convert PNG to bitmap BMP after, once having converted SVG to PNG this is easily doable with convert command, like so:
hipo@noah:~/Desktop$ convert drawing.png drawing.bmp
Maybe in future releases it will be a good idea if InkScape developers integrate a convertion to other formats this will make it handy and make surely these nice program more popular among users. Hope this is helpful. Cheers and as RMS likes to say Happy Hacking
Tags: adoption rate, binary data, bitmap, convertion, data storage, default format, Desktop, emacs, export, file, format, function, GIMP, gnu linux, graphic editor, graphic formats, graphical extension, graphical manipulation, Graphics, hipo, HTML, inkscape, interoperable, librsvg, nbsp, nifty program, noah, Open, package, png, Scalable, source vector, substitute, svg file, text, Vectors, vim, xml content
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, Various | 2 Comments »
Tuesday, November 29th, 2011
I guess everyone has ended up with problems into a script files written under Windows using some text editor which incorrectly placed into the end of lines Windows (\r\n) end of lines instead of the UNIX (\r).
Those who have have already take advantage of the nice tiny utility dos2unix which is capable of convert the Windows end of lines to UNIX. However some older UNIXes, like SunOS or HP-UX does not have the dos2unix utility into the list of packages one can install or even if its possible to install dos2unix it takes quite a hassle.
In that cases its good to say convertion of end of lines can be done without using external end programs by simply using UNIX sed .
The way to remove the incorrect Windows ^M (as seen in unix text editors) is by using the sed one liner:
server# sed 's/.$//' file-with-wrong-windows-eol.txt > file-with-fixed-unix-eol.txt
Tags: Advantage, Convert, convertion, cr lf, dos2unix, editor, hassle, hp, HP-UX, line, liner, list, MS-DOS, script, server, sunos, text, tiny utility, TXT, unix, unix text editors, UNIXes, using unix, utility, way, Windows
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, System Administration | No Comments »
Thursday, November 17th, 2011
I was looking for a way to convert some Video and Sound files, downloaded from Youtube (mostly things dedicated to free software) and as far as I looked online unfortunately these pieces of nice music and tutorials are not available for download anywhere else or at least not available for download in some of the Open / Free Format (OGG Vorbis or OGV (OGG / Theora Video).
When it comes to convertion between different formats, always the first things that I think of is ffmpeg or mencoder , however I was not sure if some of this tools are doing the trick so I did a quick research online if there is some specialised console or GUI program that can do the convertions between MP4, FLV etc. to OGV.
In less than 10 minutes I found a threat mentioning about ffmpeg2theora – A Simple Convertor to create Ogg Theora files
As I'm running Debian GNU / Linux, I installed ffmpeg2theora straight via apt, according to some reports online ffmpeg2theora cmd convertion tool is also available straight from repositories on Ubuntu as well.
On FreeBSD there is a port /usr/ports/multimedia/ffmpeg2theora available for install. Of course FFmpeg2Theora can be installed from source on other Linux distributions that might be missing a pre-built binary.
Using ffmpeg2theora to convert some kind of non-free video format is very simple, though the tool provides quite a numerous options for all those who want to have some customization for the video to be converted.
To convert the flash file "The Gnu Song.flv" for example to The Gnu Song.flv , I invoked ffmpeg2theora like this:
debian:~# ffmpeg2theora "The Gnu Song.flv"
...
The conversion took few minutes of time, as my machine is not ultra powerful and apparently the conversion to OGV format is not too quick but the good news is it works.
After the conversion was completed I used ogginfo to check the information about the recent converted file The Gnu Song.flv , below you see the file info ogginfo returns
debian:~# ogginfo The\ Gnu\ Song.ogv
Processing file "The Gnu Song.ogv"...
New logical stream (#1, serial: 5d65413f): type skeleton
New logical stream (#2, serial: 0570412d): type theora
New logical stream (#3, serial: 7e679651): type vorbis
Theora headers parsed for stream 2, information follows...
Version: 3.2.1
Vendor: Xiph.Org libtheora 1.1 20090822 (Thusnelda)
Width: 320
Height: 240
Total image: 320 by 240, crop offset (0, 0)
Framerate 25/1 (25.00 fps)
Aspect ratio undefined
Colourspace: Rec. ITU-R BT.470-6 Systems B and G (PAL)
Pixel format 4:2:0
Target bitrate: 0 kbps
Nominal quality setting (0-63): 32
User comments section follows...
ENCODER=ffmpeg2theora-0.24
Vorbis headers parsed for stream 3, information follows...
Version: 0
Vendor: Xiph.Org libVorbis I 20101101 (Schaufenugget)
Channels: 1
Rate: 22050
Nominal bitrate: 30.444000 kb/s
Upper bitrate not set
Lower bitrate not set
User comments section follows...
ENCODER=ffmpeg2theora-0.24
Logical stream 1 ended
Theora stream 2:
Total data length: 1525324 bytes
Playback length: 2m:41.360s
Average bitrate: 75.623401 kb/s
Logical stream 2 ended
Vorbis stream 3:
Total data length: 646729 bytes
Playback length: 2m:41.384s
Average bitrate: 32.059041 kb/s
ogginfo is a part of a package installed under the name vorbis-tools, vorbis tools also contains a few other helpful tools, whether operations with OGV or OGG file formats are at hand, the complete binaries vorbis-tools contains on Debian as of time of writting this post is:
/usr/bin/ogg123
/usr/bin/oggenc
/usr/bin/oggdec
/usr/bin/ogginfo
/usr/bin/vcut
/usr/bin/vorbiscomment
/usr/bin/vorbistagedit
ogg123 is a player for ogg files, however as far as I've tested it it doesn't work too well. And just to compare ogg audio files were played just nice using the play command.
oggenc is used to encode ogg audio file, based on a stream haneded to it from other audio encoded stream (let's say mp3). Hence oggenc can be used to convert mp3 files to ogg audio files , like so:
debian:~# mpg321 input.mp3 -w - | oggenc -o output.ogg -
oggdec is used to convert to wav files or raw PCM audio, whether;
vcut is used to cut ogg video file on parts.
vorbiscomment and vorbistagedit is used to edit information on already existing ogg audio files
There is also a GUI programmer for people who doesn't want to bother with writting on the command line called oggconvert . OggConvert is written for GNOME and uses GTK gnome library, here is how the program looks like:
Tags: Auto, conversion, convertion, convertions, convertor, course, customization, debian gnu, doesn, download, Draft, few minutes, file, flash file, flv, format, Free, freebsd, gnu linux, gnu song, information, linux distributions, mp4, nice music, ogv, Open, ports, quot, repositories, software, Song, Sound, sound files, Theora, threat, time, tool, trick, type, Ubuntu, User, version, video, youtube
Posted in FreeBSD, Linux, Linux Audio & Video, Various | 1 Comment »
Friday, April 15th, 2011
In my quest to know Linux better and use it capabilities to fulfill a multimedia tasks I came across the question:
How can I extract audio sound and music from Flash Videos .flv file format?
After a bit of investigation online I’ve found out in order to achieve this task the quickest way is via the handy ffmpeg conversion tool .
It’s rather easy actually, all necessery to do the conversion is to have the ffmpeg installed.
FFMpeg is part of Debian and Ubuntu repositories, so if you haven’t installed it yet, go straigh and install it with:
debian:~# apt-get install ffmpeg
...
Many modern day Linux distributions already have the ffmpeg pre-installed by default, ffmpeg even have a Windows version so this little tutorial should be directly applied on a Windows host with installed ffmpeg.
Convertion of a .flv file to .mp3 file for example is a real piece of cake to so do issue the command:
debian:~# ffmpeg -i input_file.flv -ab 128 -ar 44100 output_file.mp3
The few mmpeg options meaning is as follows:
-i (specifies input file)
-ab (Set the audio bitrate in bit/s 64k by default)
-ar (Set the audio sampling frequency (default = 44100 Hz).)
For more options checkout the ffmpeg help.
I found ffmpeg to be a bit slower than I expected. A 17 minutes .flv video file is converted to .mp3 for 38 seconds time.
Here is the textual output I got on my Debian Linux while extracting the flash video’s sound and converting it to mp3:
debian:~# time ffmpeg -i g7tvI6JCXD0.flv -ab 128 -ar 44100 output.mp3
FFmpeg version SVN-r25838, Copyright (c) 2000-2010 the FFmpeg developers
built on Jan 21 2011 08:21:58 with gcc 4.4.5
configuration: –enable-libdc1394 –prefix=/usr –extra-cflags=’-Wall -g ‘ –cc=’ccache cc’ –enable-shared –enable-libmp3lame –enable-gpl –enable-libvorbis –enable-pthreads –enable-libfaac –enable-libxvid –enable-postproc –enable-x11grab –enable-libgsm –enable-libtheora –enable-libopencore-amrnb –enable-libopencore-amrwb –enable-libx264 –enable-libspeex –enable-nonfree –disable-stripping –enable-avfilter –enable-libdirac –disable-decoder=libdirac –enable-libschroedinger –disable-encoder=libschroedinger –enable-version3 –enable-libopenjpeg –enable-libvpx –enable-librtmp –extra-libs=-lgcrypt –disable-altivec –disable-armv5te –disable-armv6 –disable-vis
libavutil 50.33. 0 / 50.39. 0
libavcore 0.14. 0 / 0.14. 0
libavcodec 52.97. 2 / 52.97. 2
libavformat 52.87. 1 / 52.87. 1
libavdevice 52. 2. 2 / 52. 2. 2
libavfilter 1.65. 0 / 1.65. 0
libswscale 0.12. 0 / 0.12. 0
libpostproc 51. 2. 0 / 51. 2. 0
[flv @ 0x1336760] Estimating duration from bitrate, this may be inaccurate
Seems stream 0 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 2000.00 (2000/1) -> 29.92 (359/12)
Input #0, flv, from ‘g7tvI6JCXD0.flv’:
Metadata:
duration : 1060
starttime : 0
totalduration : 1060
width : 480
height : 360
videodatarate : 76
audiodatarate : 94
totaldatarate : 179
framerate : 30
bytelength : 23723246
canseekontime : true
sourcedata : B5F9E82C6HH1302704673918653
purl :
pmsg :
Duration: 00:17:40.35, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 174 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: h264, yuv420p, 480×360 [PAR 1:1 DAR 4:3], 77 kb/s, 29.92 tbr, 1k tbn, 2k tbc
Stream #0.1: Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 96 kb/s
WARNING: The bitrate parameter is set too low. It takes bits/s as argument, not kbits/s
Output #0, mp3, to ‘output.mp3′:
Metadata:
duration : 1060
starttime : 0
totalduration : 1060
width : 480
height : 360
videodatarate : 76
audiodatarate : 94
totaldatarate : 179
framerate : 30
bytelength : 23723246
canseekontime : true
sourcedata : B5F9E82C6HH1302704673918653
purl :
pmsg :
TSSE : Lavf52.87.1
Stream #0.0: Audio: libmp3lame, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16, 0 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Press [q] to stop encoding
size= 16576kB time=1060.81 bitrate= 128.0kbits/s
video:0kB audio:16575kB global headers:0kB muxing overhead 0.002404%
real 0m38.489s
user 0m37.126s
sys 0m0.764s
When talking about conversions, another very useful application of ffmpeg is in case if you want to:
Extract Audio from online streams
Let’s say you have a favourite radio, you often listen and there are a podcast you want to capture for later listening, or just catch a few nice songs, using ffmpeg it’s a piece of cake by using the command like:
debian:~# ffmpeg -i http:///xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/some -ab 128 -ar 44100 captured-radio-sound.mp3
The possible ways of use of ffmpeg is truly versatily, you can use it for instance if you have to convert some kind of audio or video format to another one I have given a very simple example of converting a .flv file to .avi and vice versa in my previous post
Tags: audio bitrate, audio sampling, BSD, cake, ccache, cflags, conversion tool, convertion, debian linux, ffmpeg, file, format, gcc, height, input file, investigation, jan 21, JCXD, Linux, multimedia tasks, music, necessery, piece, piece of cake, sampling frequency, Set, Sound, sound and music, starttime, textual output, time, tool, Ubuntu, ubuntu repositories, video, video file, Videos, width, windows version
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 2 Comments »
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