This is an old post imported from the previous version of this site when it was my personal blog. Some of these posts are in spanish and I never got to translate these posts.
My daughter wanted to watch on the TV some music videos that a friend sent to her, but the problem was that some of the videos were on WMV format and our DVD player only supports DivX (in fact I think that no players with support to those formats exist, yes, I checked on Amazon).
An option was to see the videos on the computer (my computer has a bigger screen and I have the codecs to watch those formats on Linux), but the experience is not the same. So I started a search for a converter but the ones I found were for windows and these days I don’t trust anymore the free software for windows, in fact I don’t have a windows partition.
Then I found AlltoAvi and problem solved!. AlltoAvi is a software project that can be used in Linux and Windows. In Linux I only needed to install mencoder and worked flawlessly.
To convert a file you need to enter the directory where the files are located, filetype, subtitle and audio track IDs, bitrate desired, the codec you want to use to convert and the width and height of the output.
Example:
./alltoavi . wmv 0 1 650 DIVX50 320 240
will convert all the WMV files located on the current directory to DivX with a dimension of 320×240.
The videos were converted to AVI with a slight degradation of image quality but it was tolerable. In this case applies that depending on the quality of the input is the quality of the output, because I tried with a video downloaded from the web and the quality of the “original” was terrible, I guess that because offilesize restrictions. After the conversion the AVI file was full of compression artifacts.
After that I tried to convert some MKV to AVI files from some Anime episodes and the result was good. Burned the files to a DVD and the DVD player recognized and played the files without problems.
The lesson of this?. If you want to watch your videos on TV, DO NOT encode them to WMV!, AVI or MPG using DivX is going to get you better image/size and compatibility with DVD players.
Converting video files
My daughter wanted to watch on the TV some music videos that a friend sent to her, but the problem was that some of the videos were on WMV format and our DVD player only supports DivX (in fact I think that no players with support to those formats exist, yes, I checked on Amazon).
An option was to see the videos on the computer (my computer has a bigger screen and I have the codecs to watch those formats on Linux), but the experience is not the same. So I started a search for a converter but the ones I found were for windows and these days I don’t trust anymore the free software for windows, in fact I don’t have a windows partition.
Then I found AlltoAvi and problem solved!. AlltoAvi is a software project that can be used in Linux and Windows. In Linux I only needed to install mencoder and worked flawlessly.
To convert a file you need to enter the directory where the files are located, filetype, subtitle and audio track IDs, bitrate desired, the codec you want to use to convert and the width and height of the output.
Example:
./alltoavi . wmv 0 1 650 DIVX50 320 240
will convert all the WMV files located on the current directory to DivX with a dimension of 320×240.
The videos were converted to AVI with a slight degradation of image quality but it was tolerable. In this case applies that depending on the quality of the input is the quality of the output, because I tried with a video downloaded from the web and the quality of the “original” was terrible, I guess that because offilesize restrictions. After the conversion the AVI file was full of compression artifacts.
After that I tried to convert some MKV to AVI files from some Anime episodes and the result was good. Burned the files to a DVD and the DVD player recognized and played the files without problems.
The lesson of this?. If you want to watch your videos on TV, DO NOT encode them to WMV!, AVI or MPG using DivX is going to get you better image/size and compatibility with DVD players.
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