Linux video

Related Pages

• See Linux sound for Linux sound systems
• See Linux audio for audio support on Linux
• See Linux video for video support on Linux
• See Linux photo for photo support on Linux

Play videos

Mplayer

External links

• http://www.linuxtutorialblog.com/post/tutorial-playing-around-with-mplayer

Playing video files

MPlayer plays video files. Many video formats are supported. To play a file:

mplayer <SOMEFILE>

Here a short summary of keyboard shortcuts that can be used during playback:

Key	Function
Left Right	Forward / backward 10 seconds
Down Up	Forward / backward 1 minutes
PgDn PgUp	Forward / backward 10 minutes

Some frequently-used options:

mplayer -xy 2 <SOMEFILE>       # Plays a file with a scale factor of 2

Playing DVD's

Here some handy examples. Mplayer can also be used to play dvd files directly from the harddisk. Check man mplayer for more examples.

mplayer dvd://1                                  # Quick start playing dvd from dvd-reader
mplayer dvd://5-7                                # Only plays titles 5 to 7
mplayer dvd://1 -dvd-device /path/to/directory/  # Play DVD title 1 from a directory with VOB files
mplayer dvd://1 -alang fr -slang en              # Play in Japanese with French subtitles

bug: There is apparently a bug that prevents subtitles to be displayed even though the option -slang is given on the command-line. As a workaround press the key J while playback to cycle through the subtitles.

Record video

SimpleScreenRecorder

SimpleScreenRecorder is a very simple and powerful tool to record desktop on Linux.

• Fullscreen - 128kb mp3, H.264 superfast setting

Roughly 2Mbps for desktop recording. On i5-4300U CPU @ 1.90GHz, it takes 40% of one core.

VLC

We can use VLC to record the desktop, for instance to make Youtube tutorial videos.

• Go to Media → Convert/ Save
• Select the Capture Device tab
• Set Capture Mode to Desktop.

VLC foresee several profiles:

• H.264 + MP3 (.MP4 container).

Roughly 1Mbps for desktop recording. On i5-4300U CPU @ 1.90GHz, it takes 95% of one core.

• Youtube SD.

640x480 - Roughly 1Mbps for desktop recording. On i5-4300U CPU @ 1.90GHz, it takes 40% of one core.

• Youtube HD.

Issues

• VLC does not record audio

Creating a ScreenCast

From [1]:

1. Created an Intrepid instance in VirtualBox.
2. Used gtk-recordmydesktop to record only the VirtualBox window.
3. Create the intro and outro slides in OOo and recorded them using gtk-recordmydesktop.
4. Import all three clips into Pitivi and exported them as a single ogv.
5. Recorded the speech in Audacity while watching the screencast and exported it as a wav file.
6. Converted the ogv to an avi using mencoder.
7. Imported the avi and wav into avidemux, mashed them together and saved an avi.
8. Used ffmpeg2theora to convert it back to an ogv.

Another solution: http://wiki.ubuntu.com/ScreencastTeam

Webcam

• Display webcam video stream with mplayer [2]:

mplayer tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:device=/dev/video0