Thoughts from the abyss

Do you use a video downloader plugin called VideoDownloader for Firefox? If so, and you’re always downloading videos from Google and YouTube, you’ll notice you get these .flv extensions which you can’t open in a media player under Linux. Flash Video File is the file extension you get, but I know for me, they won’t open. Well thanks to hardwarehank, it’s so easy to do under Linux it’s stupid.

Download your video file as an .flv, and then go this website for the full details.

409.ralree.info

Basically, all you have to do is install ffmpeg if you don’t have it already. For me, it’s already installed, but my CentOS 4 system just has an ffmpeg RPM installed from a third party repo. Once you get that installed you’re good to go. I don’t think you have to actually install it if you already have mplayer installed…I believe it’s a package dependency. Anyways, on the the converting.

# ffmpeg -i myvideo.flv -s 320x240 myvideo.mpg

You get a bunch of output, and that’s it. Sweet, huh. You can specify any size you want. Now, I’m not advocating ripping off copyrighted content! I’m just explaining how.