Update: I used FFmpeg for some conversions but I just found out Avidemux and it seems promising! Trying it right away!

Every once in a while I get my hands on a video file that I can’t play. Today when I wanted to watch a bouldering movie it failed. Not sure why. Maybe becuase my WLAN wasn’t fast enough to stream the huge HD file?

I looked around and found no nice tools to convert the movies. Either it was some shareware, adware or I just couldn’t find the download link on the ugly web site… I reverted and decided to try to use the command line tool FFmpeg to encode my videos to mpeg and be able to play them. It worked so good I’m amazed!

In Ubuntu FFmpeg is included in the distribution and is easy to install via Synaptic or Apt (sudo apt-get install ffmpeg). In Windows you can use this unofficial builds.

To make the conversion I used the following: ffmpeg -i OriginalVideo.mp4 -ab 128k -b 2000k EncodedVideo.mpg

Tip: If you are testing different settings for FFmpeg add -t 60 to encode only the first minute of the video.

FFmpeg is capable of creating videos with different codecs as well, but I didn’t need that currently so that will be a later exercise!