wmv to mpg conversion

[turbine]

Howdy:

Do any of y'all know of any linux software that I can use to convert wmv files to mpg format? Can't seem to play wmv files on my 3.3 hdd system (at least not very well), even after downloading the latest win32 codecs.

Thanks

[kael]

This is taken from the MJPEG Tools documentation on SourceForge. You must have Mplayer and Mjpeg Tools (both must be built from source), but I have found it very useful for conversion of several tricky formats to mpeg 1 and 2 video streams; just by letting Mplayer do the work:

>mkfifo stream.yuv

>mplayer -nosound -noframedrop -vo yuv4mpeg anyfile.mpg &

>cat stream.yuv | yuv2lav -o mjpeg_wo.avi

>mplayer -vo null -ao pcm -aofile anyfile.wav anyfile.mpg

Then you can multiplex the audio and video streams with 'lavaddwav'

Some things to keep in mind, however, is that Mjpeg Tools does not currently support non-standard frame-rates, and some (I'm not exactly sure which) windows video codecs are now covered by patents, and therefore the resources are no longer available to decode such streams except without the proprietary software.

[turbine]

Thanks kael. Is there any trouble building Mplayer and Mjpeg Tools under the 3.3 knoppix distro? Typically when I try to build something from source I run into a long list of prerequistes that I don't have.

By the way when I do:
apt-cache -g pkgnames | sort > packages.txt
and then vi packages.txt, I see

mplayer
mplayer-386
mplayer-586
mplayer-686
mplayer-custom
mplayer-g4
mplayer-k6
mplayer-k7
mplayer-nogui
mplayer-powerpc
mplayerplug-in

Would it do to just apt-get install mplayer? mjpegtools is also in the apt-cache list.

[kael]

If the packages install with apt, then that would likely save you a lot of time.

To be honest with you, it's been a long time since I built Mplayer, and I do remember it being slightly tricky, and not working at all with an apt install. There is a resource, http://www.princessleia.com/MPlayer.html, that is geared specifically to building Mplayer from source for Debian.

I seem to recall Mjpeg Tools building without a hitch, but again, the binaries you get from apt would likely be time-saving.

I also read up a little bit more on those video codecs which are patented and this may all be for naught. The way I understand it, any wmv version 7 or later is proprietary and therefore will not be able to be decoded with third-party software.