Video editing is a staple in todays tech savvy home. Apple users have iMovie; Windows users have Movie Maker. Video editing in Linux is a much more difficult proposition. Converting video from one format to another is hard at the best of times.
Unfortunately, the support forums and documentation cloud the issue, and it is hard to get an opinion that isn't biased in some way.
Ubuntu and its derivatives (Xubuntu and Kubuntu) are well known in the Linux world, and are almost always at the top of distrowatch.com. It's stable; user friendly and the community support is second to none.
One of the biggest problems with Linux in general, is the fact that it is very difficult to convert video's from one format to another quickly and efficiently, without having encoding jitters or audio sync problems.
My wife, for example, has an iPod nano that records video in MP4 format. In of itself, thats not generally an issue. Playback is fine via VLC media player, and uploading to YouTube works like a charm. The problems come when converting from MP4 to DVD.
She likes to take videos of our son, or of things that are happening around the family and as of Christmas this year, wanted to put together a DVD to send to her family overseas.
I never thought it would be such a difficult task. I spent hours re-encoding the video and rendering ISO after ISO (I made about 3 DVD coasters), just because of jitters or sync problems.
Finally, after 2 days, I found a process that worked every time.
Here's what you'll need (just run the corresponding command in your terminal window):
AVIDemux
- sudo apt-get install avidemux
ManDVD
- sudo apt-get install mandvd
Your First MP4 Conversion
Assuming you have the mp4 sitting on your computer under /home/user (where user is your user ID), then essentially you can just follow this process.
- Open AVIDemux (Applications ==> Multimedia ==> AVIDemux)
- Open your mp4 file (File ==> Open ==> Highlight your MP4 ==> Open)
- It will pop up with a message saying "H.264 Detected". Click "Use Safe Mode"
- Click the "Auto Menu" and choose Optical Disk then select DVD.
- The "DVD Auto Wizard" Will appear. Select "4:3" from the Source Aspect Ratio, and "16:9" from the Destination Aspect Ratio. Click "OK" to continue.
- On the left, click the audio menu that says "MP2 (Twolame)" and change it to "AC3 (lav).
- Click the "File" menu, and save your video. Remember to add the ".mpg" extension to your filename as AVIDemux does not by default.
Note: If you get a message saying "Reuse the existing log file?", Click "No".
AVIDemux will then attempt to create an MPEG version of your MP4 file. It runs a 2-pass process that will encode it to quite a nice level, with very little loss of quality. It automatically inserts black borders to help avoid image stretching in 16:9.
Once your video is completed, it will load perfectly in ManDVD, and will automatically fit on 16:9 without the squashed image you normally get with a 4:3 conversion.
Make sure you set the final rendering to "Force 16:9" in ManDVD and it will convert perfectly. If you tell ManDVD to create an ISO image, it makes it a lot easier to burn off a whole stack of DVD's to hand out to your family at the Christmas party.
Enjoy your new DVD conversions, without the coasters.
Nicholas Trevena - A geek of the nerdiest type who reviews technology with a focus on Open Source and GPL.
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