WinFF provides a GUI for converting OGV format videos into AVI. OGV is the format gtk-recordmydesktop produces its screencasts.
I used 1000 as the Video Bitrate, 60 as the Frame Rate, and 800×600 as the Video Size.
Category Archives: Graphics
MPG to AVI in Ubuntu Using mencoder
A friend had to get a 120 MPG file down to a smaller size so he could email a message to a friend for a celebration. Ubuntu to the rescue! I found the following:
mencoder INPUTFILE -ofps 25 -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=192 -srate 48000 -xvidencopts fixed_quant=4 -o OUTPUT.avi
The srate (sound) could be dropped to 16000 if necessary but the big savings were with framerate dropping from -ofps 25 to 15 and the size reduced by adding:
scale=160:128
There are likely to be much better ways of doing these things but it worked in this case and the file was 3MB instead of 120MB. The result could be played successfully in VLC (but not necessarily in Windows Media Player or Real Player).
KolourPaint is the MS Paint Replacement for Ubuntu
I had to agree with movingtofreedom that KolourPaint is much better than GNU Paint. Even if using Gnome instead of KDE generally. Undo, zoom, tooltips etc etc etc.
Open Flash Chart
I have just come across Open Flash Chart and it looks brilliant. It has PHP and Python libraries and more.
Adding simple shapes to GIMP drawings
When working with screen dumps there is often a need to circle a button or put a red ellipse around something to draw it to the user’s attention.
The best way of doing this in the GIMP is not exactly easy to discover by accident!
I only found it out in “Beginning GIMP – From Novice to Professional” Akkana Peck, Apress 2006 pp.289-290.
Even then I had to work out how where in the interface I could get to gfig. Answer: Filters>Render>Gfig …
It might pay to resize the Gfig window so you can see all the controls.
There is a catch – basically the shape is not separately editable once it has been added to the graphic!
You can, however, save some standard images e.g. red ellipse from within the File>Save dialog of Gfig itself.
To select a shape click on the pointer on the toolbar and click on the middle of the shape. The selected shape should have a middle handle which is black, not white. Options are to drag the shape around or to reshape it depending on which button is selected on the toolbar. Not what I’d call intuitive but once you’ve got it it is simple.
Final point – the stroke for the shape is probably best to be a small fuzzy circle to prevent a pixelated effect. Making it slightly transparent is also good so it doesn’t obscure the details beneath (give opacity a middle setting).
PLUS this only works if the image mode is RGB I think.