Video Edition

Formats and conversion tools

• recordmydesktop saves exclusively to Free formats (Theora for video and Vorbis for audio).

• A general tool to convert from one format to another is ffmpeg. You can use it like this:

ffmpeg -i input-file.ogm -vcodec libx264 -b 2000k -t 5 output.mp4

Note that the -ss option does not seem to work with Theora encode streams.

• Avidemux is a nice application to split and edit streams, with a GUI. It cannot read Theora encoded videos yet though.

• To split or generally work with Theora videos, the applications are in the Gentoo package liboggz. Extracting part of a Theora video does not reset the time counter to 0 which is strange. Also, mplayer does not read well "non-canonical" Theora videos (for example ones extracted and that do not start with a keyframe). VLC is better, but generally speaking, support for Theora is quite buggy in a lot of tools.

Applications for video edition

• Kdenlive (requiring KDE 4) seems to be a very good application. It can export to a lot of different formats, and take any format as input.
• Reading from Theora seems to be buggy though.

Online services

• Youtube limits the duration of a video to 10 minutes and upload size to 1Gb. You can add fmt=22 as a parameter to the URL to get the video in HD. When embedding you need to use "&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" in the URL.

• blip.tv seems a very good service. There is an upload counter when you upload a video, which is very nice, and they accept Theora videos.