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Open Video Developers Toolkit

Video Conversion: Using a Graphical User Interface vs Command Line

Over the past decades, video creation and distribution have become available to everyone. Moving from analog to digital recording devices has multiplied possible ways to create and distribute video. Whether you want to share your creativity and your creations on a physical medium (DVD) or via streaming, you should take a look at this chapter.

The chapter focuses on the compression/decompression file formats used by different cameras, video players, and editing software. A large variety of formats exist, some are current and still being used, others might have become obsolete, and you may never have even heard of them before. Most major media companies are members of the MPEG Consortium, so you might be familiar with the different versions of the MPEG format. But it is easy to be confused - MP3 is not version 3 of MPEG, for example, but a subchapter called "layer 3" of the "MPEG 1" standard.

We compare and contrast two tools. One is called VLC, an open-source cross-platform multimedia player and framework, which can also stream audio and video in a number of formats. The second is FFmpeg, an open source cross-platform solution to record, convert and stream audio and video. While VLC has a graphical user interface (GUI), FFmpeg uses a command-line interface, i.e. a text-base interface where the users enters commands. As a developer, you are already familiar with text-based interfaces and can draw on this experience as you work with open video. If you have never used a command-line interface, this is your chance to try it out and find out more about the code work underlying file compression.

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