Merging video files

Recently I downloaded 2 video files which is actually a video file splitted into two for faster upload by the uploader. To merge them on Linux, we can use the command cat like this:

cat video1.mkv video2.mkv >> video.mkv

And it took seconds to complete merging. Now I can watch the video in 1 file.

Have fun!.

Capturing video off your desktop with xvidcap on Linux

What is xvidcap?

It is a small tool to capture things going on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. On Windows machines there are commercial tools like Lotus ScreenCam or Camtasia. From my experience, new user will take some time to take off with a video. I just think it needs more work on user-friendliness.

Where to download?
If you use Fedora, you can install with yum: yum install xvidcap
If u use Ubuntu or Debian, you can install with apt-get : apt-get install xvidcap
or for advanced user, you can download the source code here.

My desktop
Below is a video off my desktop I took with xvidcap. On the video, you can see that I was showing off Compiz. :)

How to make VCD with K3B using Linux

If you have a video file ie .avi, or .mp3 and you would like to burn to CD in VCD format so that you can play it with your vcd player. This is how I did it.

avi file

Let's say you have a .avi video file named myvideo.avi. You have to convert it
to mpg.

ffmpeg -i myvideo.avi -target pal-vcd myvideo.mpg

(Note: the -target command requires at least version 0.4.9 of ffmpeg)

Burn it!

Using k3b, a KDE burning software, you can burn it to cd in vcd format by selecting File -> New -> New Project -> New Video CD Project menu. Please make sure the file size does not exceed the storage size of the CD. If there is an error indicating vcdxbuild binary not found, you need to install vcdimager package.

Problem: There is no vcdimager package for Slackware as I know of. After searching high and low (even using slapt-get was no help), I opted to download sources: vcdimager, libpopt and libcdio source packages.

For all this source,

./configure --prefix=/usr --sysconfdir=/etc --localstatedir=/var

and as usual,

make; make install

After compiling and installing all of these packages, k3b should be able to find vcdxbuild binary and successfully burn the file to cd in vcd format.

Links
vcdimager : http://www.vcdimager.org
popt library : http://directory.fsf.org/libs/popt.html
libcdio : http://www.gnu.org/software/libcdio/