Created: 14 Aug 2003
A rather frustrating day, yesterday, trying to do some very simple video editing. I had a video of Jock (our guide on the Kimberley trip) jumping from “The Widowmaker” at Galvans Gorge. I wanted to rotate the video and provide two versions: one full length and the other cut to the jump only.
There was a steep learning curve ahead as I tried to find a software package available as part of the Debian Linux distribution that would let me make these simple changes. Kino seemed to be exactly what I wanted, however the package from the stable Debian ditribution refused to read the AVI files from my digital camera. Asking for help on my LUG mailing list had resulted in a suggestion that MPlayer would do what I wanted, so I downloaded the source and set about compiling. I had to install various extra development libraries before it would compile and as a result I filled my /usr filesystem.
After some hours of fiddling I had compiled MPlayer and discovered
that the supplied mencoder program would do what I wanted. However,
I was soon to get a first taste of fiddling with video codecs, as by
default, mencoder, using the liblavc video libraries, seemed to
produce videos that could not be played by any of my other software
(xine, xanim). So, after some investigation, I decided to produce two
versions of the videos - one with DivX/MPEG4 video and one with MJPEG
video.
My problems didn’t end there. I had some unusual error messages while uploading the files to this website. The problem turned out to be that I had run out of disk space, so I ended up removing the larger of the two MJPEGs. It was a surprise to me that Gradwell limited me to such a meagre amount of disk space; I need to look again at my hosting options. Gradwell provide an excellent service, but I cannot really afford to upgrade my account with them; I am currently jobless. I don’t want to have to remove some photos from the website, as I think that they are about the only things that people look at.
You can see the final results here.