Who needs audio/video Internet services when there is ffmpeg on Linux ?

So I joined ITWorx for eighteen days now, including weekends, and for the past two days I felt like I should have a special ringtone for my team lead. My mobile's ringtone is a builtin that is as old as the handset itself and I am not keen to do effort extracting it but it can be found on:
http://www.4shared.com/get/F97ZE-pN/Sooth.html

A few friends already liked it and asked me to send it to them but I always responded it is a builtin and I don't know how to extract it. Just now, a quick search on google using 'Sooth.aac' brought me to the link above.

Any how, let's get to the point. I usually watch NatGeo AbuDhabi and I wanted to have <NatGeo's Wild 2010 Preview> as a ringtone. Our TV set has horrible audio speakers, so I couldn't make head or tails of the preview except for the line saying "see what I see in the tree". With almost nothing from the lyrics, an English-language search on Google didn't help. So I searched in Arabic for موسيقى مملكة الغابة and I knew from Google's Ejabat that is a special recording by Viki Nova for Discovery Channel. With the artist's name at hand, things became really easier. Another search on Google using the string 'download viki nova discovery channel song' came with the comments on the preview as a youtube first result: http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=dr8DvDmzA6w

Watching the preview on a Linux means the .FLV file is saved to /tmp/FlashBlahBlah. Yes! all videos you watch on YouTube itself, not on another website embedding from YouTube, are saved to /tmp/FlashSomething with uppercase 'F' in Flash. All what I needed then was to convert the video into .MP3, rather than .OGG, so that my mobile can handle it. A final search on google using 'convert video to mp3' displayed free internet services. It took me two websites when I realized that such services are lame. Both clogged with ads and failing to render the .MP3 in standard or high quality I knew I had to resort to my OS.

Fortunately Al Hamdu Lellah, I had ffmpeg already installed. Fired:
 # ffmpeg -i InputFile -vn -ab 256 OutputFile.mp3

I then changed ownership of the file to a regular user and sent it via bluetooth to my handset. If you are so lazy to install ffmpeg and check the manual pages, then I am glad to tell you that:
-vn ==> disable video recording
-ab ==> audio bitrate

Now my team lead has a special tone on my handset. That's all folks...

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

بس انت شكلِك ...

Arabic URLs in Varnish

Inamorata