Saturday 2 August 2008

oggvideotools - Thanks for That Package!

In my previous post I outlined some ways that could lead to good screen-cast. One of the biggest issues I have had have been that the gtk-recordMyDesktop output contained skeleton track which rendered that file nearly uneditable. I tried various magic with mencoder to be finally able to extract the theora video into something other, something that can be processed by mkvmerge. It could not be however played by totem. And the same was with the result mkv.

But not anymore. Recently, when checking mail, I noticed in fedora-extras-commits list interesting package - oggvideotools. And now, at the end of my wits, I remembered it, looked into the archives to find that it's actually a new package and have been built on Tuesday. So I downloaded the package from koji (I didn't checked whether it's already in repos), installed it and looked on the content. One of the binaries caught my attention: oggSplit. I wondered how it's used, but as traditional -help or --help or man didn't worked and the program homepage showed only what it does but not how it does, I tried feeding it one of the ogv files.

The result is rather pleasing. It generated two ogg files, one named theora-[some-probably-hex-number].ogg and named unknown-[another-number].ogg. And voila, the theora-*.ogg one works, mkvmerge with it works, ... COOOOL. The unknown-*.ogg probably contains the skeleton track and I'll delete it right away. It's also probably result of this oggSplit output:
unknown type ID 325334135

So, I can safely say that I can do a high-quality screen-cast in matroska file with theora video, now :-)

2 comments:

Matt Domsch said...

I'm glad you like oggvideotools. I found it last week when I was editing videos taken at the Linux Symposium to post on the Fedora TV channel, noticed it wasn't packaged in Fedora yet, and did so. Please give it +1 karma in bodhi:
https://admin.fedoraproject.org/updates/F9/FEDORA-2008-6763
to help get it pushed from updates-testing to updates-released.

Martin said...

Done.