My family has a pretty old (5 years?) Nikon Coolpix digital camera that for many years acted a stand-in for the real video camera we couldn’t afford to buy. As a result we’ve got dozens of .mov files taken when the kids were growing up. Today’s the day I decided it was time to convert these to .avi and get them properly burned onto a DVD.
The first step was to convert the .mov files (old Quicktime format) to raw .avi files.
After googling around a bit, I found a post that showed how to do this with MEncoder, the transcoding utility that comes with Mplayer.
Here’s the command line:
mencoder sample.mov -oac pcm -ovc raw -o sample.avi
The above can also be done using the transcode utility. Here’s an example of that:
transcode -i example.mov -y raw -o example.avi
Obviously the above uses the default settings, but seems to work well enough with the source files I have.
Did I mention that both MEncoder and transcode are open source and completely free (as in beer)?