How to Convert Format of a Video File

Article Description for Manual Users Perspective

This article explains, for .Net programmers, how to convert video formats (for example AVI, MPEG and the others) and capture images from a video without actually downloading an application consisting of a huge megabytes like (50 MB) or GB of software. Some users might ask, is it really possible? For all those users, my answer is yes. This is the article I want to explain and share with you. In addition, I will also include code snippets.

Scenario for .Net Programmers to Convert Video Format File

In Sales and Entertainment Domain projects, we come across the scenario that users upload an advertisement in various formats. Let us say we need to convert all those formats to a single format, such as .swf. Therefore, this article will be useful for a requirement like this.

These days, users are bothered by the requirement to convert a video format because one video format file may not be compatible in all the players. For Example, Windows Media player, VLC Media player, Xing player and so on). Some video formats are compatible with Windows Media Player whereas other video files are not compatible with it. Whereas, some are compatible in xing player and some video files are not compatible in the same player. So, you need to convert your video formats for playing in the Media player. For this, there is a software required for converting formats of those videos. But that's where the beauty of a Linux command is useful. You can easily convert any video format file and capture multiple images from a video. This can be done with a simple and easily written Linux command on the command prompt. This command will convert various video formats, and capture images from video. But for this, you need an executable file that is freely downloadable and less than 3 Mb of size. The executable file name is ffmpeg. I will illustrate the usage with code snippets.

Schema of the Command will be like this

ffmpeg -i location of the input file name (with extension of the file) -ar 32000 -ab 64 and location of the destination file (with extension of the file) where you want to save it; ffmpeg will be in that specified drive. In the following example, the C drive is the location of ffmpeg.