title: Convert .mov to .avi link: https://onemoretech.wordpress.com/2008/10/11/convert-mov-to-avi/ author: lembobro description: post_id: 446 created: 2008/10/11 20:40:25 created_gmt: 2008/10/11 20:40:25 comment_status: open post_name: convert-mov-to-avi status: publish post_type: post

Convert .mov to .avi

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)?

Copyright 2004-2019 Phil Lembo