Ffmpeg is an aggregation of software libraries which can be used to convert, record and stream digital video as well as audio in various formats. Ffmpeg is developed under Linux, so you must use it from the command line which was also referred to as ‘text mode’, especially in the days when DOS was the major operating system. Still, given that command line applications pack more punch, programmers are faced with a rather simple task and it does not require more than piping output from one program into quite another one in the tradition of all old UNIX programs and then run it like a web server task with the help of CGI. Though Ffmpeg is Linux oriented, the software can be used in most of the operating systems, including Microsoft Windows.

No doubt, FFMPEG is free to use and excellent for converting files, though you will still need to get the hang of it since it does mean using the command line and not the mouse button. So, if you want to perform the conversion of a file into MPG format that is a format, that the K3 CD burner supports, you would need to install FFMPEG by using Synaptic Package Manager and then fire up the Terminal.

Next, you need to navigate from the command line to the folder where your file is located and simply enter in the command ffmpeg -i (name of your file) -target ntsc-vcd (name of the file with MPG file extension). Once you do this, the conversion program gets activated and there may then be some text that will scroll in the Terminal window and makes sure not to close this window which would cause the conversion to be stopped. That’s all there is to using ffpmeg.

If you use ffmpeg-php, you can, using this extension for PHP, easily add a simple object-oriented API that is useful for accessing as well as retrieving information from video as well as audio files. You can, by using PHP image functions, return frames for movie files as images that can also be manipulated and it is great when you want to automatically create thumbnail images from any of the movies you have. If you also want to learn about the duration as also the bit rate of audio files, you will find that ffmpeg-php comes in very handy and it can also easily access many of the different video formats that ffmpeg supports including mov, mpg, avi and wmv and more.

Ffmpeg-php has some notable features including easy object oriented interface, is able to grab frames from your movie files and then return them in the form of images that you can manipulate with PHP’s image functions. It can also be used to create animated GIFs from any kind of movie frames or even from GD images, and finally, it can also use ffmpeg re-sampling as well as cropping abilities on returned frames.