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Ubuntu does the magic again!

My mother is on visit to my place. She is here for a week. Yesterday, I thought of showing her a Telugu movie, so that, in this hot summer (Jodhpur is scorchy already), we can all relax under the luxury of the ac and savour some delicacies made by my mom. 'Having fun' while watching that movie was ofcourse high on agenda, however, the Indo-Pak cricket semifinal was unmissable though!

However, to my utter dismay I figured out that I had misplaced that favourite Telugu movie CD. Now what? I was determined to show [or see ;)] that movie. I put the movie on download and went back to watch the match. The computer took its own sweet time to oblige my request, but it did. The movie was in .rm format i.e., real media format. That means I can watch it only on a PC. Sigh! Then? I saved the movie onto a flash drive and tried to connect my laptop to my LCD TV and also external speakers as the original sound quality was poor :( I did not find the appropriate connecter. Sigh again!

What next? Nope, I'm not gonna give up. I thought I will convert the .rm format to a suitable DVD playable format. Though I am an avid Ubuntu (Linux) user, somehow out of stupidity (perhaps), I switched to Windows 7 and tried to convert the movie format. I tried doing it with the help of VLC player, then downloaded a couple of video format converters (so called trial versions, ugh!!). They all died on me :(

But I was not the one to budge. I said, no ways, I'll switch back to my trusted Ubuntu. It is so feature rich that it allows you to find a suitable program through its software centre and repositories, for your job. After a couple of trials, I found Arista video format converter and installed it. Within 20 minutes my movie was converted into AVI format and bingo! I burnt a DVD also.

By this time India had won the match and so did I !!!! Finally I could show and also see my favourite Telugu movie to my mom and my family too :D

Proven fact - switch to open source, open access, open journal publishing and for that matter, anything open and free from hidden things and monopoly! I am open to the world, are you??

More soon :)
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Comments

  1. Jai HaravuApril 2, 2011 at 10:51 AM

    Thanks for the interesting post. I wish more and more people realize the long-term value of open source.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Kshema PrakashApril 2, 2011 at 11:28 AM

    Thank you sir :)

    ReplyDelete
  3. PerhapsApril 6, 2011 at 10:28 AM

    Cool Post,
    there is just a simple solution, which is my fav in ubuntu.

    sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
    ffmpeg -i inputvideo.rm outputvideo.avi

    that's it. Continue exploring
    --

    ReplyDelete
  4. Kshema PrakashApril 6, 2011 at 11:00 AM

    @Perhaps: Thanks for the simple command-line solution :)

    ReplyDelete

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