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Back in the Windows/Mac days, I used the wonderfully easy to use Miro Video Converter to convert videos I have into either the more open and Freerer Theora or WebM formats. Two problems:

(1) No Linux binary that I could use.

(2) No advanced options that let me control the conversion process, such as embedding subtitles.

Is there an alternative FLOSS on Linux that does this? Thanks!

Gilles 'SO- stop being evil'
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hpy
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    Do the sources of software in [Where can I find Software for Unix/Linux that does X?](http://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/2787/where-can-i-find-software-for-unix-linux-that-does-x) help? – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Feb 22 '11 at 00:29
  • Does help, I will try my search there. Thanks! In the meantime, if you know of a specific one that's good, please let me know, too. – hpy Feb 22 '11 at 00:54
  • Have to tried VLC? In general I find that VLC covers most of these sorts of needs. – asm Feb 22 '11 at 02:50
  • I don't remember how easy/hard it was to add subtitles, but there's [`ffmpeg2theora`](http://v2v.cc/~j/ffmpeg2theora/), which attempts to be an "any to Ogg Theora" converter. – njsg Sep 01 '17 at 09:57

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I'd suggest a frontend to ffmpeg. There are several out there, for example

Sinthgunt looks the most promising to me - it looks relatively discoverable, and comes with loads of preset formats to convert into.

gnud
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ffmpeg does both, of course............

Rob
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    OP mentioned `easy`, and by that I think he is thinking GUI. So maybe you could at least point to a tutorial that de-mystifies ffmpeg. – tshepang Feb 22 '11 at 05:32
  • @Tshepang - I would hope that anyone posting here would not require a GUI to make things easy for them. – Rob Feb 22 '11 at 12:17
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    Why's that? There's many tasks that are made easy by using a GUI. – tshepang Feb 22 '11 at 12:26
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    How difficult can this be?: ffmpeg -i video.avi video.webm – Rob Feb 23 '11 at 16:30
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It may depend on the device/format targets, but HandBrake is also an interesting tool for such tasks. It is a bit picky about output formats (only mkv and m4v), but works great if you can read those.

Stéphane Péchard
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