Easily Convert Videos with WinFF and FFmpeg

WinFF is a easy to use graphical interface to the command line FFmpeg video and audio tool. WinFF makes it easy to encode many videos to a wide range of formats all at once. Its FFmpeg back-end should handle just about any video you have.

Visit WinFF’s download page and select the latest Debian/Ubuntu package. Download and install the package.

Because WinFF is a front-end for FFmpeg, the video formats you will be able to use depends on your version of FFmpeg. Ubuntu’s repositories have a version that does not support some popular video types, including H264 and AAC. You can get a more complete FFmpeg by installing Medibuntu’s version.

We’ll add the Medibuntu repository instead of downloading the packages manually. Open System->Administration->Software Sources. Select the Third-Party Software tab and click Add. When you are prompted to enter the APT line, paste this text:

deb http://packages.medibuntu.org/ hardy free

Close the Software Sources window and you will be asked if you want to reload package information. Click Reload. To add Medibuntu’s GPG key and fix authentication errors, install the package medibuntu-keyring (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install medibuntu-keyring

After you’ve added the Medibuntu repository you should get the latest FFmpeg in your Ubuntu system updates. Install these updates before continuing.

Now you’re all set up! Start WinFF from Applications->Sound & Video->WinFF. Add one or more videos you want to convert to the queue using the Add button. To select your target format, first select a device, and then the specific preset you want to use. Click Convert start.

FFmpeg will not use all of your processor’s cores while it encodes, which is good if you want to multi task. Select the multi-threading option in Edit->Preferences to speed up encoding if you’ve got a multi-core processor.

One disadvantage of WinFF is that progress is shown simply as a terminal with FFmpeg’s progress. This can make it difficult to tell how long a conversion is going to take. Other than this, I’ve found WinFF to work really well for converting various bits of video between different formats without resorting to the command line.

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