.avi to .mp3

By Filip Salo; published on March 11, 2007.

One of these days, I really should get to collecting the notes I have scattered over a few locations and either put them into a big honkin' text file or set up a private blog or something.

Until then, you're it.

I was watching something at Google Video the other day, but as it was really just the speaker and her microphone, I thought I'd rather listen to it as an mp3. Thus I needed a way to extract the sound from an .avi and encode it as an .mp3.

To reconnect to the first paragraph, this is one of those things I should write down instead of trying to figure it out from scratch every time.

Here's how I did it this time:

$ mplayer -vc null -vo null -ao pcm:fast something.avi
$ lame -f audiodump.wav something.mp3

With any luck, that's the first thing I try the next time around.