Hello,
After attending Rajeev's video conferencing demo at Directi, I was inspired to try out new ways to use clive.
Clive is a utility to download youtube videos and convert them using ffmpeg to mp4 videos to play in the popular players. The simple way to use clive is 'clive video_url' in the terminal. This results in an mp4 video getting stored in the current directory in which clive is run.
However I wanted to convert the live videos to audio mp3 only. On the net there is no mention of how to use clive to do it. The man page of clive has one option '-w' to automatically write a config file which can then be edited. Run 'clive -w' to create this file. The file is created in your home directory under .clive/config. Now edit this config file and make 2 changes.
1) ## Path to the ffmpeg program (e.g. "/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i %i %o") path_ffmpeg="/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i %i %o"
Uncomment the path_ffmpeg line to tell clive about the location of ffmpeg ( This is important )
2) ## Uncomment to re-encode to FORMAT ("mpg", "avi", ..) ## Requires also path_ffmpeg reencode_format="mp3"
Uncomment the reencode line and add mp3 in the "" quotes. This was a blind shot that worked. Clive is mainly a video utility.
Save the file and now simply run 'clive video_url' and you first get the video.mp4 file. As soon as it is downloaded clive shows a message that it is converting it to video.mp4.mp3 Thats all. Your mp3 is ready to rock.
As I had earlier downoaded only mp4 videos, I was looking for a way to use ffmpeg to convert them to mp3. From the man page options the following command was assembled using trial and error and it works.
'ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -acodec mp3 -ab 160k video.mp3'
The -i specifies the input file, -acodec specifies the audio output codec and -ab sets the audio bit rate in bits/sec.