Multiple File Conversion with VLC media Player

I have to convert a number of video files to audio format but its very painful and time consuming to convert them one by one. Is there a way to convert them in a batch with VLC player?

Sireiz

Posted 2013-07-01T12:33:47.740

Reputation: 13

Do you mean extracting the audio track from each of the video files? – matan129 – 2013-07-01T12:35:35.127

Yup, its a wmv file and i want to convert it to mp3 or wav format. – Sireiz – 2013-07-01T12:36:28.017

2Do you have to use VLC for this? – slhck – 2013-07-01T12:38:19.253

no there is no restrictions. – Sireiz – 2013-07-01T12:38:42.033

Answers

If you want to use ffmpeg, you can use the following to extract the audio parts of all WMV files in the current folder to uncompressed WAV (PCM audio):

for f in *.wmv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" "${f%.wmv}.wav"; done

Or MP3 – see the MP3 encoding guide for more info:

for f in *.wmv; do ffmpeg -i "$f" -c:a libmp3lame -q:a 2 "${f%.wmv}.mp3"; done

These are loops for Linux shells like Bash. For Windows, you'd do something like the following:

for %%A IN (*.wmv) DO ffmpeg -i "%%A" "%%A.wav"

slhck

Posted 2013-07-01T12:33:47.740

Reputation: 182 472

I also want to increase the playback speed to 1.5x in the converted files. – Sireiz – 2013-07-01T12:43:02.573

You can use the atempo filter; see: http://ffmpeg.org/trac/ffmpeg/wiki/How%20to%20speed%20up%20/%20slow%20down%20a%20video

– slhck – 2013-07-01T12:46:02.260

its first converting to audio and then increasing the playback speed, isn't it? – Sireiz – 2013-07-01T12:47:57.487

1It is internally decoding the audio to a raw format, then applying the filter, and then encoding it to either MP3 or PCM audio. You can just insert the filter between -i "$f" and "${f%.wmv}.wav". – slhck – 2013-07-01T12:51:45.253

thank you very much @slhck you r absolutely a skilled person. :) – Sireiz – 2013-07-01T12:53:39.290

It depends on your OS:

If you have Windows, it is straightforward to do in the UI:
- VLC -> Media -> ‘Open multiple files’.
If you are a Mac or a Linux user, there are bash scripts (see here).
The above link also has scripts for windows users, if you prefer.

Apart from VLC, HandBrake is a very powerful platform independent (though it was developed for Mac) conversion app that easily allows batch conversion.

dopexxx

Posted 2013-07-01T12:33:47.740

Reputation: 111

Please include the information from the links in your answer :) – bertieb – 2018-06-18T17:51:16.010

Updated. I hope that's sufficient – dopexxx – 2018-06-18T20:25:01.443

-1

I don't think there's a way to do that with VLC.

Handbrake should do what you need. It's another open source program that does media conversion. It's good at doing batches of conversions, and it actually happens to use VLC as its backend.

Handbrake website

stephenwade

Posted 2013-07-01T12:33:47.740

Reputation: 592

Handbrake on its own unfortunately does not do batch conversion. You have to manually add every item to a queue. It also does not use VLC as a backend, but (just like VLC) relies on the libavcodec and libavformat libraries, both of which originate from the FFmpeg project (see here).

– slhck – 2013-07-01T12:43:06.887

does it provide the facility to increase the playback speed in the converted files? – Sireiz – 2013-07-01T12:43:42.407

@slhck Oh. Handbrake asked me to install VLC. I guess it just uses the ffmpeg libraries in VLC. – stephenwade – 2013-07-01T12:45:51.207

1Handbrake only requires VLC because VLC ships with libdvdcss, a library needed to decrypt DVDs. The audio, video and subtitle libraries are directly distributed with Handbrake. – slhck – 2013-07-01T12:53:31.807