Converting .flv to .avi files with mencoder

My dad asked me to do something tech-oriented today, and I thought I’d share how I did it.

My dad saw this botfly-extraction video the other day, and wanted to save it to his computer. (Everyone in our family has a certain amount of personal experience with botflies, my dad slightly more than the rest. That’s what living in Belize for four years will do for ya. For what it’s worth, the video very accurately describes the “botfly experience”.)

Anyway, looking through the source of the blip.tv page that the video was hosted on, I was able to find the main .flv file: http://blip.tv/file/get/Vserrao-TheBotflyInMyHead550.flv. I saved that to my computer, and then converted it to an .avi file, so that my dad can view it easier.

I used mencoder to convert the .flv file to .avi. On my Linux desktop, this is what I used for the conversion:

mencoder -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -o botfly.avi botfly.flv

mencoder gave a much higher quality resultant video than ffmpeg did.

Screenshots of the original .flv, the mencoder .avi, and the ffmpeg .avi are below. The screenshots aren’t of the botfly, don’t worry - that’s just gross.

Original .flv: