Are there any decent resources to learn how to work with video files and/or file conversion?

Question

I've been digging around for a good conversion utility to rip some .mkv files I have to other formats (specifically .avi so I can burn to a DVD). I figure this would be a good opportunity for me to get hands-on experience doing this kind of thing.

I'm a .NET developer (C#), so I'm keen on finding resources focused on that technology stack if at all possible, but I'm open to learning other options.

Can anyone point me in the right direction (links, books, etc.) to help me get started figuring out how to work with various video/audio file formats?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I find ffmpeg excellent, try the official docs for the CLI docs or a programming interfacing tutorial if you wanted to do the conversion programmatically, it wasn't clear to me from your question. You could also look into DirectShow and/or GStreamer, you could start at the wikipedia entry for the filter graph concept, which has links to both.

Answer 2

If you are going to convert from the mkv container in order to burn to dvd, you will save time and perhaps image quality if you just convert directly to mpeg2. You can do this easily with ffmpeg.

For codec and container information, I always found Doom9 a useful starting point.