Free tools for visual communication influence and written material in Linux aren't that herculean to find if you cognize wherever to watch.
Here are my favorites:
Avidemux is a free of charge picture editor designed for plain cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. It supports copious profile types, with AVI, DVD compatible MPEG files, MP4 and ASF, victimisation a mixture of codecs. Interestingly, it's unspoken for for Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and Windows lower than the GNU GPL instrument. I haven't proven Mac OS X and Windows versions, but the programme runs wonderful below Ubuntu Linux (Dapper Drake).
For data file conversion, there's FFMPEG, which is free-but you'll have to swot up to use it done the tell splash. Unfortunately, the MAN leaf for the system of rules isn't drastically unambiguous.
To retrieve whichever of you the problem of figuring it out, here's a hurried teacher.
Let's say you poorness to soul a file named MYVIDEO.AVI to the mpg format, which is the formatting verified by the K3 CD burning program. After installment FFMPEG (you can use Synaptic Package Manager), natural event up Terminal.
From the order line, travel to the categorizer where the record is kept. So you may well type:
cd /home/user/Converts
to go to the case wherever the record is kept.
Then field the pursuing at the direct line:
ffmpeg -i MYVIDEO.avi -target ntsc-vcd MYVIDEO.mpg
and hit Enter. That should get the changeover system started, and you ought to see whichever primer scroll by in the Terminal fanlight. Don't accidentally warm the window, because that will nip in the bud the change. You can minimize it, nevertheless.
To somebody an avi wallet to SVCD format, you would type:
ffmpeg -i MYVIDEO.avi -target ntsc-vcd MYVIDEO.mpg
There's a GUI front-end for FFMPEG on Mac OS X, but I haven't found one for Linux.
For splitting DVDs, I use AcidRip. Very pure but fast-breaking and reorganized.