Creating slideshow picture/audio clips

Picasa for Windows 7/Vista allows you the ability to create slideshows from images, as well as including audio clips that can be added to the presentation.   You can use Ubuntu's ffmpeg command to extract the audio, but there are several steps that also need to be done to equip your machine to do so.

1. First, you should verify that your Ubuntu installation has the 'multiverse' repository added. On Slicehost instances only the 'universe' install, so trying to proceed to the next steps will fail since there are package dependencies that are not included with just the basic universe repository.

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid main restricted universe multiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid main restricted universe multiv
erse

deb http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates main restricted universe mu
ltiverse
deb-src http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ lucid-updates main restricted univers
e multiverse

deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-security main restricted universe m
ultiverse
deb-src http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu lucid-security main restricted univer
se multiverse

2. Next, you need to install the Medibuntu instructions. One way is to install 'ffmpeg' manually but the quicker way is to install the Medibuntu packages. The instructions are listed here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1117283

You can also execute this command which will use wget to add the Medibuntu to sourceslist, and the Medibuntu package repository, and install the medibuntu-keyring package:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update

3. You should be able to run this command. Again, if you're missing the multiverse repository, the libavcodec-extra-52 will complain that it is missing a few dependencies (i.e. libmp3lame0) and fail to install.

apt-get install ffmpeg libavcodec-extra-52

4. The final step is to use ffmpeg to extract audio clips:
ffmpeg -i -vn

The -vn flag will remove the video and output an MP3 file with the extracted audio. From there, you can add the MP3 to your movie clip. Remember, only Picasa for Windows supports this feature. Picasa for Ubuntu will only allow you to create an .AVI file without any MP3 soundtracks.