Take the 2-minute tour ×

I have a weird task to convert a pdf presentation to video: that is in video slides have to change every 5 seconds or so. I'm on linux (kubuntu). It can be done with capturing the screen. Are there any other solutions?

share|improve this question
Do you mean "I want a program to do this for me, tell me about different ones"? That would be off-topic, since we don't do recommendations. If you mean "Is there a way to do this built into my Linux distribution?", that's closer to being on-topic, but in that case you need to tell us what you've tried and why it didn't work. Stack Exchange is all about specific answers to specific questions, and as it stands right now your question isn't really specific enough to be answered. –  Jonathan Garber Oct 21 '13 at 16:03
@JonathanGarber: I meant -- maybe avconv can do it or a mencoder, or some pdf viewer like impress, but I just don't know it. I hoped to get a quick answer. After 40 minutes, I did it using a screencapture tool, and cut the thing after that. Maybe I should delete the question now. –  Adobe Oct 21 '13 at 16:12
add comment

1 Answer

Two tools should do the job nicely for you if you have to do this again in the future. Using ImageMagick's convert program can convert a PDF file to a sequence of JPEG files numbered numerically:

convert out.pdf out.jpg

This will result in numbered files: out-0.jpg, out-1.jpg, ...

There are several command-line options for convert that can change the resolution of the output, etc. It is a very powerful image conversion tool. Then use ffmpeg (a similarly powerful command-line tool, except works on video and audio files) to convert those JPEGs to a video slide show (first hit on google search of "video slideshow ffmpeg"):


share|improve this answer
add comment

Your Answer


