Extracting audio from a movie

There are many ways to get the audio track from a video. Please share your favorite! You can also save a frame from your video.

With mplayer

One simple way is with mplayer. While it plays a video, you can tell it to save the audio to a wav file. If you have a video called monkey.mpg, save its audio to a file called monkey.wav:

$ mplayer monkey.mpg -vo null -ao pcm:file=monkey.wav

Often, however, only a part of the entire audio-dump is needed. In such cases,

$ mplayer -ss <starttime> -endpos <duration> monkey.mpg -vo null -ao pcm:file=monkey.wav

Where <starttime> and <duration> may be entered in seconds, minutes or hours. Examples:

$ mplayer -ss 40 -endpos 00:01:13 monkey.mpg -vo null -ao pcm:file=monkey.wav

Dumps audio from 40 seconds in to 1:53.

$ mplayer -ss 01:10:00 -endpos 6 monkey.mpg -vo null -ao pcm:file=monkey.wav

Dumps audio from 1:10:00 to 1:10:06.