Let’s say that you are using aMSN to access Windows Live Messenger and that you have recorded some webcam sessions…

As you may know, these are normally located at /home/user/.amsn/webcam/ and are files with the extension “cam”.

These files are encoded using the “mimic” codec and not easily viewable under linux. You can install the “libmimic” library using apt-get and use a video player like VLC to see them, however you will see that the player is quite slow and unable to seek the videos, therefore converting those files to another format would be advisable.

During the years, some different software have been created to allow a simple and smooth conversion, however these are now not easily found on the internet, and even if you find them, you cannot easily install them in Ubuntu anymore due to old dependencies not easily satisfiable.

Anyway, don’t worry! All you need is to install WinFF, download new presets (depending on which libavcodec version you have), configure the screen options as you can see below and click on “Convert”:

Depending on the size of the file and your computer speed, it will take from a few seconds, to a few minutes, but in the end you will have a nice copy of your webcam sessions!