Tag Archives: mencoder

Movies, Plumbing etc.

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I’ve just revisited transcoding DVD to XviD as per this post and it seems to fail on the latest mencoder – it only encodes the first chapter of the title. The fix seems to be to specify the title and use dvdnav instead of dvd urls, so something like this (title 20, all chapters):

mencoder dvdnav://20 -dvd-device HERBIE -ffourcc DIVX -af volume=10 \
-aspect 16:9 -of avi -noodml -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts \
vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1242:abitrate=128:threads=2 -audio-preload 0.8 \
-delay 0.1 -lameopts cbr:br=128 -vf scale=640:360,harddup \
-info name="HERBIE" -ofps 25 -alang en  -o herbie_fully_loaded.avi

I upgraded the XBMC on my main Xbox to Atlantis beta2, so its more like Plex on the Mac now, with MediaStream interface (now with 4:3 support) and all the Linuxport upgrades.

I’m awaiting my replacement snooker cue tips from eBay. In true eBay style the guy promised to send me some samples for free so I could size them up, then he sent me an invoice for something like a tenner for three tips! So I just ordered 50 of the 13mm for 15 quid and told him to forget the “free samples”, these better fit or the lot are going back on eBay!

The plumbers seem to have left – I say “seem to” as they didn’t say they were done, or when they’d be back with the electrician and chimney-sweep. I have a wire hanging out of a wall for the thermostat and a mains socket that needs moving so that it doesn’t touch the copper pipes! The gas is being turned on on Tuesday, so they’d better get their arses back here quick if they want their cheque.

I just watched WALL-E, which so many people have said is “film of the year”. Well they most be smoking some good shit, as it was crap! Basically its Johnny-5 from Short Circuit playing the part of Will Smith in I Am Legend. The only two words spoken throughout the whole film are “wally” and “eva”.

I also watched Tropic Thunder, which looked like it was going to be an Apocalypse Now spoof, but was actually pretty rubbish. The best bit was the faux-trailer at the beginning. I can’t believe how many big-name actors were in such a rubbish movie.

Then there’s Narnia 2: Prince Caspian, which was a darker sequel (much like how Return To Oz was a bit psycho) and had lost most of its magic. It had turned into an action movie more than a fantasy. Apparently another sequel is being made, although it looks like the two older children won’t be in it – probably as the oldest girl is now 20, which explains the enormous tits!

Finally, Step Brothers was an OK Will Ferrell movie, typical to his style though. The Ballsack scene was incredibly funny ;-)

Amelia’s 1st Birthday

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Yesterday was my niece’s first birthday. Everyone came over to my place and ate/drank way too much – it was like Xmas, especially as I’m having leftovers for lunch tomorrow! Amelia was very happy and not at all noisy, Jacques was having fun too.

Pip has some photos and I made a video – ripped using the Mac’s Firewire/iMovie and converted to DVD-quality MPEG on my new Linux box at astounding speed, it transcoded about 3Gb of DV to MPEG2 in 8mins.

I tried converting a VMWare install of Win2003 for use with VirtualBox. Well it didn’t work, I followed the various instructions I found for doing the same with XP – similar to how I used to convert physical machines to VMWare using Acronis True Image. Basically it never actually got to the login prompt – it just sat there at the loading banner. Bit of a shame as it means that even though I can clone a basic 2003 R2 SP2 install, I still have to install Visual Studio 6/2003/2005 multiple times to fully migrate my VM’s, similar to what I did with RHEL/Oracle.

As a testimony to the ridiculous power of my new Core2Quad, I played OpenArena on full graphics detail (which looks very nice) over the internet whilst Acronis was backing up the VM, and didn’t notice even a pause. As another test I converted some DivX’s to MPEG2 to allow them to be played on a regular DVD player. Well I had four instances of mencoder running at the same time, each using a core; and it still wasn’t really taxing the CPU – or getting hot; it was so fast that by the time I had typed the command on core4, core1 had finished transcoding!

Update: just watched The Happening, which was a pretty good disaster movie about a mysterious toxin that is causing people in New York to kill themselves. Certainly better than 20 Years After, which I have started to watch but turned off twice now, which seems like just another apocalypse movie.

Scanner Problems

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I’ve wasted most of today trying to get my Epson RX425 scanner to work as a non-root user on CentOS 5.2

It worked fine before, so I think a kernel upgrade has broken udev, as I ended up having to edit /etc/security/console.perms.d/50-default-perms to allow less strict permissions on scanners than root-only.

It seems that doing it the proper way via /etc/udev/rules.d/60-iscan.rules no longer works – in fact you can put anything you like in the udev rules files and bugger all seems to change even after a reboot!

I seem to have been on pointless phonecalls all day today, and doing boring admin work like sorting out receipts and arranging a copy invoice for insurance claims etc.

I specced up a PC similar to the one I built for Kev the other day, and prices have gone up from about 500ukp to about 600ukp+ and specs have hardly gone up. So I’m going to wait for Nehalem aka Intel Core I7 before I build a new PC. I’ll rebuild and upgrade Solo a bit when Fedora10 comes out – replace the FX5200 with FX6200 graphics card and swap an old 200Gb for a new 250Gb hard disk.

Last night I decided I was going to look into scripting a load of DVD-to-DivX transcodes using mencoder. I basically took the commandline output from CloneDVD Mobile and put the same into mencoder on Linux. It all seemed to work quite well after some experimentation – for example specifying the audio language, threading and using the DVD:// virtual device instead of catting all the VOB’s together.

One odd thing is that some of the bitrates that work OK under CDVDm cause a segfault under mencoder for Linux, so I standardised on 1242kbps. When I got up in the morning I had four ripped DVD’s waiting for me!

mencoder dvd:// -dvd-device TRANSPORTER2 -ffourcc DIVX -af volume=10 \
-aspect 16:9 -of avi -noodml -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc \
-lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1242:abitrate=128:threads=2 \
-audio-preload 0.8 -delay 0.1 -lameopts cbr:br=128 -vf scale=640:360,harddup \
-info name="TRANSPORTER2" -ofps 24000/1001 -o /data4/video/transporter2.avi

Of course using the mencoder commandline on Linux rather than a GUI on Windows means that you can get to the other options – such as trimming the black bars and setting start and end points – features that CDVDm should really incorporate.