LOL…still learning in with my ripping tools. The first couple of successful rips were two stage; I first ripped the VOB files (media streams) from the DVD with transcode, and then later on used these for encoding DivX using mencoder.

Well, somehow, early on, I managed to either rip or encode (not sure which, really) with the French aucio track! So yesterday, we were at the mall, and I’d brought my iPAQ to watch the second half of XFiles #1. And there I am, feeling all cool…until Scully says “Qu’est-ce que c’est?” (close enough, anyway…my French is tres rusty.)

I keep going, thinking my ears deceived me…but nope. It’s French dubbing. Wacky! Came home and reripped…all is well. But it was pretty funny.

mencoder rocks.

I’m rippin’ through DVDs now, baby. I’m not even fancy yet…I have 1,2 and 3-pass options (as you increase the number of passes, you give the encoder more info about the data coming up, to improve performance at a given BR), and more options than I’ll EVER use; I’m still just using 1-pass quickies, and things are looking great. I’m VERY psyched so far.

Yummy. I forgot; The Zenith Angle is out. Joy.

I got it. What began as yet another evening of fun with FOSS encoding tools, in an effort to figure out HOW THE HELL to get reasonable compression on video files for my iPaq w/o rebooting to Windows has, I think, ended up with success.

I could compress video and play it back, certainly…but my options were limited to what I could encode that was decodable on the iPaq. WM9 works great…but I have to do it on Windows, and ripping of DVDs is a PITA (my goal here is, among other things, to be able to rip and view DVDs that I own or presently have rented [ie, don’t keep copies of video files if I return DVD] on my iPaq.)

I’ve used WM encoder on public domain video (I highly recommend archive.org’s moving images archive; they’ve got some great stuff), but was most interested in Free Software solutions on GNU/Linux. mencoder and transcode have been my workhorses…but are awesome pieces of software. My problems, as I suspected all along, have really been in learning how to ask for what I wanted properly. Oh…and finally finding a good DivX player for the iPaq as well!

With the right options (my last challenge was realizing that the iPaq wasn’t handling variable bit rate audio encoding properly — switching to constant BR did the trick) … voila! mencoded DivX of XFiles episode 1, coming right up! I have something new to play with on MARTA tomorrow!

Grr…if DOS used ‘cp’ instead of ‘copy’, I would be a lot happier camper. *grin* I make that mistake almost every time I copy at the DOS shell. (yes, I have and use cygwin…but arguably, this just makes it worse, b/c I can’t ALWAYS use it, and it just means that ‘cp’ sometimes DOES work on DOS!)

I tell ya…I like Evolution, but mutt is a flat out better MUA for handling large volumes of mail, IMO. Of course, it’s text-only…so Aunt Tillie is never going to use it, but it rocks.

Stand down from yellow alert.

Test post

Debugging new install. No worries.

*sigh* I just manage to get my DRM issues resolved, and Apple throws me a curve. Thanks to m4p2mp4.exe and DeDRMS, I was able to convert directly from a (bought and paid-for) iTunes AAC to MP3. Even kept the ID3 metadata…excellent!

Now…with the 4.5 upgrade to iTunes…no joy. I hope (and expect) the various FOSS tools to catch up…but I guess we’ll have to see. Crazy…b/c you know what I’ll do if they’ve “fixed” it permanently? I’ll be back to burning and ripping, and iTunes will no longer have an innate advantage due to each of MP3ing. And since my wife looks up most her music on Napster, guess where I imagine I’ll end up more often than not?

Random Links:

Cool! Found a new blog: SCOTUSblog. All you ever wanted to know, and then some *wink* about the Supreme Court and what’s going on there.

Bootable CD turns 486s into meshing WiFi routers

Robot Plane Drops Bomb in Successful Test

Record sales up, shows Soundscan, RIAA playing with stats?

(plus, I’m just psyched I can post again *grin*)

StationRipper – Rip songs from MP3 (Shoutcast, etc.) stations; a single MP3 file/song, rather than one big MP3 you have to hack by hand…

PocketScumm – Port of the ScummVM (LucasArts game engine) to PocketPC. I can play Day of The Tentacle on MARTA?? Jaz-ZY!

Test post to using gnome-blog. BloGTK is having some problems with my Plone blog tool (it’s really the blog tools problem, but still, I’m stuck for now). Hopefully, this li’l applet guy will help me keep my blog up to date better, while I sync up my blogger tool and my blogging tool…