Kid's series on German TV

The online offering from Germany’s public service broadcasters (i.e. ARD) for children ( kinder.ard.de  ) is rather limited (although they do produce good children’s television). You can find plenty online, but rarely the actual programmes themselves – instead, there’s a lot of Flash rubbish  . Selected ‘Sachgeschichten’ and clips from Die Sendung mit der Maus  are the only things that interest my son. I want the whole Sendung mit der Maus! And Sesame Street isn’t available online at all, neither in full nor in part. That’s exactly what I’d like: I don’t just want to decide for myself WHAT my children watch, but also WHEN they watch. If I lived in Germany, I could record the broadcasts onto a hard drive. Fortunately, German law not only permits digital recording for personal use (“ private copy  ”), but also the sharing of the recordings with friends. That’s how I get Sesame Street  , The Show with the Mouse  , Was ist was TV  and the Bibliothek der Sachgeschichten  .

Incidentally, there are also legal services that will record digitally in your behalf for a small fee ( ShiftTV  or OnlineTV Recorder  ). And, of course, you’re allowed – legally – to share the recorded shows with friends. Just as was the case 20 years ago with VHS video cassettes… All that remains is to trim the start and end of the file so as not to use up too much space on the hard drive. After all, shows almost never start exactly at the time the video recorder is set to record. I do the trimming using Mencoder, the open-source companion programme to MPlayer  :

mencoder -ss 00:03:19 -endpos 00:28:00 -oac copy -ovc copy /home/jeltsch/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus_10.01.31.avi -o /home/jeltsch/Multimedia/TV\ Shows/Kids\ \&\ Family/Sendung\ mit\ der\ Maus/Die_Sendung_mit_der_Maus_10.01.31_trimmed.avi