Mencoder on Michael’s Domain

Kid's series on German TV

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0000

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 .

Mplayer is probably the best video player (and mencoder the best encoder)

Wed, 04 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

Because the videodata recorded by dunerec is in some strange mpeg flavour it occupied quite a bit of diskspace. 2 hours approximately 5 GB. that is why I was looking for an easy way to convert the mpeg into divx. After unsuccessfully palying with transcode, I managed with mencoder. Mencoder is included with Mplayer and there is an RPM for Suse Linux 9.1.

Watching, ripping and converting DVDs (xine, mplayer, mencoder, dvd, iso image)

Sun, 12 Nov 2006 00:00:00 +0000

Both xine and MPlayer can play DVDs directly, but xine has a DVD navigation. In Mplayer you need to specify which movie (VOB file) you want to play:xine dvd:// mplayer dvd://3 If you just want to temporarily store the DVD on your hard disk it might be sufficient to create a DVD image:dd if=/dev/dvd of=rosenstrasse.iso The image can be mounted as follows:sudo mount -o loop rosenstrasse.iso /media/temp/ Xine can play a DVD from an iso image directly (without mouting the image):xine dvd://media/isos/movie.iso Note that you need to specify always the complete path even if the movie is in the current directory! Mplayer can play the individual VOB files from the image (however without subtitle support). I couldn’t make Mplayer to accept the iso image as dvd.For conversion to e.g. DivX/XviD the easiest is to use Mplayer/mencoder. First I extracted audio:mencoder dvd://1 -ovc frameno -o frameno.avi -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=128 Then the 1. pass encoding:mencoder dvd://1 -nosound -oac copy -o /dev/null -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800:vhq:vpass=1:vqmin=1:vqmax=31 -vop scale -zoom -xy 640 -vf pp lb Then the 2. pass encoding:mencoder dvd://1 -oac copy -o file.avi -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=800:vhq:vpass=2:vqmin=1:vqmax=31 -vop scale -zoom -xy 640 -vf pp lbIt is more difficult to extract the subtitles. You can either extract them as images (easier but bigger filesize) or then convert these images into textfiles (requires an OCR step).Extract subtitle images (from mounted iso image in this case):cat /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_?.VOB | tcextract -x ps1 -t vob -a 0x20 > movie.ps1 Convert subtitle images:subtitle2vobsub -i /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO -p movie.ps1 -o movie_name Copy metadata:cp /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_0.IFO movie_name.ifo Play from VOB file directly:mplayer /media/temp/VIDEO_TS/VTS_01_1.VOB -vobsub movie_name -vobsubid 0 Play from avi file:mplayer movie.avi -vobsub movie_name -vobsubid 0