mplayer

I bought a USB TV card; a Pinnacle PCTV Deluxe. There is only one program for Linux available: dunerec. Here is how I got it working:

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. My first try was to encode a TV recording. I did in 2 passes, meaning I execute the first command and wait until it finished and then execute the second command.

There are heaps of subtitle editors for Windows, but I found only one usable for Linux: ksubtile. It's not perfect but usable. It uses SubRip format (*.SRT). In these files subtitles have a running number, end- and startime down to milliseconds given for each subtitle. The import function of subtile fails occasionally, but you can use mplayer to convert subtitle files into srt format. BTW: If your movie and the subtitle file have the same name and are in the same directory they will be loaded automatically by mplayer (unless you switch this function off).