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UNIX Scripts Bash Tips: transcoding converting video files Part 2
April 22nd, 2008Welcome to Part 2 of trancoding and converting video files. This is a follow-up to my adventures working with a variety of software – Windows and Linux – for trancoding and converting videos.
VirtualDub and its sister VirtualDubMod have remained a constant for me on the Windows platform. This is in conjunction with Xvid as the codec of choice for compressing the video portion of my files. For the audio portion, I stick with the original source otherwise using MPEG Layer-III for compression.
On Linux (in this case, Debian as choice of distribution), I’ve delved further into Mencoder’s plethora of options through its configuration file. To be honest, it should be transocde, but I find its man page and possibilities a little too overwhelming right now.
First, when using Mencoder, you should have a few other packages installed, like MPlayer for instance. Usually this won’t be an issue, since there are a number of dependencies for it.
Second, this is all being done via the command line, so you’ll either need to go to a console or bring up an terminal window.
The basic command is simple:
mencoder old.avi -o new.avi
What’s left out are all the options you can employ. But what happens when there are so many options? and you don’t want to use the same set each time? You could write an individual shell script for each set of options, but wouldn’t it be easier to just edit a configuration file?
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The Computer in a Cardboard Box
April 17th, 2008The computer in a cardboard box. Not exactly a unique idea, but an interesting side project.
One day the PSU on my server died. After many years of use under a variety of owners. Fortunately, the motherboard nor many of the other parts were fried when this happened. Having some spare time on my hands – some might say too much – I decided to bring the idea of a computer in a cardboard box into being.
I had a spare PSU (aka power supply unit; aka transformer), but lacked an appropriate case. Rather than buying one, I cut up a cardboard box.
On board is a Slot 1 PIII 500Mhz CPU, 2 x 128MB of PC100 SDRAM, AGP 2x Ati Rage Pro card (has about 4MB of SDRAM), Yamaha sound card, and a 3COM NIC. The motherboard (Asus P2-99) sits on top of a Western Digital 4GB harddrive and a dysfunctional LG DVD-ROM/CD-RW. The optical drive fails to read DVDs. Also, the drive is only recognized when its jumpers are set to CS (cable select).
I reused the power and reset switches from the old case for powering up this computer in a cardboard box.
I installed Windows on it first, but gave up on the bloated OS. Switched to Debian stable.
It’s now an NFS client for my temporary server, does X11 over SSH using sdm (aka Secure Display Manager), runs MPlayer, xine, transcode and rtorrent.
