Through every breath that I breathe.

[reddragdiva]

• On fandom's ridiculous sense of entitlement.

Last night redcountess was unwell, so I was hoping to go out tonight. Now I've been knocked out by an asthma attack, so Liz has actually been doing things for me today. *prrr* feanelwa came over to drop off T-shirts for arkady and ewtikins and was looking marvellous!

Many Ubuntu users have problems with Firefox crashing unpredictably. I've switched to SeaMonkey, which is the current version of the old Mozilla suite. Not as slick, but utterly, utterly solid. There's no Ubuntu (or Debian) package, so I save the .tar.gz download to my home folder and install it there, then make a shortcut by hand.

I'm now going to be doing videos as MPEG4 AVIs:

for i in 1 2; do mencoder [input AVI] -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=512:vpass=$i -oac copy -o [output AVI] ; done

— they play in VLC and mplayer, and that's all anyone needs, isn't it. And I can get usable clips at twice the resolution of MPEG1/2 and quite a bit smaller file size than MPEG1/2 or especially the original MJPEG. Compare: MPEG4 (640×480, 30fps, ≈512 bit/sec, 2989KB), MPEG4 (640×480, 30fps, ≈800 bit/sec, 4407KB), MPEG1 (320×240, 30fps, 6849KB).

Phoned Arkady. She has been recruited by a cult of Ninja Morris dancers. Matt black clothes, black stick, silenced bells. She has also been playing at the folk festival to an audience of festival headliners without being booed off.

Comments

[sweh.livejournal.com]

You seem to be an mencoder expert, maybe you can help me! I'm trying to convert my NTSC TiVo downloads to NTSC DVD format.

The TiVo format is
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 480x480, 15000 kb/s, 29.97 fps(r)
Stream #0.1[0x1c0]: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, 192 kb/s

Although I also have one that is
Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 480x480, 15000 kb/s, 29.97 fps(r)
Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: 0x0000, 48000 Hz, 5:1, 384 kb/s

(ie 5.1 audio; video format is the same)

Any ideas on how to convert these?

[reddragdiva]

Expert? Fuck no. I'm winging it fiddling with plausible-looking encoder lines from websites ...

Giggling "tivo mencoder" shows many plausible links, notably http://www.fumanchu.com/tivo/ which suggests http://tivo-mplayer.sourceforge.net/ . Have these already been unhelpful?

[sweh.livejournal.com]

The problem I have isn't that mplayer won't understand what I've got, it's working out the exact options needed to convert it to DVD compatible mpeg2. Most examples show how to convert to divx or similar, but I want to make real DVDs from the results. Essentially I just need to transcade from 480x480 to DVD compatible formats (SVCD would be easy; that's already a SVCD format).

So far I've managed to use ffmpeg to do it, but the result shows too many interlacing type effects (scene transitions look crap; I'm assuming this is interlacing mistakes) that recording via analogue to a DVD-recorder looks better! I should check the latest version to see if it's improved.

[ianthes.livejournal.com]

My Saturday night = poo.

[grumpy-sysadmin.livejournal.com]

I seem to recall jwz's lazyweb blathering on a similar topic somewhat recently... ah, yes, here (http://jwz.livejournal.com/661047.html). But I guess you saw that and then started on this?

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Wooo yay for Arkady.

Have you really not seen my winter coat before? I think it's getting a bit manky, personally.

KITTENS. I need kittens like yours.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

The wonderful thing about a lot of jwz's threads is that they throw a lot of technical jargon at a question and never actually give specific answers. Other than learning that it might be telecining that's causing the interlace type effects I'm seeing, there was no new information in the thread.

[reddragdiva]

You so don't need kittens like ours. Unless you like being woken at 5am every frickin' morning.

[reddragdiva]

If they're already in SVCD, is it plausible to write a DVD-ROM that's in SVCD format except for being 4.7GB long? I presume any modern DVD player will just play such things, and that what you really want is to have it on a 5" disc you can file away in the usual manner.

I never really did get into the 5" plastic disc thing, for music or movies. I suppose I watch them on 5" plastic disc more than anything else, but I hardly do that either. I keep my camera video clips saved as the original MJPEGs (high quality and bloated files) and only transcode smaller for the web. For music, I can think of MP3s and Oggs as music and I can think of vinyl as music, but 5" plastic discs have always struck me as not quite right.1

[secretlondon.livejournal.com]

My Firefox is fine. Amarok will crash 10 times before breakfast, but Firefox just does.

I've got Mozilla installed here. It's in one of the repositories - 2:1.17.12-1.1ubuntu.2

It's 1.7 not 1.8 but it's the mozilla suite all the same and doesn't involve compiling..

[arkady.livejournal.com]

What he didn't mention is that the morris side in question (Royal Liberty, Hornchurch) are a Border Morris side that dance with scaffolding poles instead of the usual wooden sticks, and that my performance was to a crowd of over 40 people about ten minutes after I'd been dancing at my first ever ceilidh and so was still attempting to catch my breath....

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

Oh, kick ass :) Now I want to go to Broadstairs too!

[reddragdiva]

OH NOEZ FOLKY HIPPY LESBIAN!

Actually, Arkady just mentioned that, since she can get in free next year as part of the morris side, if she puts you as her girlfriend you'd get in free. So you have one year to chat her up.