I have just taken my first mini-step into transcoding video on Argo. Unlike some people, to call me an amateur at this would be greatly overstating my current skill level.

This story actually begins many, many moons ago. Last year, my dad unearthed some very ancient 16mm(?) film from decades ago, containing pictures of old family members, church gatherings, and all sorts of other odd stuff.

He didn't have any hardware on which to view it, and decided that he wanted it to be preserved anyway, so he took it to a shop where they scanned and converted it to digital. When they were going to burn it to a disc, and asked what format he wanted it in, he (having no clue about anything to do with video encoding) said DVD would be fine, thinking that it would be the most versatile and easy to deal with.

When he got it home and attempted to load it up into his iMac's editing software, the program callously refused to import the data, or do anything other than "play" the disc "as is". Apparently something having to do with protecting copyrights, despite the fact that if anybody could be said to own the copyright on his old homemade film, it would be him.

He asked me about it, and naturally I replied that in order to rip dvd's, one must find "grey market" software, easily available over the web, but not pre-installed on mass market desktop computers. Since I have slightly more knowledge on how to do things under Linux than in other environments, I offered to try ripping it for him myself.

This was right around the time Argo's old hardware broke down. For some reason, even when I moved Argo's drive over, Rygel had many difficulties reading dvds that had previously been easily playable on Argo. This included my dad's disk.

Since it wasn't terribly urgent anyway, the whole project sort of went on hiatus for a while.

Last month, after Argo got new hardware, I read the howto again and made another attempt. I got some nice raw VOB files transfered. After getting over some bumps compiling transcode, a few feeble attempts I made at getting it to take my VOB's failed. (Yes, I suppose I lack a certain degree of requisite patience.)

I wanted to try out dvd::rip, but I never did manage to successfully compile it on debian, and the hostname of the server that supposedly hosted the prepackaged .deb files did not resolve. Thus, I found myself looking longingly at the phrase under the "Gentoo Packages" section. You can get dvd::rip and transcode from the official gentoo package repository.

Well, now I'm using it. Even with a nice GUI front-end, transcode is still ridiculously complicated, but almost managable.

My first attempt to produce an mpeg-2 file resulted in something that looked fine in mplayer, but had a very screwed up aspect ratio when my dad attempted to open it in quicktime.

My second attempt, with different pixel dimensions, in which I changed the MPEG Variant option to try to keep the software from bugging me with endless warnings, resulted in something that again, played fine in mplayer, but this time quicktime wouldn't open it at all!

At this point, I "discovered" the pixel range options, and tried encoding 2-second snippets instead of waiting an hour between each failed encode. I discovered that things seemed to work best when I left the MPEG Variant set on VCD, changed the pixel dimensions to my heart's content, and ignored dvd::rip's endless warning dialogs about how I was using a non-standard resolution.

Eventually, I ended up with something that seemed to satisfy the players on both my dad's iMac and PC. (And of course, mplayer seems to handle things flawlessly no matter what I throw at it.)

Funny how it used to be that a few years ago, Linux users were left out in the cold when it came to playing lots of video formats, but now mplayer is more adept at playing a multiplicity of formats (and transcode at converting them) than any other software in existence. It puts Apple Quicktime, Microsoft Media Player, and RealPlayer to shame.

...And in a completely off-topic tangent....

What is the big freakin deal about that 10-year-old Cameron Diaz video? After the press had hammered it to death, I decided to go see what the fuss was all about, and grabbed a copy off my favorite p2p net. As far as porn goes, it's about as tame as it gets. Just a few scenes of her posing topless and pretending to chain some guy up. Big freakin deal. Also quite monotonous and repetitious. Booring.

Methinks the entire lawsuit is nothing more than a silly attempt to drum up publicity. Lame. And now, by the very fact that I'm talking about it too, I've unintentionally helped to aid this ridiculously foolish scheme. Oh well...

Now I want to emerge gimp, but that would mean the compiler would have to fight for cpu resources against transcode. Such are the dilemmas of the modern age.