I'd like to make a special announcement. As of yesterday, I burned all my home movies onto DVD, took the DVD filesystem and copied it to the fileserver, then stowed away the actual media in my backup archives. The raw AVI Type 2 feeds were deleted and replaced with the MPEG2 VOB's.
The home movie transcoding project is now marked as complete.
Damn. That was not easy. But I must say, I learned a lot about how to produce DVD-Video. Most noteably:
Windows (XP Pro at least) absolutely sucks at pulling frames from a DV interface. Absolutely and completely. Linux didn't drop a single frame unless memory was being taxed for some other process. So ripping raw DV as AVI Type 2 was only really feasible on SuSE.
Linux (currently) absolutely blows at transcoding DV into MPEG2. The software is there... the fool-proof tools aren't. For some reason MJPEG consistantly produced absolute rubbish MPEG2 streams, and ffmepg would work spectacularly aside from random garbage, bad timestamps and codec errors every so often. But having just one error every so often ruins an entire DVD, so it was nixed. And while I'm a so/so fan of Nero tools, Nero Express 3 on WinXP Pro transcoded the video and built the DVD filesystems (including some really spiffy menu screens) beautifully. Linux has a way to go with DVD authoring, Nero has it now.
Apple makes the best DVD media. But it would be cheaper for me to buy an entire publishing studio than to buy a 20-pack spindle. I used Sony's instead. TDK was the only dual-layer media I could find at the time.
NVidia's NVDVD is actually a neat lil' tool - one I'd rate as the best media player on the market right now. Fast (in rendering, not loading) and unobtrusive, I'm using it for everything now. In Linux, there's half a dozen media players that are fantastic. Take your pick.
Alas... I'm done. So happy. Now, once I heal from being sick for the past two weeks, I can get back to finishing SystemInfo. Then work on my CrystalSpace stuff. Ugh.
hey decker ego,
ReplyDeletethis is eytan. I tracked you down from sean/ryan's blog.
I just want to let you know that I have recorded a few more hits. But I don't have a website to post them on. I can email them to you if you want, but I'll need your email.
you can email me your email. my email is euslan@jcsu.edu.
talk to you later,
eytan
To avoid spammers, click on "View my complete profile" in the blog, then go to "E-mail" on the upper left-hand portion of the page. I'd be happy to find a place for some mega jams.
ReplyDeleteBTW, the kids seem to love the tracks you wrote for Gwen Stefani. Good job.