Tuesday 7 December 2010

Transcoding DVD to AVI on my Ubuntu box

I have a Sumvision media streamer, and have been transcoding all my DVD's to AVI so I can use them on the streamer. I have been using DVD::Rip which seems to do a great job, with the underlying Transcode app doing most of the hard work. However, I had done a load when I found that that on lots of the results the sound was out of sync. Now I need to try with transcode options -M [0..4] to see which gives the best result on a subset of the frames (i.e -M 2) before I code the entire movie. It's a pain, but not found another way of doing it yet.

Another pain is that for some reason I cannot encode to H.264 so am having to use mpeg, which means the files are quite a bit bigger than they need to be.

Mame on Ubuntu 10.10 (Meerkat)

Well, I recently took the plunge and upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick Meerkat). The upgrade to 10.04 had been slightly problematical as the wireless networking stopped (see a previous post), so was hoping for a better experience this time.

And so far its been pretty good with one exception. Mame stopped working. Now previously I had been using SDL Mame as this was the only one I found that displayed correctly, although sound wasn't working. Now, using the GMAMEUI it wasn't running the executable as all, with an odd byte order error.

Turns out (I think) that SDL mame has been merged with normal Mame, so by uninstalling SDL, ensuring basic Mame was installed, and pointing GMAMEUI to the Mame executable, it all started working. And I do mean ALL - the sounds as well. Hurrah!

The only other issue with 10.10 I have found is that F-Spot Import seems to be very very slow. Will post when I figure that one out.