I've just finished listening to Bill Bartmann explain this again. It's good. I'm starting to notice commonalities between motivational speakers and the steps they make to any goal :)

I Google'd a bit for the actual 9 steps though, and I can't find the list online!
So I thought I'd make the list myself in case anyone else looks. Of course, if you want explanation of what they really mean, you'll need to listen to Bartmann.



1. Make sure the goal you set is really your goal
2. Make a promise to yourself instead of setting a goal
3. Clearly identify your promise
4. Identify your personal motivator
5. Construct a promise plan
6. Review your plan regularly
7. Tell yourself you are going to fulfil your promise regularly
8. Tell others you are going to fulfil your promise
9. Envision the result

And the 10th step he mentions is review this process every day to maintain your focus!

Well. I guess I fail at fixing it ;)
I was trying to burn off a DVD with some vids on it. Of course DVD's are MPEG2 encoded to a VOB...no problem. I got this working. There's nothing easier than converting to an MPEG2. Even VLC will do it through the Wizard!!! :)

The problem is burning the DVD. K3B will burn a video disc with VOB's in the correct structure...but a DVD player won't play it without the IFO files to say what is going to be played. So how do we create the IFO's in Linux? Well I couldn't figure that out.

I did find a bunch of tools that would do the IFO as part of the whole conversion process...which leads me to ask the question: Of how much use is an MPEG2 converter if you can't use it on anything?

For one reason or another, all the DVD creation tools failed at creating the DVD disc structure (i.e. I was still left without an IFO file). I tried ManDVD, ToVid, and DeVeDe, as well as some command line tools. By the way ManDVD was really cool, nice, and slick. It felt like a commercial Windows app! Pity it didn't work properly :(

I then retried with an SVCD since that's MPEG2 also...and doesn't need the IFO files. I though it would be easier. Well it was...but all those tools bailed because they don't split the MPEG up...and then the tool fails because it will not create the BIN file because it's too big.

So I found a front end to Transcode that will do it (Transcode rocks!). I find Transcode in itself kind of unwieldly (like I'm taking a Mach3 jet just to get to work a 10 min drive away heh). But that failed for some other reason even though it split the MPEG ok. Sigh. So much time wasted!!!

I'm going to just go and buy one of those slimline DVD/DivX players. Like AU$100 on eBay. Check it!

Ok I'm assuming you know what a video format container is. If you don't then the explanation is as simple as it sounds: It's a container (file format) for holding an audio + video file that you then watch. The .avi or ogm or mkv gives a pretty clear indication of what container is used.

AVI is Microsoft's container.
OGM was created by the same people who make the audio compression codec [Ogg] Vorbis (Xiph). It looked better than AVI (simple reason: smaller / less overhead) kinda got terminated, but it kinda stopped getting worked on and the uptake was too slow = kinda dead now.
MKV is the Matroska format which is like MKV...except smaller and faster seeking again, and more stable, and better support (and still active).

So I use MKV. Sometimes programs still only accept mpg / avi formats though. In this case, it helps to have a fast way to convert the container to an AVI format. Now when I think conversion in Linux, I usually turn to AVIDemux (guys why not register avidemux.info???), with the codec's set to copy for both video and audio, this would do the trick. But for some reason, the AVIDemux on my Ubuntu (7.10) eats up all my memory while converting (it eats about 3G in 5 minutes, bringing my system to it's knees ;)

So nuts to that idea. But wait: Matroska to the rescue! Well, I don't know about actually converting...but Matroska give us a neat little command line utility to extract the tracks (audio and video) from the container. Then with a little help of avimerge, we can recombine them into an AVI.

This works and eats very little CPU and memory too :)

I don't do it that often, so I usually just do it by hand, but if you wanted to script it, I guess it would go something like this:


#!/bin/sh

if [ $# != 2 ]
then echo "Usage: $0 [INPUT] [DESTINATION DIR]"
fi

mkvextract tracks "$1" 1:"$2/video.avi"
mkvextract tracks "$1" 2:"$2/audio.mp3"
avimerge -o "$2/$1.avi" -i "$2/video.avi" -p "$2/audio.mp3"



Of course, this assumes that you have mkvextract, and avimerge, in your path. It also doesn't account if you use something other than .mp3 in the MKV container (I use Vorbis :). But hey, I just wrote it while blogging!

Oh by the way, it takes waaaayyy longer to mux to an AVI than it does to [de]mux from an MKV!