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• vnc2swf
• vncrec + transcode
• xvidcap
• Use the "better" Windows capture software to capture whatever you want running in VMWare, on a FAST machine.
• (point a camcorder at the screen and encode later)

Ooh, can someone do something like this to speed up Transcode?

-Peter

Ok, a little lesson on container formats and codecs. I'm no expert myself, but I think I can cover this much. The Mplayer formats document explains this a bit too.

Container formats do pretty much what the name implies: they contain other content. In multimedia terms, this almost always involves some sort of interleaving. A little bit of video... a little bit of audio... a little bit of video... etc. That's especially important for streaming purposes.
Examples of container formats are: MPEG System Stream (SS) and Transport Stream (TS), VOB, Quicktime QT/MOV, Microsoft AVI / ASF, Ogg, Matroska.

Codecs are the actual audio/video/whatever(?) data that gets put into those container files.
Examples of video codecs: MPEG I/II/4, Indeo, Sorenson, Theora, WMV.
Examples of audio codecs: MPEG I/II, AAC (aka MPEG 4 audio), Vorbis.

• Under MPEG, the individual streams are known as "elementary streams" (ES). These are multiplexed into a System Stream (SS). Now the Transport Stream (TS) format is being used in broadcast (DTV and HDTV) applications. I don't know the advantages/differences.
• DVDs use the "Video OBject" (VOB) format. The original MPEG SS (as I understand it) couldn't contain the extra data that the DVD guys wanted. Stuff like AC3 and DTS audio, and the embedded command stream that allows menus, "easter egg" extra features, and director/theatrical cuts without taking almost 2x the room on the disc.
• "MP3" is just an MPEG I layer 3 audio elementary stream.
• Some MPEG "movies" on the internet are really just the MPEG I/II video elementary stream.
• VCDs are MPEG I video with layer 2 audio in a System Stream. SVCD uses MPEG II video. Since a lot of DVD players include layer 3 audio ("MP3") decoding from a CD of files, some might allow layer 3 audio as well. They might also allow a higher bitrate than the SVCD standard (2.7Mbps), anywhere up to 5Mbps. These non-standard options are usually grouped under the "XVCD" name.
• I'm not entirely sure about Microsofts' WMA and WMV formats. The few WMV's I have here on my linux box get identifed as "Microsoft ASF" by the file(1) tool. I don't have any WMA's to test. WMA might be a bare "elementary" stream similar to the MP3 situation, or it could be wrapped up in an ASF container as well. Either way,, they're using the same container format but using different "filename extensions" so that people don't get confused, and so that they can launch different apps for each.
• In this message to the Mplayer-dev mailing list you can find some info on the "OGM" format (about a third of the way down. Just search for "ogm").

  On Windows all you need is to provide the FourCC for a VfW or dshow based player, and as most players on windows use a semi-automatic graph rendering ( again dhsow ) it wouldnt be too hard for us to simulate the behaviour of AVI for this. In fact, the existing muxer for Ogg ( .ogm ) from Tobias is based on Dshow also, Tobias created it to be used with Graphedit, being M$' tool around Dshow. In principal it is demuxing an existing video stream from an AVI, copying the codec related info from the AVI header ( WAVEFORMATEX ), writing these into the Ogg header and thats it.

  It works, I suppose. But there's the geeky opposition because Ogg wasn't meant to be used that way.

• Matroska seems (so far) to be ultimate container format. The authors first came up with EBML, basically a binary equivalent of XML. This could potentially allow almost any sort of metadata to be included in the descriptive head section. I suppose it could even allow for streams to be broken up into hierachical trees, perfect for interactive media. In case you can't tell, I'm really excited about the prospects of Matroska! :)
• Matroska could concie

Good Howto with scripts.

1. Use kino to do the video editing, and output/export (i.e. save as) an MPEG-2 (DVD format). To get this to work you will most likely need Mplayer installed because you'll need the mplex commandline tool to "multiplex" your audio and video files. Some like to use transcode, but I like Mplayer much better. Split the MPEG into multiple MPEGs if you want to have different chapters -- the best way to do this is to use a commandline tool called mpgtx. Or just save different MPEGs from kino. BTW, if you need to get video footage to edit in the first place then use dvgrab to get video from your DV camcorder -- it should be a part of the kino suite of tools, but if it's not, get it from one of the pages in kino.
2. Once you've gotten your MPEGs all created, now you can author. I use dvdauthor. What you have to first do is create a XML text file to list the MPEGs you want to burn into the DVD. And example of such a file is found here. The easiest method is to create a new chapter for each MPEG file. Then you run dvdauthor like so:

   dvdauthor -o DVDdir -x xml-filename

   DVDdir is the name of the output you want -- name doesn't really matter; xml-filename is the name of the text file you created.
3. DVDdir will be a directory from which you then need to create a video ISO. You need the commandline tool mkisofs. Example is:

   mkisofs -dvd-video -o fileoutput.img DVDdir

4. Now you just need to burn fileoutput.img with your DVD recorder. I use dvdrecord (yes, it's a commandline tool):

   dvdrecord -v -eject speed=4 dev=0,0,0 -dao fileoutput.img

I do this every time I rent a DVD I like. On Linux, or most any *nix system:

dd if=/dev/dvd of=/movies/filename.img

You can watch them with ogle

Only problem is, DVDs are 3-5G each so extract them as mpegs with transcode

Don't forget to share them on gnutella

Don't worry about the RIAA. Tell 'em you share your wireless bandwidth, must have been someone else. Or maybe someone spoofed your IP address. They can go and fuck themselves.

This guy is making a replica of an Enigma.
Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ertel is working on making duplicates which you can buy completely build here.

http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~maxi/html/mplayer-d ev-eng/2003-10/msg00262.html

... but this one seems newer;

http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~maxi/html/mplayer-d ev-eng/2003-10/msg00495.html

http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~maxi/html/mplayer-d ev-eng/2003-10/msg00262.html

... but this one seems newer;

http://zebra.fh-weingarten.de/~maxi/html/mplayer-d ev-eng/2003-10/msg00495.html

webvcrplus for scheduling/recording, mplayer for playback, avidemux for commercial removal, mencoder for postprocessing (deinterlacing, audio syncing, etc.), and transcode with DVD::Rip for backing up DVDs.

My primary goal for this is to make backup copies of media for when I travel. When I watch live TV on my computer, I use TVTime. I am looking more into something like MythTV, because of the possibility of streaming content, and the fact that it is getting toward the point of being able to remove commercials on the fly.

That said, I have been very happy with my current configuration. Webvcrplus works like a charm, downloading listings through xmltv and scheduling them for recording.