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http://www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/home/ertel/ertel-dir/morehome/4gallerypast/4.04gravesofrenownscientists.html

I wish more libraries would work with Google.

The fact is that libraries are the good guys in the fight to preserve information for the future generations, while the Googles and Microsofts are just corporate fly by night outfits in comparison.

It's not even that their scanning secrets are worth that much. Generally, the quality of Google's scans is not very good, and somebody will have to do it all again in the future anyway. They skimp on resolution, and don't clean the pages properly.

If you'd like to see scanning done right, take a look at Goettingen's Library. Their scans of historical math works are of a very high standard, the best I've seen around the web, certainly better than the Michigan, Cornell or Gallica offerings. Another project with the right humanitarian attitude is the Million Books Project, which is doing highly interesting work in the Chinese universities.

But unfortunately, not all of the world has access to such wonderful libraries, and specialized research is somewhat difficult, even if your city is one that is blessed with a nice public library. Boy, I loved it when I discovered sites like this, and this, and this, collections to truly warm the heart of a math geek like me. Good luck finding even a tenth of the books and journals in those three collections in your local public library.

These are all the free (as in beer) applications I use all the time:

WireTap: Save an audio file of any sound being played on the Mac by any other application.

DVDBackup: Great for backing up DVDs (while removing region coding, CSS encryption, and Macrovision encryption.) You'll still need Toast to burn the DVDs though.

PixelNhance: A must-have to tinker with the color/brightness/contrast etc. of your digital pictures.

Pixen: The best pixel-level editor on any platform.

MorphX: Morphs one image into another.

SnapNDrag: For screen captures (Grab is another basic screen capture utility that comes bundled with OSX).

Galerie: Puts your photos in a nice album-type gallery of web pages for being served by a web server.

LaTex Equation Editor and Tex Fog: The equation editors I use. Requires Tex/LaTex to be installed..

And if you are into LaTex, you'll also want CPlot: A parametric equation plotter.

CyberDuck: Open source S/FTP client. (Other FTP clients for OSX include osXigen, Transmit, Fetch, Fugu...).

Onyx: A must-have system utility.

MenuMeter: Another must-have system info utility. Excellent.

Books: A library software (book database).

Xnippets: A decent information organiser.

Carbon Copy Cloner: Backup software. (Donationware)

A few apps I have gladly paid money to use:

ChartSmith: Wonderfull for making all kinds of charts you have ever thought of (and some you haven't).

EvoCAM: Great app to record/play (or otherwise control) a Firewire/USB camera hooked to your Mac. Well worth the shareware price. (Also checkout their other offerings - ImageDV and VideoScope)

Intaglio: The 2D vector drawing/CAD program of my choice for simple CAD/ technical drawings.

Keynote: A (much better than) PowerPoint replacement from Apple. I use this all the time. (When it came out originally, I paid $$ for it; I heard Apple is bundling it with iLife now?)

Little Snitch: Keeps tabs on any stealth connections being made to/from your Mac, Shareware.

Intuem: Nice MIDI app with a clean interface. (GarageBand, one of Apple's iLife apps, is great for Audio/MIDI as well, but I find it limiting for my purpose because it does not do MIDI-out to my keyboard/synth.)

cheers- raga

In the bigger picture DirecTV should have no right to control information it beams over public airways. Unfortunately, the television industry, like the record industry before it, will die a slow and litigious death.

I urge everyone, download DirecTV programs to your hard drive, convert to mpegs using transcode, and distribute on gnutella.

That'll learn them.

Let the world change. Out with old.

Yes and no.

First off the generalised methods you allude to are MPI, the older PVM, and there's Mosix too.

MPI and PVM are framework libraries that allow for code to be written to take parallelism into account. They tend to be used for numerics calculations (which was thier birthplace), simply because numerics are CPU bound. There are others, that are even more numerics centric (HPF - a Fortran varient, for example), but MPI should probably be the target of choice for new code, including non-numerics based calculations. Note that the term 'Beowulf cluster' implies MPI. The biggest point to note with MPI is that it allows for communication between nodes, and thus can be used for calulcations that are not trivially parralisable.

Mosix is subtle different. It's a patch to Linux that distributed processes across multiple boxes. This tends to work better for jobs with long runtimes, as opposed to many smaller duration processes, however. For example, Ralphzilla>

Parrallel applications need to be written to target MPI or PVM, whereas Mosix doesn't need special targeting. On the other hand, any multiprocessor aware application will be more efficent at using them than any automated solution. Still, Mosix may well be sufficent for most purposes.

The downside to MPI &c is that they require libraries installed. Which raises dependancies, so most such applications tend to use thier own libs, built in. This is actually not a bad idea - in that it allows more specific tailoring to take place. On the other hand, MPI &c libs can be tailored for a specific set up (e.g. using non-Ethernet conectivitiy - such as a mix of Ethernet, Myranet and Papers, for example). That's a little out of the intended usage for distcc, however, where minimal set up times are desired.

On the video front, then, transcode has a buildin cluster mode, for pretty much what you were talking about. Again, it's methods are all internal, but that's not an issue here.

Cinelerra(video editing)
Transcode(video encoding)
Gear Pro(not free)
mkisofs (for making images with the -dvd-video switch)
linuxvideostudio (gooey)
lsdvd (for listing dvd contents

Been ripping movies for free on Linux for ages using transcode and sharing them on limewire.

Senator Hollins showed me how to do this.

Long live digital freedom.

When ripping, use transcode. You can effectively remove the these annoying FBI warnings for greater viewing pleasure.

Oh, and don't forget to share your digital media on gnutella

And be safe out there. Watch out for big brother. Remeber: You share you bandwidth with your neighbors via a wireless router. "It wasn't I your honor, must have been my neighbor's 10 year old kid who was sharing without FBI warnings."

Try ogle.

You can make mpegs from dvds with transcode

Don't forget to share them on your favorite P2P network.

This would be very handy to me, since I use XP for Video

Transcode,
Cinelerra, ...

Photo Editing,

Gimp, ...

Gaming

Nethack :)

Try again... What do you need windows for?

mencoder movie.asf -o movie.mpg -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=96:vol=6 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=1300:vhq:v4mv

You'll have to tweak the options to get desirable results.

...some popular transcoding applications will start supporting it. One such as transcode (but any other popular transcoder will do).
I mean, it's like the Linux kernel, if there is no heavy testing from lots of users (such as during the "development" phase), not a lot of bugs get squashed out. Yet, soon after the first stable (the first "dot-zero") release is out, the bug reports start pouring in.
The same mechanism would probably help the Vorbis codec.

Nitpicker's P.S.: "transcoder" is the correct term for what's usually called "encoder". You're not just encoding when converting from, say, DVD to DivX, but you're actually trans-coding from one video format to another (decoding one format, encoding the other). That's what "trans-" means: "from one to another".

Ffdshow is an easy replacement, as it's based on a Linux project, ffmpeg.

The extent of my encoding comes from recording TV or VHS tapes and throwing a few filters at them for cleanup and encoding. So I've never had a chance to become familiar with what features avisynth has. Some people over at Doom9's Linux forum have mentioned getting Avisynth running in wine.

Tmpgenc should be a pretty easy replacement. Transcode seems to be a favorite for mpeg2 encoding. There was a problem when I first started using Linux, which slowed mpeg encoding to a snails pace for a while, and I've never found a chance to get back to see how it works when fully functional. A lot of peoplel swear by it though, and it's feature list is pretty impressive. Avidemux, as well as quite a few other programs also provide mpeg1 encoding, I think through ffmpeg.

Everything in VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod except video capture should work fine under wine and that's what I used for quite a while before Avidemux appeared. The design and functionality are very similar to virtualdub, and it also includes encoding to mpeg1.

One of the two best media players for Linux, Mplayer, should be noted to have better support for matroska, in cvs, than is available for the format under windows. And these tools can be used for creation and editing of matroska files.

For capture from a tv card, I use nuppelvideo, and then use avidemux to edit and convert to a smaller format.

Most of the suggestions here require ~$500 DVD burners, expensive capture hardware or locating ancient uber-vhs decks which probably aren't that easy to find service for.

I suggest an mid range used PC ~500mhz, coupled with a cd-burner and a $90 CDN TV Tuner card. I use the ATI TV Wonder PCI, which can be found for much less on Ebay... either way nearly every Tuner card i've come across is supported by BTTV, although I've had small luck with Gatos which is designed for ATI All-In-Wonder cards.

So for software, we're looking at:
Linux (i use Debian with 2.4.18)
Compile BTTV and TV Tuner support in your kernel or modules if needed
Nuppelvideo - great *ZERO* frame dropping capture software which will result in huge, quality, 640x480, raw, stereo clips.
Transcode which will convert your Nuppelvideo files into any format you choose, I prefer DivX 5, which squashes your clips down to size suitable for 700mb discs. No DVD needed.

If you're still wondering why we're using a TV tuner card, it's that fact that almost all of them have S-Video/Composite/Stero inputs, so you can capture from most sources... incl. VHS, Beta, whatever.

The quality is great IMHO, for the small amount of $$ and the ease of transfer once you have a handle on the software. There are load of resources out there, much of the DVD ripping FAQs mirror all the audio/video sync/editing info you'll need to master this process.

To top it all off, if you use an avi file format, like DivX uses, you can use VirtualDub, free software that allows you to chop up clips, join them and fix repair/mix audio features on your clips. Just make sure you choose Direct Stream Copy so the clips are "spliced" (very quick) and not processed (hours zzzzzzzz).

All of this with free software, a few bucks, your old computer... does it get any better?

DVD2AVI is a piece of piss under linux. It's easy than Windows in fact. I use dvd::rip... four clicks and my DVD is ripped into OGM format (Xvid, vorbis) -- or AVI divx,mp3 if you prefer. mplayer can play just about anything, and mencoder works pretty well. transcode converts anything into anything else (just about).

My son and I have been capturing analog video and producing short digital videos and movies for past few months. We have made a goal to do this entirely in Linux and have learned a bit along the way that may be of use to others. My son has recently made some videos for his high school classes that have been voted best in the class. Here's what worked for us:

1. Start with a reasonably recent model PC, such as an Athlon 1700+ or better built on a decent motherboard. Give it at least 512Mb of RAM and make sure you have at least 20Mb or more of free disk space.

2. Use a relatively recent version of Linux with at least a 2.4.18 kernel. Most distributions which use this kernel (e.g., Red Hat 7.3) include drivers which support the capture cards listed below.

3. We've been using two types of PCI capture cards: an Iomega Buz, and a Linux Media Labs LML33. The Buz is out of production, but it can regularly be had on ebay for $20-$40. It is based on the Zoran MJPEG chipset and Phillips video encoder chips. As a side benefit, it also contains an ultra SCSI controller that is supposedly supported in Linux, though I haven't tried it yet. The LML33 was designed spefically with Linux in mind, and is also based on the Zoran MJPEG chipset, but it uses a BrookTree video encoder. It is also a bit more expensive; we paid $125 for a used one on ebay. Both cards are well supported in Linux, and produce high quality DVD-resolution 720x480 video at 30 frames/second.

4. Install a recent version of mjpegtools. The most important piece of mjpegtools is the lavrec utility, which supports recording from the Zoran cards to either AVI or Quicktime formatted MJPEG files. mjpegtools also includes several other useful utilities.

5. Install a recent distribution of Transcode. Transcode is a very useful suite of command line utilities for transcoding and processing videos and supports just about every video codec available on Linux.

6. Install Cinelerra and Blender. Cinelerra is a bit quirky, still tends to crash a lot, and is butt-ugly, but it has some awesome editing and compositing abilities including multiple layer editing and compositing, and keyframe-based effects control. The most recent version also contains a nice adaptive de-interlace filter. Cinelerra also contains a very nice translate filter that can be used to trim edge artifacts that often appear in captured video. Blender is gread for things like generating 3-D titles and short 3-D blurbs and transition animations if you like to do those kinds of things. Gimp is also quite useful for generating titles and editing individual frames if that is required.

With the above combination of hardware and software, you can achive very close to DVD quality results with very little outlay of cash in a completely Linux environment, and the results can be quite satisfying. My son has been making videos for his high school classes and I have been digitizing old home videos and it's been quite fun.

Another project that might intrest you is Mpeg4ip. This project includes tools to do realtime MPEG4 capture and conversion of other videos to MPEG4 format.

And last but not least is transcode, They just added support for realtime capture and conversion to this program so you can output in a number of diffrent formats, including MPEG4 via Divx5 or XviD.

>> Small command-line tools are appropriate for hacking together text processing filters,
>> but I can't see them being useful for building a multimedia pipeline.

Uhhhh... transcode much? Use it, and I imagine you'll find as I have that it absolutely shames every other program that has the same feature set for -any- platform.

I wrote the Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide. I have a section in there on SVCDs. So I know a thing or two about making SVCDs in Linux.

Here's a couple of Linux programs that can encode mpeg-2:

• mjpegtools
• transcode (see here for its SVCD documentation section)

Avisynth has also been useful for various NLE and filtering tasks...is something similar available for Linux?

Okay, here's the beauty of Linux. You don't need it. If you simply want to frameserve an AVI, a named pipe (man mkfifo) will do just fine. If you want to do fancy stuff like overlay two AVIs, check out the subtitler plugin in the transcode software I mentioned above, which can do overlays, fades, and scrolling of many types of objects including text, pictures, and video.

I wrote the Linux Digital Fansubbing Guide. I have a section in there on SVCDs. So I know a thing or two about making SVCDs in Linux.

Here's a couple of Linux programs that can encode mpeg-2:

• mjpegtools
• transcode (see here for its SVCD documentation section)

Avisynth has also been useful for various NLE and filtering tasks...is something similar available for Linux?

Okay, here's the beauty of Linux. You don't need it. If you simply want to frameserve an AVI, a named pipe (man mkfifo) will do just fine. If you want to do fancy stuff like overlay two AVIs, check out the subtitler plugin in the transcode software I mentioned above, which can do overlays, fades, and scrolling of many types of objects including text, pictures, and video.

Eiffel is a language with an minimal instruction set (sometimes refered to as RISC language), which is used mostly in environments that emphasize reliability and dependability. It's small instruction set (e.g. there is only one type of loop) make it easy to learn and understand but is taking away some of the fun of coding. Most of the work you put into an eiffel project is to find the right approache, because you don't have too many ways to implement stuff. Here in Europe it's used in mostly academic environments that like the grace of its simplistic approace and its 100% object oriented design.

Tradeoffs of this language are its high compilation time, as Eiffel source gets translated to C and then into a native form, the scarcity of available system libraries and the lack of dynamic features as shared objects and stuff.

If your going to invest some time in this language, a look at those open source projects might be worthwhile:
eposix - POSIX bindings for eiffel
gobo - a collection of tools and libraries to unify the development of applications on diffrent Eiffel compilers
mico/e - a CORBA ORB in Eiffel (DISCLAIMER: I am involved in the development of this project)

To create (S)VCD cue/bins from MPEG files , you can use vcdimager. Keep in mind that (S)VCD only accept certain resolutions and bitrates, not just any MPEG file can be used to create a video CD.

That's not the optimal method of proceding.

A video codec, such as DivX, typically utilises some form of transformation, be it FFT, IDCT or some form of wavelet transform, then quantisation. Whilst you could split that into separate sections, it makes more sense to operate at a higher level - i.e. to split your video stream into chunks and then send each chunk off to a node, to compress in the usual fashion.

The advantages of this approach is that the codec only need be written once, and given that that's a hard part, this is a good thing. It also means that the cluster interface is codec neutral, thus no particular work need be done on the part of the codec developers.

transcode has such a mode.

What do others use for recording?

I went through using various tools and had best results with:
vcr
and
nvrec

Apparently mencoder (part of the kickass mplayer package) will also do the job.

Using nvrec you can start recording a program and then start playing it back via mplayer a short time later as it's still recording with few problems.

I recently bought a ReplayTV
though, and since these babies have ethernet, I should be able to stream my video directly from it using Xine/mplayer over my LAN. I'm moving on Monday and haven't bothered to wire ethernet to it yet so this is untested. To grab/stream video from a ReplayTV under Linux or another Java enabled OS use dvarchive
I've been thinking of setting up a cron job to suck the video off my ReplayTV, use transcode to convert it to mpeg1 and burn it to a VCD to archive shows to CD automatically..

BTW, I've had problems many times with mplayer and A/V sync, while xine will play the same video flawlessly. I hate the xine UI though, and much prefer mplayers sparten interface..

Take a look at Transcode by Dr. Thomas Östreich. I use it for any number of video stream tricks, including what you describe here. http://www.Theorie.Physik.UNI-Goettingen.DE/~ostre ich/transcode/

Since DivX is traditionally using MP3 to encode the sound, we're going to see some effects here as well.

One alternative that's explored by some projects, like transcode is to continue to use the DivX codec for video, but embed Ogg instead of MP3 in the .avi for sound. Seems like it's working pretty well.

I have your card, the ATI TV Wonder. It captures crisp, stereo clips at 640x480 at a full 30fps, no frame drops.

Have a look into BTTV (a driver) XawTV (a player) and a variety of recording software, I prefer Nuppelvideo which can be converted to virtually any format (including DivX 5) using transcode.

The bttv stuff is included in the kernel source all the rest is only a brief compile or an apt-get xxxxx.
It takes a little while to get everything running, but once you do, it runs completely stable and uses very little resources. Say goodbye to that awful ATI capture software.
The finale being that all these clips can be edited using Cinelerra 1.0.

Time to start archiving Trek, SNL and The Osbournes?

http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostre ich/transcode/
http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostre ich/transcode/html/modules.html

http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostre ich/transcode/
http://www.theorie.physik.uni-goettingen.de/~ostre ich/transcode/html/modules.html

Let's see, I've got my video capture card working on v4l, I've got video capture to mjpeg (good balance of 'quality of original encoding' and 'file size taken up by original encoding') working through xawtv's(no, not a troll, that really is xawtv's URL) 'Streamer' utility, I've got framerate and format conversions of other file types working through mplayer's Mencoder, and I've got The MJPEG tools for generation of VCD and SVCD video from the original sources (the yuvdenoise filter is handy when transferring old VHS's to VCD), and when I want to get more complex with my conversions, I've got transcode (the '.ppml' format for subtitle rendering seems to support quite a lot of effects...) and now I've got Cinelerra (which I can never seem to spell properly the first time) for messing with the video itself, once I figure out how to use the program (which now runs on my Slackware box after seeing a previous poster's tip about finding the libgcc* libraries and such in OpenOffice - Thanks!).

Now if only I could get xawtv to recognize that I have libquicktime.so on my machine so that I could save my video to .mov's (so that I can get more than 2GB at a time) I'd be set...

Well, that and support for .ogg [XVid/VP3]/Vorbis video file encoding (MPlayer already supports playback at least, or so I'm told, and it sounds like support for this in ffmpeg may be coming Real Soon Now from what I've seen on the mailing list...)

So, there's quite a lot of work that seems to be going on with Linux multimedia (not even counting proprietary packages and audio-only tools) if you look long enough...

I recommend you take a look at transcode and dvd::rip With these tools, it is possible to make a backup copy of your DVD's onto one or two CD-R's in DivX format. The ripping process takes about 15 minutes, and the encoding can take a mere 2 hours on a newer processor, depending on your settings. A high-quality, two-pass encoding session takes less than 8 hours on a 1-GHz machine. The resulting video is virtually indistinguishable from the original MPEG-2 video.

You may not want to download a 7-gigabyte file and pay for two DVD-R's to burn it on, but downloading a 1.4-megabyte file and burning it on two 25-cent CD-R's is not nearly as extreme.

What you fail to realize why the MPAA freaked out about DeCSS. They knew that DVD's were going to be around for a long time. They knew that while it was infeasible for technology at the time to make copying DVD's impractacle for the average consumer, it would get there in the next 5 years! They knew that video codecs and video encoding software would become more efficient and easier to use. They predicted that the .mp3 equivalent for movies would emerge, and bandwidth for the average end user would continue to increase. They didn't want to see another Napster in the movie realm.

And that's why they are fighting this tooth and nail. If they can get the courts to pass the laws that would keep people from copying their films, then they can reduce the number of movies that people obtain copies of movies without paying for them. They count on the fact that if something is illegal, fewer people will engage in that activity than if something is legal.

But to point out a flaw in your argument: people make a moral distinction between physically harming other people and copying a DVD or a CD. They are much more likely to use DeCSS to copy a movie that they didn't pay for than they are to bash in a stranger's head with a baseball bat.

I cropped it and encoded that into divx:-D
9.4M MATRIX_SVCD_JH.avi
27M MATRIX_SVCD_JH.mpg
go transcode
http://169.226.225.80/~justin/m/MATRIX_SVCD_JH.avi will be up for a bit someone else mirror it hehe
note: don't even bother trying that link after 5/17
-Justin

As the author of Transcode explained to me, using a binary Divx encoder with PVM/MPI/Mosix is impossible. I don't know what state open source Divx encoders are in, but I agree this would be a much better solution than chopping up a DVD and encoding all the pieces separately.

Watch this post get modded up, and not my qualified response to the From Coder to Game Designer question. Humbug!

Anyway, as brought up in the last Ask Slashdot remotely similar to this one (Archiving DVD's with Linux), dvd::rip, which is a Perl+GTK front-end to transcode, has a fairly insecure cluster mode, whereby it will split up the video transcoding task among however many machines you can coerce into doing it, and rip and mux the audio with the video on the host machine.

Sounds like just what the doctor ordered. Now someone go mod up that other answer of mine. Please?

Mencoder is easier, transcode is more versatile (I think).

Mencoder is the "encoding" project that goes along with Mplayer, which in my opinion is probably the best-performing media player with the widest support for files and codecs (including Windows Media codecs, using the 'native' Windows DLL's) for linux at the moment, though not necessarily the easiest to use (not difficult, in my opinion, either, just not "clicky-pointy" simple like, say, Xine).

Trans code, on the other hand, has a bewildering variety of options to work through, but has a ton of functionality to go with it.

In both cases, the software handles reading DVD's, and can convert them to other formats. Transcode handles a bunch of different formats and codecs. Mencoder is limited to .avi file format at the moment, but can put a variety of codecs into this avi (including vorbis audio, as I recall). I've also found that you can even use mencoder to "capture" mms:// files for offline perusing or conversion, which is nice, since otherwise I wouldn't get anything but the Microsoft "Download Media Player for Mac or Windows" page whenever I tried to view such things...

For MPlayer/Mencoder, I strongly recommend reading the documentation (the software is great, but the impatience of the people on the mplayer mailing lists with people asking questions that are answered in the documentation are well known) and using a recent set of CVS sources.

transcode is a fantastic app. It can convert just about any kind of video stream to any other kind. It supports cropping, resizing, etc etc. Careful with the current prereleases, there are some nasty A/V sync issues. 0.6.0pre1 & 2 work best for me.

It's pretty tough to get right on the commandline, so grab dvd::rip, a nice perl/gtk frontend. Most useful, dvd::rip has a nice gui for using transcode's cluster encoding. That's right, you can build a dvd-ripping cluster. I have a 4-node setup, and it only takes a few hours to rip a dvd, using two-pass DivX 4.02. Careful with the newer prereleases, there are some nasty A/V sync issues. 0.6.0pre1 & 2 seem to work best for me.

I would suggest using one of the MPEG-4 variants (DivX 4.x, or XviD) in two-pass mode. In my experience, this produces very good quality. I rip my movies to one 1.4gb file, which I then split onto two CDs. You might be able to afford slightly larger file sizes, to do AC3 audio pass-through, for example.

If you double or triple your storage capacity, consider just storing the unencrypted VOB files - you'll get superior audio & video, as well as all the alternate audio & subtitle tracks.