Skip to content

Converting a DVD film (mpeg2) to DV

Posted by Daniel Lange on
Other

There are a gazillion web pages telling you how to convert DV to MPEG2 for DVD use. But I got a DVD from a corporate event and needed to convert it to DV to be cut in kdenlive. So just the other way around. Try to find a web page about that direction (needle in haystack, anyone?).

Giving up on google, I tried unsuccessfully with the swiss army knife that comes to mind first (ffmeg).

While something like ffmpeg -i vts_01_1.vob -i vts_01_2.vob -i vts_01_3.vob -sameq -target dv ../Raum_Video.avi creates a nice .avi, even mplayer complains about it violating the dv and avi standards.

So back to digging around in tutorials and forums and trial and error with other tools. Finally I found Avidemux to be the tool of choice. It encapsulates ffmpeg and other tools nicely to make them produce the expected results. Set video to DV (lavc), Audio to WAV PCM and the container format to AVI and go grab a coffee meal. It creates a nice DV file that you can easily work with in your favorite video editor.

Screenshot of Avidemux in action

httpdate - set local date and time from a web server

Posted by Daniel Lange on
Linux

While ntp may be a great protocol, I find it quite bloated and slow for the simple purpose of just setting a local date and time to a reference clock. I do not need 20ms accuracy on a notebook's clock :-). Thus I use(d) rdate for a decade now but the public rdate servers are slowly dying out. So I'm replacing it more and more with htpdate which works quite nicely. It's written in C and a perl alternative is available on the author's site. There is also a forked windows version of it available.

Developing a bit larger bash script (which syncs a few servers), I wondered whether I could realize the time sync part in bash as well.

It's quite possible:

  1. # open a tcp connection to www.google.com
  2. exec 3<>/dev/tcp/www.google.com/80
  3. # say hello HTTP-style
  4. echo -e "GET / HTTP/1.0\n\n">&3
  5. # parse for a Date: line and with a bit of magic throw the date-string at the date command
  6. LC_ALL=C LANG=en date --rfc-2822 --utc -s "$(head <&3 | grep -i "Date: " | sed -e s/Date\:\ //I)"
  7. # close the tcp connection
  8. exec 3<&-

Simple, eh?

Continue reading "httpdate - set local date and time from a web server"