How to create a video DVD with command line tools

Maybe you know this scenario: You’ve been invited to a family get-together and you take some videos of the most memorable events. Afterwards a family member comes to you and says: “I’ve seen you recording this and that. Could you give it to me on DVD?”. As a matter of fact, you can easily create a video DVD of any video you have recorded with just a view command lines.

How to use a remote firewire port and transcode DV video locally with ffmpeg

I recently moved into another appartment and found some old VHS tapes I recorded years ago. As luck would have it, I got my hands on a VCR and a MiniDV camcorder with builtin ADC, so I can get analog video signals into the MiniDV camcorder. So all I needed was a computer with firewire or IEEE1394 port. The only computer I have that still has a firewire port is my server, so I hooked the VCR to the MiniDV and the MiniDV to my server.

How to use your iPod Shuffle in Linux

In this article I will describe the probably best way to use your first or second generation iPod Shuffle in Linux. The described method is based on a python script called rebuild_db. The script will allow you to simply copy/paste music files to your iPod like to any other regular MP3-Player. In case you have a different or newer version of the iPod, the described method may not work for you and you should try using gtkPod instead.

How to make screencasts with FFmpeg

FFmpeg is able to use audio and video streams from many different sources. In order to record a screencast, you can use the x11grab input module for recording an X screen and the alsa input module for audio recording.

How to extract video URLs from YouTube

I know there are many tools out there that allow you to download videos from YouTube, like the Video Download Helper for Firefox, even online tools that convert the audio to mp3. The reasons I’m writing this article are a) because sometimes you just need the URL, for example to watch a video with a much less ressource consuming player like VLC or ffplay, b) because sometimes you just want to listen to the audio and save up even more ressources by not decoding the video and c) because I can 😉

How to install Bumblebee on Arch Linux

In this article I will describe how to install Bumblebee on Arch Linux. The Bumblebee-Wiki provides the following description for the software: “Bumblebee is an effort to make Nvidia Optimus enabled laptops work in GNU/Linux systems. Such feature involves two graphics cards with two different power consumption profiles plugged in a layered way sharing a single framebuffer”. Please be extremely cautious throughout the whole installation procedure, depending on your system you may end up with a messed up driver or system configuration! This “How To” is based on my system, here are the most relevant specs:

• Lenovo ThinkPad T420s
• CPU: Intel Core i7 – 2620M with integrated GPU
• Graphics: NVIDIA 4200M Optimus Graphics (NVIDIA GF119M)

0. Preparations
1. Installation
2. Important and useful commands
3. Troubleshooting

How to stream multiple TV channels with a single DVB-T tuner using VLC

DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting – Terrestrial) is the European-based digital terrestrial television broadcast transmission standard. The system transmits video, audio and data streams encoded in a MPEG transport stream which can be decoded by different types of receiver cards, boxes or USB sticks. Every broadcast channel with its video, audio and data stream is multiplexed into a MPEG program stream and one or more of these are multiplexed into a MPEG transport stream which is then transmitted on a single frequency. So basically your tuner card/box/stick is receiving multiple broadcast channels on a single frequency at once and your tuner software selects the program stream you intend to watch or record. In this article I will explain how you can demultiplex the transport stream and watch or record multiple broadcast channels at the same time with a single tuner.

How to transcode a directory of audio files to AAC with FFmpeg

I recently started to backup my CDs as lossless flac files on my home server. The problem is, my mobile phone cannot play back flac files, so I wrote a little bash script that transcodes a directory of audio files to high quality variable bitrate AAC files that I can play back on my mobile phone.

How to split and demux a file with FFmpeg

If you have a large video or audio file and want to split it into several smaller files, you can use ffmpeg to obtain that goal. What you need are the start timecodes and the length of the segments you want to cut. You can tell ffmpeg the start position of a segment with the -ss option and the length of a segment with the -t option.

How to combine multiple files with FFmpeg

To create a large video file from multiple video files, one does not simply cat into Mordor, because of different header information or stream mappings in the files. But one can use ffmpeg to do that job.