I’d just like to apologise to my listeners and my co-host for the delay in releasing the podcast this time around.
The Devubuntu server which holds ubuntuos.com has been having some trouble lately - security trouble, apparantly (well, I SAID that it didn’t look very secure!). So FTP access has been locked out, and I couldn’t get a hold of the podcast audio.
It would have been up on Sunday as usual, except that I was waiting for contact from George regarding his addition to the ‘cast; and now I’ve realised that he’s recorded an actual podcast himself!
It is now fully edited and due for release today.
Mencoder has been a bit of a bastard lately. It refuses to use the dimensions that I’ve specified; which is a problem because my DVDs are 16:9, not 4:3! I found that Mencoder had encoded my files with 576 lines rather than 480 lines, which is why my DVD player didn’t want to play them. Transcode doesn’t have a problem with the aspect ratio or getting the correct size, but it chops some video off the beginning. As in, the first 10 minutes of the movie. That sucks arse.
Unfortunately, in order to get those movies into MPEG-4 in a way that my DVD player can understand, I’ll have to boot into Windows.
I’m still thinking more about OpenDisc. We should have never let it be a battle of Bluray vs HD DVD - it should have been Bluray versus OpenDisc. Maybe some day it will be? But only after we get better support for encoding video on Linux.
Are my troubles possibly related to me using an AMD64 chip with a 32-bit Linux and 32-bit Mencoder/FFMPEG/Transcode? I have heard that sometimes there are troubles, but I dunno.
Maybe I should do port scans of other computers online, find out if any have SSH running without a firewall and with root logins permitted, crack into them and use them to encode video? 
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