2013-03-13 Every time I want to transcode, concatinate or cut videos I wonder again if I better use mencoder(1) or ffmpeg(1). Each time I need to look up the switches and each time I try both tools and pick one of the results without having appropriate knowledge. Similar today, I can't even remember which tool I used the pro- duce the file that I chose in the end. I don't worry as I am happy having moved some videos from CDs to DVDs. Backing up the backups should be done once in a while. (I should do it more often!) Actually, some of the disks caused read errors. ddrescue [0] is a great helper in these cases. I really like it. My slow internet connection makes it impossible to stream films, thus I download them (slowly) to watch them in afterwards. Sad- ly, this is disliked by many mediatheks. But there is tatort-dl [1] to the rescue, at least for the ARD Mediathek. It requires rtmpdump. [2] I had to compile it from source. When I installed the library in /usr/local/lib it wasn't found by tatort-dl. This can be solved in two ways: Temporary: Set the environment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH to this directory. Permanently: Add the path to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig(8) afterwards. (See the man pages ldconfig(8) and ld.so(8) for de- tails.) [0] http://www.gnu.org/software/ddrescue/ddrescue.html [1] http://rg42.org/wiki/tatort-dl [2] http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/ http://marmaro.de/lue/ markus schnalke