First up, sorry I haven’t written recently, my internet has been capped and it’s been painfully slow. A recent discovery has been Sébastien Wains homepage which I’d like to think is in a similar vain to this page, simple tips related to day to day work. Sébastien’s blog is generally targeted at Linux administration and has a number of quality tips. Many of the tips are pure gold if you’ve ever been stuck in a similar situation. I recommend articles on Linux Run Levels, Using Rsync over SSH and Automating SVN keywords.

I had a post on this a while ago which used "transcode" and a series of other convoluted steps. By far the easiest is to just use mencoder which is the encoding half of mplayer. The following commands build you an MPEG4 from a DVD in 2 easy passes, it’s really this simple!

mencoder dvd:// -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=1 -alang en -oac copy -o /dev/null
mencoder dvd:// -ovc xvid -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=650000 -alang en -oac mp3lame
   -lameopts vbr=3 -o movie.avi

The only important bits are the bitrate in the second pass. Raise that number to maybe 768000 if you require even better quality and a larger file size. You’ll also want to Install DVD playback capability which is pretty simple if you’re using Ubuntu (and there’s plenty of other guides for other distributions).

Finally sorry that I haven’t written lately, just got back from holiday, so more posts coming soon!