One thing that’d be nice is to get a list of the packages installed in pear command-line syntax. I.e. pear install MDB2-beta.

So, here’s a quick reference to convert the output of “pear list” to a list you can use with pear:

pear list | egrep "(stable|beta|alpha)$" | while read line; do echo $line | cut -d " " -f 1,3 --output-delimiter=-; done

A sample output would be:

$ pear list
INSTALLED PACKAGES, CHANNEL PEAR.PHP.NET:
=========================================
PACKAGE VERSION STATE
Archive_Tar 1.3.7 stable
Auth_SASL 1.0.4 stable
Console_Color 1.0.3 stable
Console_Getopt 1.2.3 stable
Console_Table 1.1.4 stable
Crypt_HMAC 1.0.1 stable

to this:

Archive_Tar-stable
Auth_SASL-stable
Console_Color-stable
Console_Getopt-stable
Console_Table-stable
Crypt_HMAC-stable
etc …

For me it’s just a nice way to backup the pear module list, or copy it to a file and then install the pear modules on another box.

Short version: Use Handbrake (available on Linux, Mac OS X and Windows). I’ve gone through a lot of applications through the years trying to find that “perfect rip”, and Handbrake beats everything hands down. I’m a videophile who likes everything looking as nice as it can, and this is what I use regularly.

Accessing DVDs

The first things you’ll need installed on your box is libdvdread and libdvdcss. libdvdread will access the DVD filesystem, and libdvdcss will decrypt the DRM on the disc. These should both ship with your distro, or if they don’t, should be relatively easy to acquire.

I use a lot of command line tools to access DVDs, so my focus was on that. The reason for that is because I have a lot of shell scripts to rip my massive library of discs, and I store data about them in a database.

lsdvd is the first stop. A very small app that uses libdvdread to display human and script-friendly output of the details of your disc.

mplayer dvd:// and mplayer dvdnav:// plus the optional track (dvd://3) or optional -dvd-device argument to specify the location of the device or ripped ISO.

I use dd to copy the contents of the entire disc to the harddrive and then rip it from there, to avoid wear and tear on the DVD drive, and also because I can do things like simultaneously rip one disc in the background and encode another at the same time.

When accessing the drive, you’ll want to use mplayer or some other program to access the drive and decrypt the CSS so that the drive itself caches the access. Otherwise, it may lock up.

I use pv to dump the disc and give me a pretty progress bar with ripping ETA and disc read speed: pv -ptre -w 80 /dev/dvd | dd of=movie.iso

If you want to extract the chapters, you can use dvdxchap, which is part of the ogmtools package.

DVD Tracks

Every movie I’ve run into has one track specifically for the video. Using lsdvd you can find the longest track, time-length wise, and that will be the movie.

TV shows on DVD often put many episodes into one track, where one or more chapters may contain an episode. You’ll need to examine these yourself to find out where each one starts and each one ends.

Another caveat is that they are not always ordered on the track or on the DVD in the same order that shows up in the menu. The best advice when accessing tracks and titles on DVDs is to never assume anything, if you are trying to preserve order.

DVD Subtitles

Subtitles on DVDs come in two formats: VobSub and Closed Captioning. VobSub subtitles are images that are overlaid onto the picture. Closed captioning is a text format.

If you have a ripped VOB (DVD MPEG-2 video), you can extract the subtitles using a program called ccextractor. It will save the subtitles to SRT, a subtitle format that can be muxed into your final video.

Encoding DVDs

Handbrake is a very “smart” application that will make things extremely easy on you. It supports encoding using three codecs: x264, ffmpeg and theora. x264 is an actively-developed H.264 video codec, and is used professionally by many companies. It also has a lot of options that you may find useful in your encode, based on your target playback device (ipod, ipad, iphone, apple tv, htpc, computer, etc.).

Handbrake supports muxing (or putting audio and video into a wrapper format) to two containers: MP4 and Matroska. MP4 is a very popular standard used in lots of places. It’s an open-specification. Audio is usually AAC. Matroska is an open-source openly developed container format that has a standardized specification. Support for it is growing in a lot of devices. Matroska can handle multiple video streams, multiple audio streams, multiple subtitles, stores metadata, chapters and attachments. Strictly speaking, either one will work fine for most people’s needs, but for those looking for advanced usage and tagging, Matroska will fit your needs. On linux, the tools for muxing and accessing information about a Matroska file are found in the mkvtoolnix package.

Deinterlacing and Decombing

Most movies will be progressive video, meaning that each frame is one full picture. Production studios and DVD authors may have their video interlaced. Interlaced video is where half of the frame is shown in quick succession where the second half is shown. On older TVs (like the CRT tube TVs) display at a native resolution of 480i, so you won’t notice the lines. Progessive displays (computer monitors, HDTVs, etc.) will display the lines and it can be a visual annoyance.

Handbrake uses filters to convert interlaced video to progressive video, called deinterlacing. Decombing is also a feature that Handbrake supports, which is basically “smart” deinterlacing. It is safe to turn on the decombing filter to the default setting for all your encodes, and let Handbrake automatically convert your video for you. Don’t use the deinterlacing filter unless you specifically know what you are doing.

Please see 100fps.com for a quick explanation of video deinterlacing.

Other Handbrake Features

Handbrake has lots of handy features. It has support for “profiles” which is a combined set of preferences for container format, video codec, audio codecs, preferred subtitle settings, post-processing, deinterlacing, decombing, and all the H.264 settings that come with x264.

One nice thing it will do as well is auto-crop your feature film for you. This is a boon if you have a letterbox source video, where the movie itself is in widescreen, but the presentation is in fullframe.

You can also “queue” up your encodes, so Handbrake can be working on multiple files. You don’t need to wait for one to finish before assigning it it’s next task.

Handbrake is also multi-threaded when using x264 to encode your video. With a six-core desktop, I have been able to encode video using the “Normal” profile between 160 to 180 frames per second. Meaning a 25 minute video will take about 2 1/2 minutes to encode.

PHP Classes

I’ve got some small classes that I use in my shell scripts for Matroska and Handbrake (v0.95 required). You may or may not find these helpful. I should warn that these are just used on my own set of scripts, so they may or may not be very clean or can have small bugs.

References

If you want more information, here are some good places to go:

doom9
Multimedia wiki
Handbrake forums
100fps.com

Also, feel free to contact me if you have any questions, and I’ll be glad to help.

I use disc_id to give me a unique 32-character string of a DVD, so I have an identifier to track them by in my database of DVDs.

I don’t know if it’s just me or not, but my DVD drives have issues trying to poll the devices. Once I insert a disc, it will take a few seconds for it to register completely so I can access it. However, binaries that access it will think it’s ready to respond sooner than it is able, and will die unexpectedly. So what I needed was a way to get the disc id and not worry about whether or not the drive has finished registering or not.

I just call my little script dvd_id and it is simply a small wrapper that checks the exit code of the disc_id binary. If it doesn’t work the first time, it sleeps for one second and tries again, then repeats the process until it gets a successful exit code of zero.

That’s it. Pretty simple, but like all little scripts, you really tend to depend on them.
#!/bin/bash
EXIT_CODE=1
DEVICE=$1
if [[ -z $DEVICE ]]; then
DEVICE=/dev/dvd
fi

if [[ $EXIT_CODE != 0 ]]; then
sleep 1
fi
done

Recently, I was thinking about how LIRC can capture IR events and map them to X keyboard events.  Basically, you can control X applications with your remote control.  I started to reason that if that were possible, then I could just use my web development skills and create a webpage frontend for my HTPC that would run on a lightweight browser, and listen for keystrokes.

Just playing around with it tonight, I actually made some really great progress thanks to a combination of a good friend, my humble jQuery beginnings, and my laughable CSS skills.  This is the result so far.

I’m really stoked about the implementation so far.  You’ll most likely need Firefox to get that working properly.  It will capture the arrow key presses (up, down, left, right) and use that for navigation.  I realize that the beginnings are rather crude, but the fact that I could throw this together, so quickly, while I’m just barely learning my way around jQuery seems pretty impressive to me.  I’m actually quite proud, though, that I got the navigation to work properly, too, so wrapping around rows and columns works.

This is certainly going to be a fun project to hack on.  If I could get this working, this would open up all kinds of possibilities for me for displaying metadata and new options for navigation.

For comparison, here’s a screenshot of what my frontend looks like right now.  As you can see, I’m trying to imitate the style as closely as possible.

There’s a lot of advantages to having it web-based — not that I’m going to serve up anything remotely or anything, this is solely for my LAN.  It’ll just allow me to build out stuff much faster.

The hard part is going to be doing testing on the frontends.  They are both running off of tiny installations, and it’s not easy building and porting software to run on them.  Sounds like a challenge that’s extremely hard, going to take a lot of time, and will have marginal benefit and at the same time increase my workload and opportunity to own more of my software stack when things go wrong.  That’s just right up my alley.

I’ve been doing web design for a long time, but it hasn’t really gotten too interesting until I started playing with MVCs and JS frameworks and AJAX.  Now, all the *boring* stuff is totally out of the way, and the fun stuff is where I can see what I can quickly develop.  Kind of interesting really.  Plus, I think it’s kinda cool because I had pretty much sworn off getting more into computer tech, but this is one that really is interesting.  Well, for now, anyway.

So, I’m working on creating a REST API inside my MVC (using CodeIgniter), but on top of that, I’m writing a class that JavaScript can use to send calls to the REST API.  Here’s what I’ve come up with so far: link.

I’m really looking for some peer review on this thing .. the only thing you need to be familiar with is PrototypeJS and JavaScript, and it should make sense.  It doesn’t matter what REST API it sends stuff to.

I want to explain a couple of coding conventions though.

The get_rest_url() function is a protected method, which is kinda cool — I didn’t know until today you could do that with JavaScript.  If you created a REST  object named, then calling the function wouldn’t work.   You can only call it internally.  That’s why it’s in the constructor.

I should probably learn to use exceptions.  The concept of them just baffles me though, and I don’t really see the point of them when you can do things procedurally.  Whatever.  I’m holding out on being stubborn on this one.

The class supposes that your REST URL will accept the uniq identifer at the end.

The AJAX requests need to be synchronous, otherwise I couldn’t access the responses.  If someone knows a way to do both, I’d be glad to hear about it … synchronous and then using bind(this) on the function is the only option I’ve found.

That’s all I can think of.  Like I said, JS is not my strongest coding skill, so if anyone could do a once-over, it’d be nicely appreciated.

For what it’s worth, the code works just fine for my needs though.

The basic question I have is, if you are running a complex query where you would have specific instructions on how to order the data, who does the ordering? the Model or the Controller?

If it’s the Model … then how do you pass in the order by variables into a function?  Do you have an argument that takes an ORDER BY variable that is inserted into your SQL statement?  Do you write specific functions in the Model that spit out the data in the possible orders that are available from the View?

If it’s the Controller … then how the heck do you order it?  Do you grab all the data, and then run ways to sort the arrays?  That seems extremely tedious.

I could go on ranting more, but I think I’ll leave my question as small as that for now.  Frankly, I’m stumped.

My situation I’m in right now is that I’m building reports which pull together data from multiple sources, and then need to organize them based on the most simplest ordering scheme which spans multiple columns.  That is, order by this first, then that, then the third column.  That’s all fine and good, but what about when the client wants to rearrange the data?  That’s where I get lost.

And I’m not looking for some out of the box solution like using JavaScript to rearrange data in the view dynamically.  I’m not interested in something like that.

Basically, my question is, if you are customizing data presented to the View, based on input from the client, where does the lifting go, and how do you get it in there?  Like I said, I’m lost.

I hit a snag with the Form.serialize function today that took me a while to figure out what was going on.  Blame it on a confusing doc, because this certainly could have been explained with more clarity.

The Prototype doc (the old one, the new one is hard to navigate and has less information) says that if you pass true to the getHash parameter, it will return “an object hash.”  A careful reading of that should be implied, because it returns a JavaScript hash, not a Prototype Hash object.  Big difference.

I hit upon the problem because I would serialize my form, then try to add more keys to it, using the set function.  That would throw errors, and I couldn’t figure out why.

So, there’s a couple of ways around it.  The simplest one I like is to immediately create it as a Prototype Hash, so you can do what you would normally do.

var h = $H($(‘form’).serialize(true));

I’ve been doing some reading up the past few days, and stumbled upon some great resources.  One really cool thing I found, that I’ll write about later since I’ve got some ebuilds in the works, is GNOME Seed.  Seed is, basically, JavaScript bindings for GTK+.  In other words, you can build GUI applications in JavaScript.  How freaking cool is that?  (For the curious, read this, this and this.)

Anyway, one part of doing my research about JavaScript is building a little toolkit of common functions that I can use as a fallback when I need to understand what’s going on.  I’m really familiar with PHP, so I’ve been using that as  a sort of inspiration.

I’ve got a little function I wrote, called var_dump(), which basically does the same thing as the PHP function, and with similar syntax output.  The code is here.  If any JavaScript gurus wants to look at it and give me some pointers, let me know.  I’d appreciate it.   Mine is making a call to Seed, but obviously it’d be easy enough to put into a browser.