converting avi's to vcd with tovid

Tried to make vcds first with mencoder. The documentation made it look easy enough. I used vcdimager to process the mpgs produced by mencoder to make bin and cue files. I burned it on CD, and unfortunately, my DVD player could not recognize it or play it at all!

That convinced me that VCD making was not as easy as the mplayer documentation made it to be. I needed a frontend. I tried out tovid. Then burned the VCD. The VCD played all right for the first several minutes, but then the video just stops dead, and all i get is audio!

Urgh, tovid still isn't perfect, but i'll keep an eye on its development.

I think i go back to trying linux video maker. Although still alpha, i remember trying it and it produced workable VCDs.

compiling faad2

apart from following the instructions on README.linux, delete the lines under rpm: in Makefile.am, and Makefile.in.

make should then work properly.

animated gifs!

i recently discovered, after visiting a fan site for Equilibrium, that there is something called an animated gif. Coolness! A picture file that animates! Putting one of those on a website would make the site so much cooler.

I found out that mplayer can output animated gifs from video files using -vo option. I need to investigate further to find out how to control resolution of output and how to restrict the time mplayer plays. This will be rather more complicated.