For a couple of years there have been a number of great open-source programs around for encoding video, both in Windows and (Ubuntu) Linux. Some of them provide a nice graphical user interface, but the best ones are still commandline tools, such as ffmpeg and MEncoder. They are extremely flexible, but unfortunately also have a bewildering number of commandline options. This page lists a few invocations I regularly use.

Extracting DVD titles

To extract a single title from a DVD, first copy the DVD to harddisk:

dvdbackup -M

Next, use totem or vlc (under Plackback->Title) to find out the number of the title you want. For our example we’ll assume that the DVD files are in a directory called DVD_VOLUME/ and that we want the second title. Finally, copy the title …

For some reason, repairing broken equipment is one of these tasks that I tend to put off for months, if not years, because it feels like it’s going to be a lot of hassle.

About a year ago the volume knob broke off my Kenwood KRF-V5090D audio video surround receiver during transport. For a while I was able to make it work again by gluing the parts back together, using a matchstick and some polyurethane resin. In the end, this didn’t hold though, and it became increasingly difficult to set the volume. Given that I bought the thing quite cheaply in a second-hand store and the remote control was missing, I decided to try and replace the volume knob myself. The amplifier is a member of the Kenwood KRF-V and VR …

Repairing a damaged PDF-file

Ghostscript can “repair” some damaged or buggy PDF-files, by regenerating them. Try something like:

ps2pdf damaged.pdf fixed.pdf

Believe it or not but ps2pdf will happily accept PDF as input, and from it create a new PDF… You can use all the usual Ghostscript options. If you don’t specify any, default values will be used to generate the output PDF. But for instance, if you’re generating a high-quality PDF for printing, try:

ps2pdf -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress damaged.pdf fixed.pdf

This is needed to fix PDF files generated by OpenOffice.org 3.2.1, which have invalid xref entries (bug #615812). These PDF files can be viewed in Ubuntu and MacOS X, but cannot be printed in the Windows version of Adobe Reader.

Alternatively, you can use …

There are at least three ways to do this in Ubuntu. You will need the packages ghostscript (for all methods, but installed by default) and pdftk (for method 2), and optionally a Java Runtime Environment (for method 3).

Method 1: ps2pdf

The ps2pdf script that comes with Ghostscript is meant to convert PostScript to PDF, but it will happily take PDF-files as input. Just try: ps2pdf input.pdf output.pdf

You can add GhostScript options to control the PDF-output. To get smaller files you can try adding one of the preset-options: -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook or -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen

For more advanced settings: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Ps2pdf.htm

Note that the screen preset converts all images to sRGB and converts to PDF 1.3 which does not support all types of …

Older versions of Ubuntu (before 8.04) used to have a built-in font-manager that could be reached by browsing font:/// in the file-manager. However, when Gnome upgraded to their new gvfs in 2008, their font manager and viewer both stopped working. In current Ubuntu-versions, at least the built-in font viewer (gnome-font-viewer) does work again. However the lack of a Gnome font-manager still leaves Ubuntu without proper font management out of the box, which is kind of annoying. Luckily in recent Ubuntu versions you can install the fontmatrix package, which gives you the excellent Fontmatrix font manager.

But even without Fontmatrix, it’s really not that hard to install fonts in Ubuntu. All the hard work is handled behind the scenes by Defoma, the somewhat invisible Debian Font Manager.

Of course Ubuntu comes with …