waider dot i e

October 26: A new Moxy hotel opened near to us recently so we figured we'd go sample their cocktails given it's a long weekend and therefore not a school night. Bleh. Expensive and terrible.

All DVD records now restored so back to the conundrum of what to do with the DVDs that aren't ripping properly.
October 25: Directing things at Poolbeg Parkrun again. Whee!
October 24: Slowly rebuilding the trashed records. Dammit.

Slow Horses: still excellent. Shame about the short seasons, mind you.
October 23: Trying to update one record to remove an error and ... updated all of them. Oops. And while I've done spot backups of the database before code changes in the past, of course I didn't do one this time. It should be possible to reconstruct the missing data in any case, and possibly the script already does that, but annoying nonetheless.
October 22: Ok, so I have five "movie" discs that need remedial work, and have not yet considered the non-movie discs. Debating wheter I want to delve further into DVD structure and anatomy 101 and fix this damned bug, or just take the raw VOB files ttcat spits out and use them as the source. I've not yet checked if they produce a clean rip, mind you.
October 21: The patched version seems to be able to rip the full length of the track but my script isn't quite happy with the result, finding discontinuities in it. I wonder if this isn't the same sort of problem - expecting monotonically increasing values where the DVD spec is happy to do no such thing in the interests of frustrating copying.

Ok, that's interesting. A straightforward dump of the stream has no issues, but transcoding it throws up the discontinuity errors. I suppose that makes sense since the stream dump isn't parsing, it's just doing a bitwise copy.
October 20: Ok, some progress with the DVD ripping. It looks like there's an incorrect conditional in the DVDNAV parsing that expects a value to never go back on itself aaaand that's exactly what the bogus DVD is doing. Gonna patch the Mac version of ffmpeg and see how it gets on with my outstanding unripped movies.
October 19: Inserting (effectively) print statements to debug - or trace - ffmpeg's behaviour. Because it's not obviously erroring.
October 18: It has been another busy week, meaning getting home late and not doing much of note. Slow Horses: continues to be excellent. Deep Space Nine: a bit cheap-looking at times, but continues to entertain. Voyager: frankly silly at times, but it's fine. I will note in passing that our beloved service provider once again stiffed us on an episode, and of course it was part one of a two-parter.

I have a disc to rip here that both tccat and mplayer seem ok with, but not ffmpeg. I'm torn between debugging this, and just using the tools that work to rip it. However as previously noted, mplayer annoyingly drops metadata when I use it for this purpose and I've not figured out how to wedge it back in again. I guess I should see what tccat does instead.

Somehow I had never seen The Rainmaker; as you'd imagine for a John Grisham tale it's fairly straightforward and to be honest this isn't great art, either. Harmless, I think, would be about the strongest thing I could say about it. I did laugh out loud at some of the courtroom antics, though.
October 13: Found myself unexpectedly watching and enjoying Made of Stone, a somewhat infectious documentary about ... lifting stones.