Hacker's Diary

A rough account of what I did with Emacs recently.

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.
October 12: DVD Ripping: I think I've ripped all the movies that can be ripped at this point, now looking at the ones that don't want to be ripped by ffmpeg to see if I can figure out why.

October 11: I'd noticed an increase in junk mail but didn't get around to investigating until this weekend. Turns out spamd got killed off in early September. Interestingly it seems greylisting did a good job of keeping the server from getting completely flooded with junk.
October 10: Did I mention Slow Horses is back? Slow Horses is back. It's good.
October 9: We have mostly wrapped Season 1 of Voyager, since the next episode is a two-parter which spans S1 and S2. It feels like it's mostly a retread of a lot of the themes of TNG, except that Janeway treats the prime directive as, to quote a certain pirate, "more of a guideline".
October 8: Voyager: the Tuvix episode was deeply silly on so many levels.
October 7: Found a few discs that contained TV content (i.e. episodes) that I'd ripped as movies. Ooops.
October 6: Ripping: working my way through the discs I'd marked as skippable and separating them into "yes" (Bonus discs) or "no" (marked skippable to avoid dealing with it),
October 5: Having fought my way past some combination of DVD weirdness to deal with either a bad disc or some funky copy protection, and fixed the stupid writing-to-db bug (I'd cleverly included some writing code in an if statement that was excluding it from executing, which was a form of caching, which my long-ago colleague Brian taught me always to be wary of...) I am now encountering another DVD rip with issues. This one definitely looks like I may have to poke around in mplayer to see how mplayer handles it and why ffmpeg can't do the same.

IMDb seems to have broken the "reference view" (movie url/reference) which I had set as a preference and as a default landing link from this page. The "fullcredits" page is a poor substitute but will do for now. And thanks to some previous scripting work updating my entire 25-year-old nerd diary took seconds.

October 4: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine continues to be fun. It's a shame that the broadcast quality is a bit naff, but I find I made a note here years ago that our digibox appears to upscale SD to HD in a less-than-brilliant fashion and maybe that's what we're seeing, or maybe it really was recorded on a pile of VHS tapes and allowed to degrade.

Yesterday's local activity featured a protest which included ~~Riot~~ Public Order police and "incapacitating spray" (pepper spray to you and me). Observed rather than engaged in.
October 3: Very curious. For some reason my attempts to write data back to a SQLite database are not working, but are also not producing errors.

This is part of the DVD ripping stuff. Yes. A database.
October 2: Ok, boring but functional: sort the titles by decreasing length, then rip the first title, check for discontinuities, if it fails throw it away and move on to the next, repeat until a successful rip is obtained. I should probably have a bit more validation but we'll see how well this does - it successfully got one of the discs that wasn't working into the ripping hopper.
October 1: Jiggled the DVD ripping thing to find the title with the most chapters. It worked. Except that picked up a making-of/extra that had more chapters than the movie on the same disc. Trying now with "longest title" but I can already see that's going to hit a number of identical-length titles and I'm not sure which is the one I want.

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