Entries tagged with “backups” from Garbage In, Garbage Out

Thanks to the hints at http://www.perturb.org/content/dvd2mp3-2.html, I now have a sane way to handle copying the audio soundtracks from a DVD, and saving them as mp3 for use on our ipods.

Needed tools:

LAME encoder
MPlayer OSX to decode a DVD

From the mencoder package, I found (using the unix underpinnings of OSX) the actual mplayer executable, and put that in my path. LAME, I compiled and installed.

jfesler-g5:~/$ mkfifo soundpipe
jfesler-g5:~/$ ~/bin/mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -aofile ~/soundpipe -vc dummy dvd://2 -dvd-device /dev/rdisk3

In another window..

jfesler-g5:~/$ lame -b 128 soundpipe audio.mp3

My next experiments will hopefully be to extract one chapter at a time, so that I don't end up with a single 2 hour mp3.

http://gigo.com/ftp/pub/src/mksnapshot-0.4.tar.gz

Make efficient snapshots of a directory to another location, using hardlinks to the previous backup when appropriate. Sorta like netapp .snapshots. Now works on (at least) FreeBSD, Solaris, Linux. Needs to be tested elsewhere.

This is similiar, but not, to the various rsync snapshot methods out there now. rsync benefits: someone else maintains the code. rsync downside: it scans your source and dest (entirely) before starting the job, which can be _very_ costly. rsync benefit: can operate across multiple hosts (my tool can't).