System Administration
Ripping a DVD
Two-pass encoding:
mencoder -dvd 2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1 -oac copy -o movie.avi
mencoder -dvd 2 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2 -oac copy -o movie.avi
Burning a CD from an ISO file
Note that you can use bchunk to convert from .bin and .cue files to .iso, but for some types of data (Playstation 2 games) this results in a bad burn.
This used to be really fiddly on Linux because you had to set up IDE-SCSI, and Linux support for SCSI emulation for IDE blows. Fortunately Debian has dropped support for cdrecord and now includes wodim, which seems not to require IDE-SCSI... and anyway, it's now very easy to burn an ISO:
wodim -v -dev=/dev/hdc filename.iso
Burning a CD from a .cue
Once again, made relatively simple with wodim.
wodim -v -dev=/dev/hdc -dao -cuefile filename.cue
Burning a DVD
From a directory:
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/dvd -J -V title_of_dvd -R /path/to/disc/root
From an iso:
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/hdc=some.iso
Download all files of a named type from a Web site
wget -r -l1 -H -t1 -nd -N -np -A.extension -erobots=off http://site
Re-encode .wma to .mp3
Requires mplayer and lame. It is of course very evil because when you re-encode you ride with Satan -- or, at the very least, compound the encoding errors. The solution is to kill anyone who encodes anything as wma.
for i in *.wma; do mplayer -ao pcm:file=out.wav "$i"; newfile=`basename "$i" .wma`.mp3; echo $i $newfile; lame out.wav "$newfile"; done