The problem for me is that Ihad two videos with different types of audio streams. ffmpeg would join them but they would not play past the point of the join. So Iused mencoder like below and it joined the audio and made them both mp3 streams and it worked! -oac mp3lame specifies the audio to be convered into an mp3 stream using the lame codec. after the oac the two files are the ones to be joined. the -o is the name of the outp........

Based on this tutorial: http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/overlay-images-video-using-mplayer-and-mencoder mencoder -oac pcm -ovc raw -vf bmovl=0:0:tfifo -o $output $file vf_bmovl: Unknown command: ''. Ignoring. ........

mencoder -fps 30 -ss 00:00:38 -oac lavc -ovc copy 152408.mp4 -o soundedit.mp4 The -ss flag means to start at 38 seconds (so the first 38 seconds of video will be removed).........

Movie-Aspect is undefined - no prescaling applied. videocodec: libavcodec (720x1280 fourcc=34504d46 [FMP4]) [mpeg4 @ 0x2c91c00] timebase not supported by mpeg 4 standard Could not open codec. FATAL: Cannot initialize video driver. That is the error I would get, I thought it was a codec error something else. By fluke Isaw something about ffmpeg where someone recommended manually telling it to the "fps" and it worked.........

[3805108.257042] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) [3805108.257052] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off [3805108.257054] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Mode Sense: 00 3a 00 00 [3805108.257066] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write cache: enabled, read cache: enabled, doesn't support DPO or FUA [3805108.257083] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] 1953525168 512-byte hardware sectors: (1.00 TB/931 GiB) [3805108.257090] sd 0:0:0:0: [sda] Write Protect is off........

This is the most I can get when plugging in a hard drive hot and only on some power connectors. [71656.314271] ata5: exception Emask 0x50 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x90a02 action 0xe frozen [71656.314277] ata5: irq_stat 0x00400000, PHY RDY changed [71656.314285] ata5: SError: { RecovComm Persist HostInt PHYRdyChg 10B8B } [71656.314294] ata5: hard resetting link [71660.360686] ata5: softreset failed (device not ready) [71660.360694] ata5: applying........

In my case I already copied the VIDEO_TS folder to my hard drive. Here is the command for mencoder: mencoder -dvd-device "myvideobackup/VIDEO_TS" dvd:// -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=128 -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=-700000 -o myvideobackup.avi Replace "-dvd-device myvideobackup/VIDEO_TS" with the location of your backup files or the /dev device of your DVD drive. The -o myvideobackup.avi is of course the name o........

I separated the 2 drives in the RAID 1 array. 1 is the old one /dev/sda and is out of date, while the separated other one /dev/sdc was in another drive and mounted and used with more data (updated). I wonder how mdadm will handle this: usb-storage: device scan complete md: md127 stopped. md: bind md: md127: raid array is not clean -- starting background reconstruction raid1: raid set md127 active with 1 out of 2 m........

Mencoder is great, you can throw anything at it, including video files from your camera and have it encode into xvid or almost any other format. In my case I took 640x480 video from my Canon and reduced the size by 1/3 with the options below (there are many other options that you can read about in the manual but I like to keep it simple). Mencoder Encode mencoder -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts fixed_quant=4 -o ........