For a couple of years there have been a number of great open-source programs around for encoding video, both in Windows and (Ubuntu) Linux. Some of them provide a nice graphical user interface, but the best ones are still commandline tools, such as ffmpeg and MEncoder. They are extremely flexible …

A few weeks ago I started teaching a mathematics-course for first-year biology students, as part of a larger three-month Systems Biology course at the University of Utrecht. A couple of years ago the university started to record a number of its lectures, which were then made available online for students …

One of the drawbacks of a monolithic kernel is that you're often stuck with outdated drivers that don't work for your hardware. Even if a fix is available upstream, there's no easy way to update just a single driver. Luckily, LinuxTV now at least offers a script to automatically recompile …

How to merge/join/combine/concatenate multiple video files

Say you have a collection of short video clips made with a telephone or digital camera, and you want to join them into a single video file. How can you do this without having to re-encode everything?

In Ubuntu Linux:

What …

Last year I bought a cheap :ZOLID High-Speed DVD Maker at Aldi. Of course it was only packaged with Windows software, so I spent some time researching how to get the thing to work on Ubuntu Linux. It turns out that the device is sold under a number of different …

Update (2014):

In Ubuntu, DV video-capture over Firewire has basically been broken for normal users for the last 7 years or so. I've been unable to get Kino to work on Ubuntu 10.04 and onward, so I switched to dvgrab. If you run it with root-privileges (sudo dvgrab), it …

On current Ubuntu versions (Edgy Eft and higher), the remote control on SAA7134 based TV-cards is automatically recognised by the kernel, and added as an event-device to /dev/input. This means that LIRC itself is not needed anymore, which is great because it's not very easy to configure. The inputlirc …