Setting up MySQL

This blog entry describes my attempts to set up mySQL on my Linux machine. First, download the source tarball from http://dev.mysql/downloads. Uncompress and de-tar. It is built in the standard way, i.e. configure; make; make install. There are quite a few dependencies etc so it takes a while for the configure to run. There are loads of files to compile to it takes quite a while to make.

Movie file formats

Movie clips in AVI form tend be unplayable in DVD players even when the play has been multi-regioned. So there needs to be a way to convert these files to MPGs. Googling for AVI to MPG converters gives loads of hits but these hits turn out to be mostly dead-ends. This blog entry is about my discoveries into getting a working AVI to MPG converter. The hits from google tend to be references to shareware for Windoze. I tried one of these in desperation and although it initially seemed to work I later realised that the MPG was truncated to the first hour of the film. It also took AGES to run (I left it converting overnight). I looked for open source solutions and these seem to be very thin on the ground. I came across ffmpeg (http://www.ffmeg.org) but the last official source release fails to compile with the latest GNU compiler. The latest CVS snapshot also did not work properly when I ran it on Linux. It consumed more and more memory and CPU until eventually all the machine was doing was swapping. I then tried building the last official release on cygwin and amazingly, this works! Not only does it work but the command is quite quick as well. To convert fred.avi to fred.mpg the command to use is: ffmpeg -i fred.avi -target vcd fred.mpg