Nice script, but two things..

First, ffmpeg's deinterlacer kinda sucks. Especially if you're working with NTSC broadcast (60000/1001fps) content, because really you want to be doing a pullup. Since in your example you're using 24000/1001, I guess it's progressive content. In that case, do you really need to deinterlace at all? If you do, you might be interested in the "top" parameter (see the manpage) for setting which field is first in interlaced content; usually it won't be necessary, but it's nice to have the ability. Just throw "-top -1" somewhere in there so it'll always autodetect, or if you want to get fancy, leverage ffprobe to tell you which field is first; I think you can do that with 'ffprobe -show_streams'.

Second, I find a crf of 18 to 20 to be ideal for DVD content, particularly fast motion. Higher values tend to *just barely* starve the encoder of data during high/fast motion; it's more noticeable on a scaled-up display IMO.

What are the opinions of other ffmpeg+x264 users out there?

With regards to moderation, it seems in the past 6 to 12 months, suddenly the same people not only keep getting mod points, but they get 10-20 of them at a time! When your "average" moderator only gets 5 points roughly once every two months, it's easy to see what has happened lately to moderation. As for me? I guess I pissed off slashcode a while back when tagging was still new, and one day a bunch of people (myself included) gave every story a "dontmebro" tag. dont-agw-mebro would be perfect for this one!

Want a fun sandbox experience with U8? Google u8cheat.exe. There were so many cheating and debugging options in that game you could set up just about anything, sandbox-style. I used to have more fun playing around with the cheats than I did with the actual game.

Now, how about a collision? Let's see what other "sentences" can end up at the same md5sum :)

While the rate is overall less, the means is what really matters. All of the suicides (afaik) have been jumps from a building. Jumping off a building makes a very bold, very public statement. Plus, it guarantees the jumper's family something like 110,000 yuan; that's over $16k in US! To the worker making less than $1k/month, that's a big chunk of change to "give" to your family. It's very sad, and it's good to see someone (Apple) at least making some effort toward the positive. No one should feel like they have to choose suicide.

In a nutshell, here's the difference between civil cases and criminal cases in the US. In a civil case, it is considered to be a person (or party/parties) versus another person and/or parties. This is your typical lawsuit case. In a criminal case, law enforcement seeks to bring criminal charges against a person or persons. The police collect the evidence, detectives process, and typically the district attorney (DA) will actually bring the charges up on behalf of the State.

So long story short, while stealing is indeed a criminal offense, you'll never find a DA willing to take that case, for the flimsy evidence reasons listed all over slashdot anytime stuff like this comes up. As a result, the only option left for a company or corporation like this is a civil trial, via their lawyers.

There's more to it, like how winning in a civil trial is much easier to do generally. For a good example, see the criminal and civil trials of OJ Simpson. In the criminal trial he was found not guilty, but in the civil trial he was found "liable", and had a judgment levied against him by the families of the two murder victims.

Interestingly, the maiden name has lost its value in recent times. It used to be that the moment a woman got married, her maiden name all but vanished; these days, it seems the younger married woman prefers to use her maiden name as a new middle name.

The maiden name was always a goofy "security" thing anyway; long before the internet, a little social engineering is all it took to glean a maiden name.

Ugh, no kidding. That's one of my biggest language pet peeves. (sig related)

Yes, there are open tools, but at the end of the day Adobe still controls the future direction of Flash as a format, platform, whatever. In the end though, all this Adobe/Apple stuff looks like two 500-lb gorrillas trying to piss all over each other, and customers may end up feeling it the worst.
 
Yet another part of me wants to say "You kids get off my damned lawn, I've hated Flash since it was owned by Macromedia!" :)

etc-update? I moved on to dispatch-conf a number of years ago, and thought everyone else did too. etc-update is a pain in the ass, and always has been.

 
It all comes down to update-grub on ubuntu. For reasons I don't know, the initial installation does not detect ANY other partitions -- Linux, Win, OS/2, whatever. Immediately after running update-grub as root, grub will detect partitions properly and add them to grub.conf (or whatever ubuntu uses). The Ubuntu team initially was going to rely on a zero-day kernel update -- which would force update-grub to run -- as a workaround for this problem, but they then decided to respin some (not all) ISOs.

FWIW, I think you should also include 2010. We are about to be 5 months into 2010, and we've had 30 deaths in ONE MINE ALONE so far this year (one more person died in the hospital several days ago relating to the UBB mine). Also, the day before Obama's UBB mine worker eulogy, a mine worker in a different mine in WV was crushed to death. So there's 31 deaths inside of one month's time for mining coal, in WV alone, for 2010.

Phew... now you've taken me back. I remember upping my 486/33 from 4M RAM to 8M so I could properly play Lands of Lore : The Throne of Chaos. It's funny to look back now; games truly drove all the upgrades back then. And as you said, when 3DFX and OpenGL hit? It was a whole new level. Now our machines are more capable, but are often less fun to use.

Yeah, me too. Your post brought back some nice memories for me, of the days when squeezing 150MHz actually mattered. 'Holy crap, Carmageddon runs GREAT now!'