Well, today I have a pretty long TODO list that I’d like to accomplish, although at the top of my list was also to watch Ice Age 2, while relaxing on the couch, that would probably stop me from finishing any other entry on that list… so I’ll remove that one for now. After all yesterday I as lucky, and tired, enough to watch Pirates of the Carribean (which was, by the way, a quite good movie, especially for someone like me so fascinated with swords of all kinds, thanks Alberto for «forcing» me to watch it 😉 ).
I also tried to get pan (not PAM this time) to compile on Gentoo/FreeBSD, but after fixing enchant, I found myself stuck with gmime, as that needs a patch too but I’m not sure how to handle it yet (there’s an extra _POSIX_SOURCE that breaks on FreeBSD). I’ll fix this later on today.
Also Bruce M Simpson from FreeBSD contacted me about the nss-mdns port, so I’ve resumed looking for it, I’ll tonight if I can apply what I found today in the sources to get it working somehow. I don’t think it’s too difficult, it’s just scarcely documented.
But in this whole lot of stuff to do, I was hoping to relax by listening to some music.. something I wanted to try, was to rip the 5.1 tracks out of the Rhapsody’s Live in Canada 2005 to compress to WavPack so that I could listen to it through Amarok (one of the reasons I had was also to test the WavPack 5.1 support in xine/ffmpeg and the ability for PulseAudio to play 5.1 files from xine). Unfortunately, even if there are tricks with mencoder to dump the audio of a track through mplayer to an ac3 file (no way to get it through a GUI it seems), I can’t find a way to pass it to wavpack, as both ffmpeg and a52dec produce a stereo wav file, rather than a multichannel one, and WavPack does not work with AC3. I suppose my best bet would be to code myself a bridge between the two, but I don’t have enough time. Sigh.
I managed to extract a 6-channel PCM WAV file from an AC3 audio track in a dvd vob once (the dvd side of Weird Al Yankovic’s Straight Outta Lynwood) — I used something (I think ffmpeg) to copy out the raw ac3 track from the vob (mplayer/mencoder choke on the still images used on the disc) Then I used
mplayer -ao pcm:fast -channels 6to convert the ac3 file to wav. I did have to use a wave editor to split the tracks apart thoughas a clarification, I meant songs rather than tracks in the last sentence, and since you seem to not be having problems getting mplayer to play your disc, the ac3 extraction step shouldn’t be necessary —
mplayer dvd://[<title>] [-chapter <start>[-<end>]] -vo null -vc null -ao pcm:fast:[file=<filename>] -channels 6should work just fine