My brother mocked my use of ffmpeg to create flash video as I did a couple of days ago. He sent me this set of command line options for the Swiss Army knife of video encoders: mencoder. I went ahead and encoded the classic civil defense film “Duck and Cover”, and then used the flvtool2 to add indexing.

Here is the result:

Here is a little shell script that shows the options. I used mencoder as installed fresh from a new Fiesty Fawn Ubuntu installation. If you install rubygems, you can then type “sudo gem install flvtool2” to get flvtool2 installed (it is in /var/lib/gems/1.8/bin/flvtool2, which is not in my path, but it’s there), and it seems to work well too.

Anyway, Kevin wanted me to test it, and it seems to work.

I dropped in at work over the weekend (we are in the final death throes of production on Ratatouille, so I’m basically doing 7 days a week for the next couple of weeks) and noticed that the traffic along 80 was pretty bad. I didn’t think too much of it, but apparently the cause was a collapsed overpass very near Pixar. A tanker truck apparently exploded and burned on one of the overpasses, and the deck above it collapsed. It’s quite the mess, and will likely take months to fix. I went over to an adjacent overpass and took this photo. It’s ugly. Really ugly.