server/unix upgrades

did dist-upgrades to the servers, the main problem is that they have the lvm filesystems and for some reason do not want to mount the boot directories, which makes the grub install part unhappy.

upgrading the wiki from 1.10 to 1.13, thinking about adding the semantic wiki extension.
Semantic wiki seems ok.

installed mathematica the other day, it seemed to go ok.

More video options

This is what I used last time, and it brought the ~110 MB ogg file to ~58 MB avi file.

I'm not sure how much use each of the video options are, but the output quality seemed fine.

mencoder out.ogg -o ajax_intro.avi -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=-50000:bf_threshold=200:curve_compression_high=90:max_key_interval=500 -af volume=30 -lameopts mode=3:highpassfreq=0:lowpassfreq=0 -ofps 15

Videos

In order to compensate for a soft/quiet recording audio volume I used the -af volume=25 flag to add 25 decibels.

I haven't screened the output yet (it is only at 3%, about 30 minutes to go), but I'll update with anything interesting.

mencoder out.ogg -o mvc_catalyst.flv -of lavf -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=192 -af lavcresample=22050 -srate 22050 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=2000:autoaspect:mbd=2:trell:v4mv -af volume=25

update:
audio was a little quiet, so I'll up it to 30, and there was no space saved to speak of, so I'm trying
mencoder out.ogg -o mvc_catalyst.avi -ovc xvid -oac mp3lame -xvidencopts pass=2:bitrate=-30000 -af volume=30

I'll see how the quality is...