Concert DVDs are cool. But who has time to sit in front of a screen watching some pillocks prance around a stage. So I've taken to ripping the audio and playing that instead. There's an excellent guide over on Afonic on how to do this, almost for free.

The only issue is in step seven where you're asked to enter the “cue” points to split the tracks up. If you have to do this by hand, it's rather tedious. Fortunately, there's a way around it. Back in step two, if you add a tick to create “Chapter Information - OGG” a file will be written in the same dir as the extracted AC3 file which contains the times in the sample where each chapter starts - for all the stuff I've ripped so far, these have matched the tracks played.

Using the file you could enter the times one-by-one into Goldwave's Cue List. But this is also tedious... so I wrote a quick and dirty version to convert the chapter info into a cue file which can be loaded into Goldwave to automatically set the cue points. You still need to enter track names (I recommend using 01_Song_Name to speed things along), but that's not too bad. See the Read more section for the perl source. If you've not already installed it on Windows, you'll need ActiveState's Perl for Windows to run it.

With perl installed, and once you've extracted your AC3 file, kick up a DOS session and CD to the directory where the AC3 file is and run the script with the name of the AC3 file and the name of the chapter information file as arguments. For example, here's the one I just did for KMFDM's WWIII Tour 2003 DVD.

F:\WW3_TOUR\VIDEO_TS>perl c:\bin\chapter2cue.pl “VTS_02_1 - 0x80 - Audio - AC3 - 2ch - 48kHz - DRC - DELAY -280ms.AC3” “VTS_02 - Chapter Information - OGG.txt”

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I'm running a dual-monitor setup at the moment. By judicious use of Cygwin/X I've arranged it so that the right monitor is mainly occupied by a full screen Gnome Session over SSH from my Fedora box. It's possible to get the session full screen, but since it involves fiddling with the main taskbar (the session always pops on the main screen, so is initially constrained by the taskbar and doesn't resize when forced onto the second monitor - but you can shrink the taskbar then start Cygwin/X) I'm filling the gap with the trial version of UltaMon - though there's a displeasing gap between the fake taskbar and the bottom of the X-session. Best thing about this setup is the ease of passing clipboard data between the two systems.

The CoH Wiki and this site are now running under mod_rewrite URLs. It's quite a powerful feature in Apache but I don't think I've found a single example or guide which actually had a working example. As for trying to debug what's going wrong... well, I though JavaScript had poor debugging - but mod_rewrite doesn't seem to have any at all. There's supposedly a log file you can tell it to write to and a log level to set, but despite setting the level to the highest, I got nothing output to the file (though it was created).

Here's a very simple Plugin for Nucleus which allows you to automatically link words or phrases to Wikipedia using the standard Wikipedia double-square bracketing (ie “[[Word or Phrase]]” .

Update 2005-02-25: Version 0.2. Removes some extraneous code and now correctly works in the extended section.

Update 2005-10-30: Version 0.3. Re-written the replacement code and added coping with [[Actual Entry|Text to Display]] tags.

Grab the source.