Running after Logout

I've had different levels of success with this. If you just place a command in the background with bg, it will still die after logout. Sometimes 'nohup' works, but I'm not sure when or why. It probably has something to do with display type or somthing.

The reason I'm so interested in this is that I often issue 'wget' commands from my laptop that transfer large amounts of data between two remote computers. This was where I got most of my help.

I used "screen", but I didn't do everything smoothly, which probably isn't smart. Screen opened up a different looking terminal in the shell, from which I issued the command. I couldn't get out of the window, so I just clicked "close" on my laptop. After logging back in, I saw that the command continued to run. I'm sure there's a more graceful way to do this, using some screen commands, etc.

Mplayer/Mencoder

I like movies and music a lot. Mplayer is my tool of choice here. It's open source, supports many video formats, and has an endless array of options for playback. It's pretty easy to install too. I don't remember if it was automatic the last time I did it, or if I had to resolve dependencies, etc. That's one reason why I started this blog, so I don't HAVE to remember.

Oh yeah, I used yum to get mplayer and mencoder. I think it went to the freshpms repository:
yum -install mplayer
I had to do mplayer and mencoder separately. I don't know if they are supposed to come bundled together, but they didn't this time.

Anyways, I'm using 'mencoder' to copy DVD with video in VOB format, whatever the hell that is. I started here and branched out. I have 4 files of about 1.08 GB each. I ran the following:

mencoder -oac pcm -ovc x264 VTS_01_1.VOB -o VTS_01_1.mpg
-o: output file name
-ovc: output video
-oac: output audio
I think it identifies the output time by the extension you give it.