UB Yesterday

Yesterday's UB was excellent. It was a contemplative prayer service based somewhat on the Taize tradition. We sang a few songs (1 2 3) repetitively and had some prayer, responsive readings, and silence. The songs were very simple, and yet at the same time very deep and reverent. It was really nice to see the combination of the simple and yet profound, not like "La la la, I love Jesus."

Come and fill our hearts with your peace. You alone O Lord are holy. Come and fill our hearts with your peace. Alleluia.

In the Lord I'll be ever thankful, in the Lord, I will rejoice! Look to God, do not be afraid; lift up your voices, the Lord is near. Lift up your voices, the Lord is near.

The Lord is my light, my light and salvation; in God I trust, in God I trust.

Since that seems to be an indication of good things yet to come, I've decided to start recording the UB sessions. Here is my shell script:

#!/bin/bash
echo GetUB Script Go! Run Script Run!
cd /home/Justin/mplayer
echo Beginning capture
./mplayer -quiet -noframedrop -dumpfile ./UB`date --iso-8601`.rm -dumpstream rtsp://a1707.l1271037706.c12710.n.lr.akamaistream.net/live/D/1707/12710/v0001/reflector:37706 &
JOB=$!
bash -c "sleep 2700 ; kill $JOB && echo Capture timeout" &
wait $JOB
echo Capture complete
echo Beginning First Layer encoding
./mencoder -quiet -ffourcc DX50 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=1 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=32 -o ./UB`date --iso-8601`.avi ./UB`date --iso-8601`.rm
echo Beginning Second Layer encoding
./mencoder -quiet -ffourcc DX50 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vpass=2 -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=32 -o ./UB`date --iso-8601`.avi ./UB`date --iso-8601`.rm
echo Moving new file
mv UB`date --iso-8601`.avi ~/Desktop/University\ Bible/
echo All done!

The script is run by Windows Task Scheduler in Cygwin every Tue and Thur at 9:28, and seems to be working, but for some reason the sound tends to get scrambled after a while. It's not as prominent when playing the original .rm through mplayer, but after encoding it's horrible on any player. Oh well. Luckily, it usually doesn't happen till about 35 minutes into the recording.