It's no big secret that HMV is a struggling retailer. It's suffering from the double-whammy of a declining high street caused by the economic situation and a declining market for music on physical media.

HMV is for many towns, the last place the consumers can visit in the high street to buy music. The other big names have gone - Our Price, Virgin (later Zavvi), Woolworths - and independents stores are in decline leaving many towns with none. Sadly I wonder if in five or ten years time this last bastion will also loose its physical presence.

Despite the obvious impact that the above points must be making on the business, I wonder though if HMV are doing themselves any favours. It seems that with each passing year, the amount of space given to the humble CD is declining, being taken over firstly by DVDs, Blurays and Games and most recently by technology. Not only that, the stock on offer has some very interesting pricing options.

The trouble with the pricing is that it's impossible to go in to the store with a budget and a list of albums. Each disc being priced differently (ranging from £7 to £15 or more - excluding sales) makes it impossible to know beforehand exactly how much will be spent. Indeed, it encourages price checking - if I see a disc that I want on offer at, say £12, I will be checking Amazon to see if it can be had for significantly less. Looking at a DVD set of the television series 'Black Books' today, I saw it available in store for £30. Amazon will sell me the same for £17.99! Much as I enjoy browsing a shop, I'm not putting myself out of pocket by an additional £12.

Of course, the price only comes in to play if what the customer wants is available. So often I go into the store with a list of albums in mind only to find that not one of them is stocked. Sometimes I can check a few stores if I'm traveling around but I find the situation the same everywhere. Although a physical store cannot stock everything, the problem is exacerbated by the diminishing range of CDs and although the sale of physical albums has fallen significantly thanks to downloading, it is by no means dead yet.

As for technology, whilst I understand HMV branching out into this area and in particular digital music players, headphones etc., I find it bizarre that they also see fit to stock tablet computers of various makes and models. The technology corner is starting to look like a section of Comet more than a music store and HMV certainly isn't the first place I'd think of to buy such equipment. If their opinion is to sell these devices because they can play music, well I wouldn't be surprised to see full computers making an appearance and perhaps a range of mobile phones too!

I understand the need for the business to diversify but I think it may be going too far. I find that as a music customer the store is not catering for my needs and there are plenty of times when I walk out empty handed. I think they should re-think the deminishing stock of CD albums, better focus the technology section, and bring in standardised pricing. All of this would encourage me to visit the store more often, spending my hard-earned cash which as a business is surely the most important thing.

The Linux command line makes the task of making a DVD-Video compliant disc fairly straight forward when one knows how, but finding straight forward instructions on the internet isn't always so simple. So after searching through various sites I've come up with my own guide.

1. Create a folder on a hard disc with ample storage space (15GB should be plenty for one 4.7GB DVD). Make sure this is easily accessible from the command prompt (keep the name short for ease of typing). For this example, I'm going to place a folder on the desktop called "dvd".
2. Copy the video files that you wish to place on the DVD into this new folder.
3. If you haven't already, call up the Terminal (Applications - Accessories - Terminal in Ubuntu).
4. Ensure tovid, mencoder and dvdauthor are both installed
   

   sudo apt-get install tovid mencoder dvdauthor

5. Navigate to the new folder containing your videos
   

   cd ~/Desktop/dvd

6. Use tovid to convert videos to DVD compliant MPG files
   

   tovid -noask -dvd -in myvideo.avi -out myvideo.mpg

   
   Repeat this for each video file
7. Use dvdauthor to convert the newly created MPG files to DVD format files
   

   dvdauthor -o DVD/ -t myvideo.mpg

   
   Repeat this for each video file. Each file will become a title on the DVD.
8. Run the following command to create the titles:
   

   dvdauthor -o DVD/ -T

9. Create an ISO of the DVD, ready to be burnt to disc:
   

   mkisofs -dvd-video -v -o DVD.iso DVD

10. A file called DVD.iso will now be found in the folder created earlier. Use a CD/DVD burning package such as K3B or Brasero to burn this image to a disc.
11. The DVD should now be playable on a standalone player

A little entry from my iPaq.

I've learnt today that one of my favourite cartoon kids programmes that I used to watch on CITV in the first half of the 90's is coming out on DVD in March.

It's none other than The Dreamstone, which will take proud position next to my Danger Mouse DVD!