Squeeze, FFMPEG and MP3 Conversions

Debian Squeeze: Things have changed and there seems to be poor notice from the developers.
I still like to find my old favorite songs on YouTube and strip out the audio track to make an MP3. It’s gotten a little complicated, but I’m getting by with things. For example, I always use Chrome to watch the video, then dig around in ~/.cache/google-chrome/Default/Cache/ to find the downloaded FLV file. Mostly it’s just ls -l and find the biggest item, then run file f_0000xx on it to see if it’s what I’m hunting. Copy the thing and name it appropriately, and all is well, up that point.
Now, having made sure I got all the goodies from Debian-Multimedia according to this page, I found I could no longer use my old CLI incantations to do the magic. At first I found references to having removed the MP3 codecs. I struggled with a lot of DIY stuff and couldn’t come up with a good package. I kept getting conflicting advice and none of it was up to date or complete. I kept poking around with several search engines, then stumbled across it: the codec is no longer simply called “mp3” but “libmp3lame”. So when you do this, it comes out like so:
ffmpeg -i input.flv -vn -acodec libmp3lame output.mp3
I’m not sure why they felt this non-standard argument was a good idea, but there you have it. Of course, you can add various switches to change the bitrate and frequency, but I’ve never noticed much difference from using the defaults, but then I play my music from my laptop.
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Also, on a wild tangent, I have decided the folks steering development of Firefox are complete jerks. I now simply download the tarball for Seamonkey as is and install it manually as root:
tar -xvfj seamonkey-2.3.tar.bz2
mv ./seamonkey/ /usr/local/
Then I create a menu and desktop launcher linking to /usr/local/seamonkey/seamonkey and chase down the appropriate icon for it. Runs like a charm and pretty much updates itself, plus offers none of the crazy decisions you get from the FF folks.