is LWN worth it?

I pay 54 USD a year for access to LWN.  I have never doubted that it is worth it -- Jon Corbet is the best.

But there are times when it feels as if $54 is a bit low, for what we are getting, and if I were living in the US I'd probably up my subscription :-)

Consider this masterpiece from http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/261820/ba3e6e870fa9a1c5/ , where he is working on getting home videos from an old video camera onto the computer:

Another possibility was mencoder, a tool which is packaged with mplayer. Your editor does not doubt that mencoder is capable of acquiring a video stream from this device, converting it into any format one could imagine, and, while it's at it, changing the camera angle and improving the musical talents of the children being filmed. But anybody who has read the mplayer/mencoder man page knows that it is a masterpiece of its kind - a work written to a length that less verbose authors (Neal Stephenson, say) could only dream about - though Stephenson does do a better job of keeping the plot moving.