bash redirection

[Craig White]

I am so weak on shell scripting - and I do try and I wear out the info
pages (way too many on bash)...

how do I redirect output to input...

I am trying to pipe output of mplayer into ffmpeg and I can't get my
head around it since ffmpeg needs an input file...

ffmpeg -i some_file_somewhere outputfile_somewhere 
(or off the X11 display which doesn't seem useful at all.)

ideally, I would like to do something like this...

mplayer dvd://$TITLE -chapter "$X-$X" -dumpstream -dumpfile
"$X-$NAME.vob" | \
ffmpeg -i "$X-$NAME.vob" -s 360x240 -ab 128 "$X-$NAME.mp4"

but even better, I would love to not write the intermediate.vob file at
all.

I just want to rip my music DVD's to my iPod (by the way...the 360x240
at 128 bps audio from high quality DVD gives really great quality iPod
video/audio for a very small footprint).

bones?

Craig