Go Go Geekboy » AVI

Day 26 – Ubuntu Vidcast Woes and What Next?

VooDooStevie — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 13:55:14 +0000

One thing I learned today is that there is just some formats that the ipod cannot read. I synced up all the podcasts and the Ubuntu Podcast shows on my iPod however the video does not play what so ever! How is that possible that it transfers it over, but won’t play the friggen thing. I will have to look into the file format to figure this out. But there are other things afoot right now.

I am now trying to think of what I should remove or tweak next. I find it funny that with all the programs and files I have on the system now it’s only 20GB used and a large portion of that is the documents and files I have in my home folder Can we say Bloatware?

I am looking back on the things I have been doing through this experiment and it pleases me to see I am able to do a lot of things I was able to do under Windows just fine.

Netflix REALLY needs to get on the ball with the instant streaming stuff because this is a pain in the nuts having it be Silverlight 2.0 only. That is primarily one of the only things I miss so far.

Speaking of streaming I need to think about finding info about how to get my DirecTV DVR and this machine to talk so I can stream movies or pictures. I got it going under windows before. I also will have to hard-wire the laptop so I can get a decent connection for that as well.

It would be awesome to be able to stream videos off of the lappy because I have a ton of AVI’s I backed up onto DVD-R’s that I could easily copy onto the hard drive to play better. Maybe I will do this later today.. Or start that.

Day 13 – Rip, Transcode, Warzone!

VooDooStevie — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 12:33:40 +0000

We last left off with ripping a DVD using dvd::rip. It really took it about an hour to rip it from the CD to my Hard drive. But it only rips the files into VOB format. In order to play on another machine or for me to burn the movie onto a DVD I need it to be encoded into an AVI file, so I transcoded the video within dvd::rip. After about 2 hours of doing that, I had a perfect 1.5GB AVI (it was a 2 1/2 hour movie so it was expected).

The issue I had with ripping movies in the past is the sound didn’t sync with the video. It was like watching an old Kung Fu movie but more annoying for the audio. You”d hear a bang and then see it 5 seconds later. Not good.

I looked around for some more games to play. I downloaded a RTS game called Warzone 2100. Here’s a blip from the developer:

Warzone 2100 is a real-time strategy game, originally developed by Pumpkin Studios and published by Eidos Interactive, now developed by the Warzone 2100 Project. Compared to other real-time strategy games, it has a greater focus on artillery, radar, and counter-battery technologies, more frequent in-game cinematic updates as game play progresses, a massive research tree, as well as a vehicle design system.

Now the only way to install this under Linux is to compile it so I have to do that… Later.

There is a windows based client so I can play with you Windows folks if you wanna.

So not too much done today, I had to look at a co-worker’s home computer for him. They were getting a lot of poor performance on their machine. Hrm WinXP and only 512MB of Ram?! BAD!

I post these the day after I do them. In other words, all this that I am posting here on Thursday was actually done on Wednesday. In case you hadn’t figured it all out yet. Oh and today (Thursday 8/13) is my birthday. I don’t know what I will be able to do when I get out of work so Day 14 will be real short.

Day 7 – Rip It, Rip It Goo… Nevermind.

VooDooStevie — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 14:02:27 +0000

Today was an interesting day. I was off from work to get my license renewed but after I was able to sit and play around with a few things.

I downloaded a game called PlaneShift which is a free MMORPG. Not as good as Rapellz… Man I am missing that game. I should just install it on the Windows machine to play it. But I digress…

I said I wanted to Rip and Burn DVD’s as one of my points of usage for a computer, so I played with that. However I ran into some issues.

Stupid me forgot to get the package to read encrypted DVD’s (which is basically EVERY movie DVD out there) so I had to install it. If you are trying to watch movies, do this:

Install the libdvdnav4, libdvdread4, gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad and gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly packages.
If you would like to play encrypted DVDs, press Applications → Accessories → Terminal and type the following into the screen which appears, followed by the Enter key:
sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh
Enter your password if prompted. The libdvdcss2 package will be downloaded and installed from a website.
Insert a DVD into your drive. It should open automatically in the Movie Player.

Now that should work. I realized I didn’t do this when I tried using DVD95 to rip my DVD and it wasn’t reading ANY of the disks I was putting in.

After I took that step. I was able to Rip the DVD to an ISO for a 4.7GB DVD with no problems. Then I burned the DVD and it played fine on the PS2 I have, but on our normal DVD player it was kind of iffy. Oh well, guess I will have to try a different approach later on. But I got the menus and everything which was kind of cool.

Time-wise it wasn’t that long compared to ripping it as a movie file (an Xvid AVI for example), but using DVD95 you really lose a lot of quality when converting to the lower size DVD so Ripper Beware!

Day 3 – Not a whole hell of a lot played with today.

VooDooStevie — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:20:21 +0000

Well here we are on the third day and basically I just attempted to burn a DVD from a DivX based AVI using DVDStyler. Burning took about an hour all together which isn’t too bad. However, the audio and video lot sync. DAMMIT!

After that fail, decided to play around with the screenlets and AWN some more.

Opened up Audacity and made a quick opening sound for my next show (which I need to work on). I was able to recreate and improve on the walkie talkie sounding thing that you hear in the opening. Originally that is made with Audition’s Multiband Compressor Filter but seeing I am not using Audition anymore, I have to take more steps. Annoying to some extent, but the outcome I think is AWESOME.

I also played a little with torrents which work fine… Yo Ho!

Nothing much today, maybe more later on. But I so far have not returned to Windows.

I think I need to try out Banshee to see how well it handles podcasts. gPodder works, but just trying out some other things to see what feels better. Banshee was recommended as an iTunes replacement. We shall see.