DVD::RIP

My daughters are really bored with their range of DVDs so if ripping DVDs was legal I might sign up to Amazon's DVD rental for a free 2 week trial and copy some Angelina Ballerinas to my hard disk using the wonderful DVD::RIP.
DVD::RIP is a perl/tcl graphical front end to the various command line tools needed to rip, re size and transcode DVDs. It offers a lot of flexibility but is still the easiest to use of any i've tried. I think this is because it's not dumbed down. The defaults are sensible and you can pretty much click and go but the UI is very well laid out so it's easy to find the setting you need to change.
It does require a high level understanding of the process:

1. Extract the raw MPEG2 from the DVD.
2. Resize/Crop if desired
3. Transcode to MPEG4

It would be usable if you didn't understand the process, which is a shame, but once you get past that - it is very straightforward.

Missing my Linux Box

I'm sitting at the office, missing my Linux box. How sad am I?!

Had a rough experience over the weekend (I can't find the energy to play during the week). I was very interested in Beryl a 3D accelerated desktop interface (lots of nice eye candy). I didn't think things through properly and headed straight for the Nvidia site to download drivers. Big mistake -> much grief. I got it working but there were too many problems so i decided to revert.

As things went from bad to worse I was expecting to need to reinstall the system to get myself out of the many holes I'd dug but after walking away for a couple of hours I was able to sort it out and get things back to normal (with GLX/Beryl still working). For a large part of the time I had no X and didn't know where to start but after reading through various man files i was able to find enough pointers and with some more pocking around i was able to get the various packages installed to recover X and get back to normal operation.

I'm starting to understand why people get so militant and emotional about their choice of software, there is a big emotional investment in this stuff ... when things go wrong you can't help but wonder whether it's worth the effort and compare it to previous experiences. I guess this is where a bit of blind faith in the cause is needed to pull one along. The prospect of having to start with a clean system was daunting. But i think what kept me going is that it would still be quicker than building my windows box. Even now - the though of having to install windows on this box scares me: 1) will activation work? (will i even find the product key?) 2) There are so many drivers and codecs that need downloading and endless rebooting - what a pain. 3) For a few of the devices i don't even know how i got them working last time - just a lot of clicking around until they worked. 4) Windows is just an OS - it's a few hours more to get VS, Office etc up and running.

In any case, the total time to install a complete, working windows box would be much greater than with the Linux box 2Days/vs 3 hours. And in any case - I was able to recover the system and didn't need to reinstall! i learnt a few tricks about how to get on the web and list and download packages with no X GUI and next time this happens it will be easier.

Linux, doesn't feel quite as zippy as when I first brought it up. I have installed a lot of packages but I suspect the main culprit is Beagle, a desktop search tool. I have set it to index a lot of stuff, especially on my old NTFS partitions - i think it doesn't like NTFS.

Beagle is very similar to the MSN desktop search tool. Running queries is very simple and it is remarkably good at getting the right things in lightening fast speeds.

I'm not sure what to do yet about those NTFS partitions. I think Beagle has a concept of static indexes which would be ideal for those read-only NTFS partitions.

Until now, I haven't felt comfortable locking myself into a Linux partition format for anything important, but i feel ready to do so now and will be moving my main data drive to ext3. fs-driver offers good support for reading ext2/3 partitions in Windows so it's not too risky.

I'm not ready to get rid of Windows dual-boot yet though. The main problem is that I haven't found anything close to a reasonable video calling solution. There are other holes but these at least can be worked around by running windows in a VM.

Another task: I need to get more familiar with what's being run at boot time, it's still pretty fast, and memory usage rarely goes above 350Mb, but there are a lot of processes running immediately after boot which are probably using CPU and IO and it would be nice to know what everything is and get rid of the ones i don't need. There is a services tab in Ubuntu, so i will start there before digging into the RC scripts.

It would be nice to build a custom kernel too, perhaps as a Christmas project, although i don't know if I'm brave enough for that just yet - i suspect much of the apt repositories wouldn't work with a custom kernel so I will need to do a lot of research before going down that route.

Weekend two with Ubuntu

This is such good fun. I was feeling quite jaded and fed up with computers recently but getting to work with Linux as my main home machine has re-sparked my interest and more importantly the joy of it. It's a proper hobbyist thing. Everything is there to tinker with and although there is no need to bother if you just want to get on and do something specific (just bang on windows) the end result feels so much nicer - it's something i crafted myself and know intimately. With windows there is a feeling that things are going on you don't know about. You install a package and it modifies this DLL and that registry entry. You install something and it adds a tray icon you need to figure out how to get rid of that, then it phones home to tell the developer about you. On Linux you can see every module, every library and every process. If you stick to open source packages you can compile them yourself so you know exactly what's there. It's very very liberating. I guess that's the idea.

progress update

Close to 100% of my hardware is now working under Linux. The only thing I haven't got working is the Sony MP3 player but I think that would require modifying the ROM on the player to work around the DRM and I'm not sure i will even look into that at present.

1. The DigiTV tuner card and MythTV are now working well together. I don't really watch broadcast TV much these days so i haven't tested it thoroughly, but it seems at least as stable as it was under windows (it wasn't very stable under windows).
   I mainly like watching American rubbish and it's easier to get that as torrents.
   Although you can schedule recordings (so you're not bound by the schedule) it's still pretty inconvenient. The main problems with this are:
   1. It's unreliable. Recordings sometimes break up; take up CPU and if you need to reboot during a recording, you can't.
   2. It's a haste to schedule the recordings and handle conflicting air times. Windows Media Center (WMC) is pretty sophisticated in this respect but it's still a lot more haste then firing up a torrent.
   3. Adverts.
   4. The raw MPEG2 files are big (about 2GB per hour). Vs. 600Mb for a DivX
   I spent a lot of time fine tuning MythTV so it's pretty good now and has quite a few features that WMC doesn't have - although i can't say it's as rich in functionality overall as WMC is.

2. My Sony digital camcorder is working. I was able to get the video off the camera but playback is bad - i think it's something to do with interlacing which is a subject i don't quite understand. The video editing software is really rubbish. I need to look into finding something better. Worst case scenario is that i use Linux to grab the raw video and edit in the windows VmWare box.

3. I got a good deal further in getting my Quick cam Pro 5000 working. I had to download and compile a kernel module. This module is V4L2 only and doesn't work well at the moment, but hopefully that will change in the near future. Currently there doesn't appear to be any video conferencing package that has a windows equivalent and works with my camera. The most promising one I could find is aMSN which recognised the camera once I built it from the latest source so I'm going to focus on this. I might even have a go at hacking the source. One thing that occurred to me today is to plug the CamCorder into the TV card's composite input. When I select the composite input in aMSN i get an empty blue screen which looks like it's being generated by the device - so that just might work.

I also haven't tried setting up my palm T3 yet. I haven't used the T3 for a while but I think I will see what it's like under Linux. The main problem was the sync which was slow and had to be started manually. I expect the Linux tools will be better and might make it worth bringing it back into service.

Ubunutu on my home desktop

A couple of weeks ago, when my friend, Pete, told me he was having a go setting up Linux at work, I ridiculed it telling him it wasn't worth the effort based on my past experiences with the OS. My first jobs were in a Unix environment using Apache/Perl on Solaris and (some) Linux. I hated it and it was great when windows application servers became usable. But still, once in a while, I download and evaluate a Linux distro for use as my home computer.

At home I use my PC primarily for entertainment: watching TV/videos, web surfing, photos and music and VOIP. I have a TV tuner, web cam and various other bits and pieces and the TV is used as a second screen for video.

Each time I tried getting this working under Linux it was an immense struggle and in any case the software wasn't very usable. So I gave up after a couple of days. It's been about a year since I last tried, most recently with Ubuntu (circa V.5). Last weekend I installed Ubuntu 6.10. My! things have come a long way. The WiFi card was identified immediately, I was able to get the TV-out, IR Remote, and Canon A710 DigiCam working fairly easily.

I have SMB file sharing working both ways with a windows box, a windows development Virtual Machine hosted under VMWare (at near native speed), all the video and audio codecs work flawlessly, a very nice TV based Media Centre system and pretty much all the software I need for day to day activities. Most of this was achieved in the first 5 hours. The system is stable and rock solid. Windows creeks and crawls from time to time, but Linux just keeps on going.

The bad points

• I came across several minor bugs in settling up hardware, for example: I had to specify the serial IDs of the DigiCam to get the system to read images off it, and modify a script to enable the Nvidia driver to work. The issues I encountered are known ones and I was able to easily find solutions, however the complexities of the solutions would be beyond the ability of most users. The fact that I stumbled on these leads me to suspect there are many others I didn't come across. To be honest the bugs seem to be related to the "glue" scripts and default configuration files that hold the distribution together - but in a sense this is more worrying than bugs in the core software packages. I had quite a lot of prior Unix experience without which I doubt I would have got very far
• Configuring the system is hard work: Lots of editing of cryptic text files, calling other scripts to restart deamons, remembering to use sudo, etc - all completely unacceptable to most people. The default installation only comes with the most basic admin and configuration graphical user interfaces.
• I still haven't got the TV tuner, Sony MP3 players, video camera and web cam working and doubt I will be able to - although my knowledge is growing and I might tackle these again soon.
• Lots of software doesn't exist on Linux. Notably to me: skype video. I was very pleased to see Picassa for Linux but I actually like Ubuntu's built in image management package. Some of the built in packages such as Azures and the Video editor have died and I can't get them to come up - tasks for another days and not a major problem.

The really good points

• It's (legally) Free!
• The Ubuntu shell and default packages are so consistent and well integrated that day-to-day usage for things like web, word processing, email and image manipulation are actually easier on Linux than on windows. The whole thing feel sleek, fast and uncluttered.
• Security - this is a very serious concern for most non experts. Having to deal with viruses and spy ware is a nightmare. Many of my friends and relatives abandon their computers due to this. With Linux this is so much less likely to be a problem.
• Good alternative packages for most tasks, at least for the needs of a non professional user. Quite a few commercial ones too.
• Terrific for web development. Not sure why I haven't looked at the LAMP stack for such a long time - but now it's on my desktop I don't have any more excuses. I'm also exploring ROR which is pretty nice.
• No more rebooting! The system just keeps going, 99% of updates don't require reboots either. If something goes really pear shaped, I press ctrl+alt+backspace which kills X and it's processes which pops back in n2 seconds, and then, after singing in, restores everything to exactly the way it was. It restores the session after a shut down too! Booting from cold takes about the same as windows but there is no endless crunching after logon.

I think there is no going back to windows for me!

ps: I haven't evaluated vista properly yet ;-)