June 3rd, 2007 cmsj
The title says it all really. I’ve banged on about games a bit and now it’s time to do something involving curiosity!
So I know how to, should i want to for any reason, this is how you can make videos that are playable on a PS3 (only tested on firmware 1.80). Note that it doesn’t transcode to H.264, but instead uses a lesser MPEG4 profile of some kind (mpeg4 appears to be entirely too complicated to figure out!).
This mostly comes from here, but the gist is that you grab a specific version of ffmpeg from SVN and compile it against a variety of media libraries from multiverse. This makes me think ubuntu should have a bleeding edge version of ffmpeg in multiverse that links against the libraries there - if licences allow for it.
For what it’s worth, this is the command line I’ve been using with it (note that it will strip surround audio down to 2 channel stereo. That’s all i have, so I haven’t bothered to figure out anything better).
ffmpeg -y -i /path/to/source.avi -acodec aac -ab 192kb -vcodec mpeg4 -b 1500kb -mbd 2 -flags +4mv+trell -aic 2 -cmp 2 -subcmp 2 -title "Blah 2: The blahing" /path/to/output.mp4
Posted in FOSS, Games, Ubuntu | 3 Comments »
April 9th, 2005 cmsj
Congratulations to the Ubuntu team, who released Hoary today. If you haven’t tried it yet, do :)
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October 26th, 2004 cmsj
I’ve been running Ubuntu since a week or so before the launch and so far I’m quite happy with it. It feels mostly like Debian, which is what I was running before I moved to Fedora (for the better 32/64bit compatibility), but has a little more pace to it so far, plus a pretty significant surge of good will and interest.
One thing I am a little disappointed in is that it seems the releases (in this case their first; warty) won’t change much beyond security and important bug fixes. They are scheduled for every 6 months though. Personally I still think a rolling-stable approach to the desktop is going to be a killer feature if it happens.
What will set Ubuntu’s real course now they have a userbase will be the development of the next release, hoary. There are now quite a lot of people who are want to get involved and want to help. We just have to hope the process shapes itself well and a coherant way of working emerges and works well.
My favorite things about it are really all things about GNOME, especially the automatic digital camera importing. It’s fantastic to see the computer become more aware of what is happening to it and behave Correct™ly.
My least favorite is really inherited from Debian - the 32bit compatibility on AMD64 machines isn’t great. The good thing is that I can confidently append “yet” to that :)
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September 29th, 2004 cmsj
For a while now I’ve been thinking that it would be a good idea to have a distro that was Debian, but more pragmatic and much quicker to track upstream releases (presumably at the slight expense of package quality)
Ubuntu Linux is a fork of Debian’s unstable branch, sid. It includes newer GNOME packages than sid (although they are due very shortly I believe) and appears to have a much more pragmatic approach to distro making. Bad for servers, good for getting a distro that has no release as such, but is just tracking the current stable releases of as much software as possible.
And therein lies the key, making a lot of software available - something that Debian has an incredible history of, with many thousands of packages. Where Debian is limited by being out of date and stable or slightly behind the times and unstable, Ubuntu will hopefully offer more stability and predictability than sid, but still a current desktop (probably where the approach is best suited, since that is where development is happening quickest).
To get lots of software, the Ubuntu guys have been talking about two things.
- Allow easy importing of packages from sid that compile (which we can reasonably assume to be most of the interesting packages people are going to want)
- Allow easy importing of user contributed packages
This second item is the real key I think. If it is incredibly easy to submit a source package, have it be autobuilt on all architectures and when that works, reviewed by a project member for inclusion, people will do it. We see on distros like Fedora that people are prepared to put in massive efforts to maintain current software (see, the Dag and other RPM repositories. Their efforts are significantly hampered by the fact that they are unable to integrate their packages into the main Fedora trees, leading to them having to replace Fedora packages with newer versions and other worrying things. A big problem is that the various trees are not necessarily entirely compatible and there is some overlap. On a personal note, I find that having all of the sites that support x86_64 in yum’s config makes it incredibly slow (I’d use apt, but it doesn’t support Fedora’s excellent biarch system).
If this goes well, I would propose formalising the system to a degree by using GPG to allow the maintainer of a package to upload new versions without requiring moderator time. This is obviously another tactic lifted largely from debian, although they require manual verification by a debian developer who are the only ones with keys capable of uploading a new package.
I will be watching Ubuntu closely, and if they do move in the direction I am hoping, it will have to be worth a shot :)
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