A quick bite size post, really as reminder to me, on how to create a video file from a series of images: -

ffmpeg -qscale 5 -r 25 -b 8000 -i img%03d.png movie.mp4

The %03d means that ffmpeg should expect three digit number series padded with zeros.

Genius!

Labels: HOME, LINUX

There have been some interesting developments with the Humax Foxsat HDR and a custom firmware released in the last few months.

A good few years ago there were stories floating around to the effect that Humax would provide a firmware update giving FTP access to recordings. Users were excited but the update never arrived.

I am pleased to announce that a custom firmware is now available here http://myhumax.org/blog/ which has certainly rekindled my interest in the box. Installation was easy and worked first time.

I am now able to navigate the HDR's internal hard drive via FTP or network file sharing. The device now sports a handy web interface which allows navigation of recordings, access to the EPG, scheduling of recordings and package management.

[Edit] Updates to packages are published here http://hummypkg.org.uk

There are plenty of articles on http://myhumax.org/ and http://www.avforums.com/ so I won't go into too much detail.

Labels: DVB, HOME

Life is never simple. Days after cancelling my 'everything is covered' insurance (but is it?) on my laptop, the power supply gave up. This posed an interesting challenge, how to extract everything updated since the last backup in exactly 17 minutes - before the battery ran out. In reality 17 minutes was a little optimistic and it turned out to be closer to 7 minutes, but having signed-up for Dropbox the previous month I was covered, and dare I say a little smug too.

I have a desktop machine running Ubuntu 11.04 and to be honest I was looking for an excuse to ditch the laptop - the only thing I used it for was to sync my iPad via iTunes. Easy, install Windows 7 on VirtualBox, install iTunes and away we go.

Wrong. Looks like Ubuntu 11.04 comes with VirtualBox 4.0.6 OSE which doesn't seem to like Apple products connected via USB.

There was a surprisingly high volume of posts on forums with many recommendations and many replies saying "That worked", or indeed "That didn't work".

The only thing that worked for me was: -

• Uninstall VirtualBox through the Ubuntu Software Center tool


• Download and install the latest version of VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Linux_Downloads)


• Download and install the VirtualBox Extension Pack (https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads)


• Plug in your iPad/iPod, add it as a USB device on your VM


• Start your Windows VM and load iTunes

Labels: HOME, LINUX

A particularly enjoyable article by the Daily Mail, http://goo.gl/dFIlS. Maybe it's those rose-tinted spectacles but I'm sure when I was younger fog didn't make front-page headlines and cause the country to grind to a halt.

Or maybe it just wasn't reported.

Labels: HOME, NANNYSTATE

It's a long story, but my obsession with Ubuntu continues this weekend.

I'm learning the piano and I have a lot of sheet music lying around - scribblings from my teacher, scales, exercises and songs to play. Also, I've recently joined the Apple bandwagon and bought an iPad. So I'm thinking, wouldn't it be good if I could have all of this music on my iPad?

I'm not a big fan of trawling the net for applications to convert scanned documents to PDF, to join them together, then ultimately being disappointed because it didn't work quite how I expected.

So, I scanned my sheet music to TIFF documents.

On Ubuntu I installed 'TIFF2PDF', like this: -

sudo apt-get install tiff2pdf

I also installed 'PDFTK', like this: -

sudo apt-get install pdftk

To convert my TIFF files to PDFs I used: -


tiff2pdf c_blues_scale.tif -o c_blues_scale.pdf
tiff2pdf c_major_scale.tif -o c_major_scale.pdf


To join them up I used: -

pdftk c_blues_scale.pdf c_major_scale.pdf output Scales.pdf

I hope this is useful to someone, I was quite pleased with its' simplicity!

Labels: HOME, LINUX

In my ongoing quest to get my Ubuntu machine just how I like it, I felt the need to get PMS running as a service on Ubuntu. I am running 11.04 and the following seems to work like a champ.

First let's get the prerequisites out of the way. Fire up a terminal window and enter the following:-

sudo apt-get install mplayer mencoder ffmpeg sun-java6-jre

After a flurry of activity on the terminal window it should finish and be back at the prompt. Next download the archive from http://www.ps3mediaserver.org/ and extract to some useful location. Mine is in my home folder.

Now we need to create a startup script in the init.d folder. Like this: -

cd /etc/init.d
sudo nano startpms

Cut and paste the text below into the file:-


#!/bin/bash
cd /path/to/PMS.sh
nohup ./PMS.sh &
exit


Exit out of nano by pressing CTRL-X then Y, and when back at the terminal prompt type:-

sudo chmod +x startpms

This makes the startpms script executable. Finally we need to register the startup script so it gets executed when on startup, like this:-

sudo update-rc.d startpms defaults

Restart your machine and you're done.

Labels: HOME, LINUX

If you're interested, this is how I installed Handbrake on my upgraded Ubuntu (11.04): -

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

Thanks to Web UPD8

Labels: HOME, LINUX