I know I’ve been missing lately; I have gotten myself pretty busy between WoW, setting up an HA/LB (High Availability/Load Balancing) web and database server(s) for a client and just time with the family.

If you haven’t seen it before, Ultra Monkey is quite a simple and nice set of tools to manage an HA/LB configuration – and it has several good example configurations to get you started.

If you have read my previous articles you may have seen that I have an N810 internet tablet.  There is a new device out now that is the successor to that, the N900 cell phone.  I have written a small PyQt4 application for the N900 called pyPianobar.  Because this is PyQt4, if you grab the deb and extract it on your Linux Desktop (such as Ubuntu), you can actually use it there too! (You’ll need to install pianobar first)  This gives you Pandora Radio on your desktop, or your N900 :).

I’m currently trying to save up for an N900 so I can do some more tinkering, but also been waiting to see what will come of the new MeeGo (what a horrible name) that spawned as the result of an Intel (Moblin)/Nokia (Maemo) drunken one-night stand.

I’ve setup and been using Moblin on my Acer Aspire One – and it’s not too bad.  It’s childish, but so is everything now days (ever seen an iPhone? Ugh.)  Once I see for sure that the community will get a decent MeeGo port over to the N900 that is likely to be my next phone, even if it is $500+.  Yes, I’m saying it’s worth it :).

I don’t want the next Nokia device because they’ve already said it will be a capacitive touch screen like the Android and iPhone mess and capacitive is just not as accurate as resistive.  I also like using a Stylus when I want to be particular.  As an example, watch this – specifically the very last 30 seconds of the video or so.  It shows a very nice Avatar drawing done with the default Sketch app on the phone.  I just don’t think something like that is possible on capacitive.. and I don’t need multi-touch.

On the WoW front, I’ve written a small addon for Feral Druid’s that uses the Faceroller mod.  It will show a decent kitty rotation for high-DPS making it quite a bit simpler to keep track of everything.  The next update, which hopefully will be soon, will include a minor prediction system and a bear rotation for tanking.

As you can see, I keep myself entertained :).  I never can just “do” something, I have to toy with it – code something for it, tinker with it… eventually break it :D.  I still haven’t gotten the hang of the whole Blogging scene though and as such my blog tends to fall by the way-side.  There’s already so many out there on any given topic that it’s usually just a waste for me to add yet another reference or complaint for XYZ in yet another blog.

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the update – check out the N900, WoW and Ultra Monkey someday :).

Finally! It’s about time I get this to you guys right?? :). Well here it is at last, the full review of the Budget Gamer that I told you about in a previous post.

Here is the list of hardware components again for you:

That’s it! My gamer system that came in at around $740 with all parts purchased through Newegg. I’ve had this system for just about 3 weeks now and it has definitely been a pleasure to work with.

I’m certainly not the biggest gamer (or best at reviews for that matter), and this is the first PC that I have owned that could be considered to be even remotely close to a (mid-)high end machine. Being that, I of course love this system since it’s so much better than anything I’ve ever had previously :D. It’s also the first complete system I built from scratch. It makes me just a tad biased I think ;).

But, raw numbers don’t lie – so while I personally love my new computer because of it’s inherent awesomeness :), I will be posting benchmarks with numbers so that you can peruse the intrawebz and compare what I’m getting with other relevant reviews to your section of interest.

Only three components really warrant reviews in my opinion, and that’s the case, the CPU, and the video card. I don’t have any kind of tools or know-how to “benchmark” the memory, I am ill-equipped to properly benchmark or analyze the PSU, and benchmarking the motherboard, well.. I have no idea how you would do that.

For those components I’ll say these things:
1) The computer is running, evidently the PSU works well enough. (Though I am Hypothesizing it is preventing me from reaching full O/C potential on my Radeon 4890).
2) I had to change settings, timings, and other stuff in the motherboard BIOS to get 1600 from my DDR3 memory. It defaulted to 1066.
3) On Ubuntu Linux, my free -m is showing me 3900MB memory. This is less than 4GB, but when I googled it seemed normal? I still want to look into this.

Alright then, now that all of that is out of the way, lets get this party started shall we?

In this post I’m going to take a look at WinFF and Hyper Video Converter.  In my Arch Linux post I detailed my many problems getting a decent video converter to work right in Arch Linux and on the Acer Aspire One.

In all of the big all-in-one packages: OGMRip, dvd::rip, AcidRip, HandBrake, etc.  I ran into one problem after the other.

OGMRip would seem to start, but on two different DVD’s it never finished.  It died sometime in the middle of the rip.  AcidRip did not support H.264 out of the box, and queueing files could have been easier.  OTOH: once I fixed AcidRip to work with H.264 the resulting file was in excellent condition.  See my Arch Linux post on what I did there.

dvd::rip worked great on Ubuntu, except that once again H.264 support was lacking in the default ffmpeg compile.  Since I had intrepid, and there was no easy way to get H.264 support without re-compiling, I went with Arch.  Arch Linux’s ffmpeg supports H.264 perfectly, and everything seems to run.. until you realize dvd::rip freezes at about 70% ripping but the log file says “Title 1 finished”.  Encoding after that invariably gave me async audio.

At this point I decided I was probably going to have to do this by hand, but a new google search popped into my head: ffmpeg frontends.  I also searched for anything with ffmpeg in it in my repositories on arch.  I used the Yaourt package on Arch which allows you to search the user contributed repositories, and not just the normal Pacman repo’s.

In there I found hypervc-qt4:

I show the settings I used in this screenshot.  H.264, avi, aac, default, 1500 kbits, 128 Kbits, 16:9, default, default.

This has produced decent quality for me.  The nice thing about this is that you first create the command, which shows in a small window on the bottom and you can from there either run the command manually or click the “convert” button.  You can also simply add multiple video files (including vob) into the top and it will encode each of them in batch operation.

Note:  It does not join them, putting 4 vob’s of the same movie will result in 4 avi files.   You need to first join the vob files together in some manner like:
cat My_Totally_Legal_Movie-001.vob My_Totally_Legal_Movie-002.vob > My_Totally_Legal_Movie.vob

Which I have done, but I have not yet encoded and watched a movie I did like that so I can’t guarantee it’ll work.  It appears to while playing the vob in mplayer though.

Anyway, the reason getting the commands is so nice is you can setup a NFS share on your netbook, mount it on any other Linux Box laying around your house (since we all use Linux now right? :D) and then run the command on that machine.  Allowing you to encode more than one movie at a time.

Another program I came across in WinFF:

This one came with tons of default Presets.  I selected the MP4 option and it defaulted to using H.264.  Unfortunately, the one file I did using this program came out with no sound.  Not sure what happened there but didn’t look too deep into it since I had an alternative already ready.

WinFF also allows you to show the commands to convert the files.. and in this case WinFF outdoes HyperVC.  WinFF will show you the ffmpeg commands of every video file you add to the list, all at once.  You just copy and paste.  HyperVC will not let you create commands if you select the radio button to “Convert All Input”.

Both of these programs let you save your settings, in HyperVC it is called Profiles and in WinFF it is called Presets.  WinFF comes with defaults like iPod, Palm, PSP, Mobile Phone, etc.  There are also some available online if you look around.  HyperVC comes with nothing default, and you just create your own as you go. Thanks to hyper in the comments, I found that in arch linux you need to run this command for HyperVC:

cp /usr/share/hypervc-qt4/hyperconf ~/.hyperconf

And you will get tons of new profiles to play with. Including some for DivX, xvid, Ipod, Mobile Phones, DVD, FLV, etc. Very useful!

While my test of the WinFF did not go so well it may have been user error, since both WinFF and HyperVC are frontends to ffmpeg, they both should work.. it’s just a matter of tweaking the settings to get them right.  I find these applications to be awesome, and seeing that I don’t see many threads/posts on using them when searching around for “Ripping DVD’s on Linux”.. I thought they deserved a post in somebody’s blog.. somewhere.  While these don’t go directly from DVD, a simple vobcopy command to get a single vob file on your hard drive is not difficult and takes little time:
vobcopy -l -o /path/to/output

Some quick filesizes for comparison (all are good quality)

AcidRip + H.264 + 1500 kbits + MP3 128 kbit audio = 1.3GB
dvd::rip + xvid + VBR + MP3 128 Kbit audio = 1.4GB (with H.264 I got one to 950MB).
HyperVC + H.264 + 1500 kbits + AAC 128 kbit audio = 1.2GB

So as you can see.. and what would be logical.. using the same settings in the different applications doesn’t get you anything.. but obviously doing things like lowering the audio bits, or the Video Bitrate you could probably get really good looking videos into the 700-900mb range.

A quick summary, I love HyperVC, and WinFF certainly does the job.. ultimately it really doesn’t matter which application (including the big boys) you use if they work.. just whichever one has the right look and feel to match you.  I recommend trying AcidRip and DVD::Rip on your setup and see if they work – if you have any problems, these two are excellent and lightweight alternatives.

Thanks for stopping by!

UPDATE:  I now use MP3 format for my audio, which passes the -acodec libmp3lame option to ffmpeg.  The AAC audio was not playing well on my Netbook and mplayer would always return the “Your computer is not fast enough to play this video”.  Messing with the -nobps or -ni options sometimes returned good results but that was just annoying.  MP3 audio works without needing to do anything special, and still sounds fine to me.

How’s it going everybody?? Few days ago a friend of mine got me to throw on Arch Linux and give it a whirl, again.  So, I been away getting Arch Linux setup and running and remembering why I liked it the first time :).

I was running Ubuntu, as I stated previously, and I wanted to try out some DVD Ripping software so I could store all the DVD’s I own on a Hard Drive.  Ultimately, I would like to make a media center, but for now just having backups was my goal – and with the AAO having a 160GB HDD I figured why not?

Well, I tried all the big boys of course, dvd::rip, AcidRip, Thoggen, OGMRip, etc.  And while they all worked fine in Ubuntu I preferred dvd::rip the most because of it’s clustering ability.  Unfortunately, due to the completely flakey wireless on the AAO in Linux (using both ath5k and madwifi’s drivers it randomly disconnects on me), the clustering ability was out.  Mid-rip it would disconnect and cause all the nodes to die off cancelling the project.

I also quickly learned that ubuntu bastardized their ffmpeg and didn’t allow the use of the H.264 codec.  This was easily fixable in Hardy using Medibuntu, but Linux Mint and correspondingly Intrepid that it’s based on, requires a complete rebuild of ffmpeg and H.264.

Instead, I decided to try Arch and put on my old favorite: XFCE.  Here’s what it looks like currently:

Arch linux, for those that don’t know, is built on a philosophy of “Keep it simple, stupid”, or KISS.  That does NOT mean simple for you, it means simple for their packages.  There is no post-configuration needed when installing packages, it doesn’t automatically add the appropriate startup and shutdown services, etc.

While it has a truly nice package management system, pacman, that rivals both Yum and Apt, each of the packages will usually still require you to do manual things if you want them to start automatically.

As far as Arch goes, everything works flawless on the AAO.. and is very speedy when using the XFCE desktop since there is no unnecessary services running in the background.

Unfortunately, dvd::rip no longer works right.  Because Arch Linux is mostly bleeding-edge it has things like Transcode 1.1, and dvd::rip only supports up to 1.0.9.  It runs, but during ripping it hangs at 70% and the log says it finished.  If you try encoding it after you do that the audio is completely async.

OGMRip works fine, you can google around for it’s procedures, but I wanted a little more control.  AcidRip required me to modify some source code to get it to work with H.264, shown below:


#/usr/share/perl5/vendor_perl/AcidRip/acidrip.pm
if ( $::settings->{'video_codec'} eq 'x264' ) {
$menc{'video'} = "-ovc x264 -x264encopts bitrate=1500";
}


In my installation that was around line 227. There is an ‘nuv’ codec if statement right before it that I placed it after. It statically sets the bitrate to 1500, you can change that to whatever you wanted.  It allows AcidRip to work properly using the newer x264.

The quality of the rip was fine.. but I needed something  that worked with VOB files better so I could batch process.  Currently I’m copying the dvd’s to the HDD with vobcopy, which is very simple:
vobcopy -l -o /path/to/output

That gives me one large vob file to work with. I’m currently encoding a couple using a script I found here and also have another going using HandBrake. I am using an NFS share on my AAO to allow more than one computer to be converting vob files. I’ll let you know the quality of these videos when they finish. I connected my AAO to ethernet for this due to the wireless problems mentioned above.

Well, that’s all I got for today, two very interesting GUI’s I have found for linux that I will be reviewing in my next post are Hyper Video Converter and WinFF. Both of these are frontends for ffmpeg, and in the case of HyperVC it even shows you the command line before you choose to encode so you can run it yourself.. perfect when using multiple machines through ssh.

So far, I’m loving my AAO as a complete Laptop Replacement for me.