This used to be near impossible some time ago however a new ATI driver just got released: 10.6 and now VSYNC actually works on application level. However, this still does not make it work under mplayer. To get that working you will have to do a few tricks. If you run a desktop WITHOUT compisiting the tricks are easy, but with compositing i found myself trying a whole lot more things to get it working.

Note: I suspect the ATI catalyst 10.6 driver is needed!

The trick when you run a desktop without compositing:

mplayer -vo gl2 yourvideo.avi

The trick when you do run compositing is quite a bit more complex.

First edit xorg with the following edits in the device section:

And add the following at the bottom of your xorg.conf file (if not there already):

Section “Extensions”
Option     “Composite” “Enable” # If enabled (and used), use OpenGL to VSync
EndSection

Now restart your X by logging out and back in. Playing a video that is tear free with compositing enabled should now be possible with the following mplayer command:

mplayer -vo gl yourvideo.avi

Note the “-vo gl” instead of “-vo gl2” …. With my ATI cards the xorg.conf edits where needed to get -gl playing nicely.

This post probably helps some people with the same problem. Leave a comment if this helped you (or not).

Regards,
Mark

Update

I noticed a big difference between windowed and fullscreen mode. On ATI video just seems to flickr when run in windowed mode (even with “-vo gl”) but the same video with the same settings runs without any flickering in fullscreen mode (press “f”).

It “seems” like a windows task not “possible” on linux but that’s wrong. Auto suspending can be done through con jobs as is a widely known.

Auto resuming is something that is in a bit darker area of Linux.
This is how you can do that. There is a linux command line tool (probably even installed by default) called: rtcwake. With this tool you can use your system “Real Time Clock (RTC)” and that allows you to wake your pc at a set point in time.

The commands to do that are very simple but hard to find out if you don’t know what to look for. For example the following commands set your PC to wake in 5 minutes (asuming it’s sleeping) — execute as root! — :

echo 0 >/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm # Clear RTC
date “+%s” -d “+ 5 minutes” >/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm # Set the time 5 minutes in the future

The latter command can also be done like this:

echo +300 >/sys/class/rtc/rtc0/wakealarm

Now all you have to do is suspend your pc and it will (probably) wake up at the set time.
On the command line there are various ways to suspend:

echo -n mem > /sys/power/state

or

pm-suspend

or other ways (like dbus).

Where is this usefull? Well, this might be very handy for HTPC setups that you can just turn off at times when not a single person is gonna use it.

Hope you found this usefull.
Regards,
Mark.

Playing a bluray video in Linux is kinda awkward so that’s why i make a small howto that describes just that.
I’m not aware of any other methods to play bluray movies with (custom) subtitles like described below. If you know another (better?) method please let me know.

Before you start, make sure you can mount your bluray image which can be done with the following line:

mount -o loop -t udf /path/to/image.iso /media/bluray_image

Or you have a bluray drive with the disc inserted.

Note: the bluray menus are not usable yet in Linux. only playing the video file is possible at the moment.

First you need to have the mplayer svn version. I used this one from arch linux.
I assume you know how to compile it and get mplayer working.

Once it’s compiled and installed you need to go to your bluray drive or the mount path and then in the folder:
BDMV/STREAM/

Now if your running compiz or any kind of 3d accelerated desktop environment then you have to append:

-ao gl

to the play line (comes later) otherwise you can just use:

-ao xv

Now the final play line would be (assuming your still in the BDMV/STREAM/ folder):

mplayer -vo gl 00000.m2ts

I used -vo gl because i use an accelerated desktop but replace the gl with xv if you’re not using an accelerated desktop. The file: 00000.m2ts was the one that was the biggest for me (well over 6 GB). the name might differ in your movie so make sure check the name before trying to play it.

Now for the subtitles.
Since bluray menus are still not possible in linux you have to just download the subtitle you want. So, go to your favorite subtitle site which provides .srt subtitle files and grab the one you want. Now there is one issue with playing those bluray movies. Somehow mplayer “thinks” it starts playing at minute 10 while the movie plays from second one. This causes your subtitles to begin playing from 10 minutes thus resulting in the wrong subtitles at the wrong time. There is a nice little trick in mplayer that can be done to “prevent” this. Just let your subtitles delay 10 minutes like so:

-subdelay -600

And a subtitle can be loaded with -sub <filename>

The resulting line to play a bluray movie with subtitles is:

mplayer -vo gl -subdelay -600 -sub subtitle.srt BDMV/STREAM/00000.m2ts

That’s what worked for me when playing ripped bluray movies.
Hope this works for you as well.

Goodluck,
Mark.

Yet again a issue in ubuntu that lets me search for hours only to find non working solutions.
So here i go again.. i will just post the solution that worked for me.

The issue was that i had an ip address in a different part of the same subnetwork. all in 192.168.1.*
Now on the ubuntu forums you can find a lot of questions to release and renew your ip. None of those methods worked for me.
This did:

sudo echo '' > /var/lib/dhcp3/dhclient.leases
sudo echo '' > /var/lib/dhcp3/dhclient-eth0.lease
sudo dhclient -r // or with eth0
sudo dhclient // or with eth0

What this is doing is cleaning the dhclient lease files and after that releasing your current ip followed by a new dhcp request to get a new ip.Big downside is that the ip doesn’t seem to be released on the actual dhcp server thus for the remaining lease time no other computers willbe able to get that ip.

This is how it worked for me and i take the downside for what it is.

This will probably help a few other ubuntu users out there with the same issue.
Mark

Just a quick post with some links that will help you get your PVR-150 device running in ubuntu or just linux.
http://www.simsemporium.com/Stuff/Mythtv+-+PVR-150+-+Ubuntu+-+New+Zealand+HOWTO.html

Note about that link. They tell you to compile ivtv. That’s not needed! ivtv is in the ubuntu repository (universe repo) so you can search for that in synaptic or just by typing this in a console: sudo apt-get install ivtv-utils.

And if your sound is not working this might be very helpful: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/228363

That’s it for this quick twitter like post. I hope this helped a few people with this issue.

Good luck,
Mark

Since there is no guide anywhere on the internet that tells you how you can get DirectFB working on ubuntu, i will make one.

I expect you know how you compile things in this article. If you don’t follow some guide that explains how to do that.

The very first thing you have to do is get ubuntu (9.04 but the last few versions should all work fine).
next is setting up your “framebuffer” at boot time. To do this restart your pc. while in grub press “e” to edit that boot line. Then select the kernel line and again press “e” to edit that line. Now add (at the end of that line) vga=ask. Right after that it will ask you which resolution you want. See if yours is in that list and anter the number that’s standing infront of it. Now just let it boot. Once booted you will have to edit your grub menu file (sudo nano /boot/grub/menu.lst) and add vga=0xthe number you picked) and then when you reboot you should have the framebuffer stuff. If you don’t have it look for a solution somewhere on the internet. Problems with framebuffers can be quite hard to understand or find solutions for. I don’t know much more about those framebuffers then this.

Once that’s all done you will have to setup your build environment. run the following commands:

sudo apt-get install linux-source // Will install the actual linux source of your current kernel
sudo apt-get build-dep linux // Will get your linux kernel source dependencies installed on your system
sudo apt-get build-dep libdirectfb-1.0-0 // We are going to use a later version of DirectFB but this will do fine to install the requirements
wget http://www.directfb.org/downloads/Core/DirectFB-1.2.8.tar.gz
wget http://www.directfb.org/downloads/Core/linux-fusion-8.1.1.tar.gz
wget http://www.directfb.org/downloads/Extras/DirectFB-examples-1.2.0.tar.gz

Note: go to: http://www.directfb.org/index.php?path=Main%2FDownloads to download the latest DirectFB 1.2.* (do not download the 1.3.* versions because that’s still in development) release and the latest linux-fusion file.

Once you’ve done the two apt-get lines and downloaded the files you will have to extract those later two.
Do that by running:

tar -xvf DirectFB-1.2.8.tar.gz
tar -xvf linux-fusion-8.1.1.tar.gz
tar -xvf DirectFB-Examples-1.2.0.tar.gz

The first thing we’re going to do now is getting that fusion module compiled and loaded at boot time.
Here is the list of commands to do that:

cd linux-fusion-8.1.1 make && sudo make install
sudo su -
echo fusion >> /etc/initramfs-tools/modules // this adds the text “fusion” at the end of the modules file
exit
sudo update-initramfs -u // This updates your initramfs file
sudo modprobe fusion // Only needed if you didn’t restart after you changed initramfs. Otherwise this module will be loaded anyway beacayse it’s done so during boot.

Now fusion is done.
Next is compiling DirectFB with multi application support.

Here is the list of commands needed for that:
cd DirectFB-1.2.8
./configure –enable-multi –libdir=/usr/lib64 –bindir=/usr/bin // note the libdir is /usr/lib64 for x86_64 distributions and just /usr/lib for the rest. Change it to your needs
make && sudo make install

Now it should be compiling for a few minutes. Depending on your cpu. My quadcore does this in a few minutes.
Once it’s done DirectFB is installed and (if all previous steps worked fine) can be used.

Now to see it in use we need some examples.
here is the command list for that:

cd DiirectFB-Examples-1.2.0
./configure –bindir=/usr/bin // note no need to set a libdir because it’s not making libs
make && sudo make install

Now the examples are also ready to use.
You can now switch to another tty (CTRL + ALT + F<number>), login and run something like df_window.
Be sure to type df_ followed by a hit on the tab button. It will give you all run commands that start with df_ and all the results that  you get to see are DirectFB examples.

But this didn’t show you a multi-app environment yet.

Log in into your gnome or kde or whatever graphical environment you use. Open up a terminal in there and type:

nano ~/.directfbrc

What we’re going to do now is change a few directfb settings to run it under X11. (see man directfbrc for more settings)
Just plain copy and paste the following settings in that file:

mode=1024×768
pixelformat=RGB32
system=x11

You can change the resolution to your liking if you want.

Now type (still in that same console that’s running inside your graphical environment):

df_window & // runs it in the background
df_cpuload &

And you will see the df_window example with in there the cpuload graphic. Nifty huh?
Just be carefull here. save all your data before you start with this because if you do anything wrong it COULD completely crash your system in a way that you just have to reboot to get it back. While writing this howto i experienced this myself because i did do df_window & but i didn’t add the “&” to df_cpuload

This was it for the DirectFB howto.
I might post more stuff about DirectFB in the future.

I hope it was useful to you,
Mark

Lets do the same order as the gnome release notes only with my opinion about them and of the items that deserve a little more attention.

Brasero

Brasero always seemed to be the burning tool to use under linux. Or the one most used. It didn’t made much sense to have nautilus-cd-burner (which has been removed in gnome 2.26) while most people preferred brasero. Brasero is also integrated in nautilus (go to Applications -> System Tools -> CD/DVD Creator) and seems to be offering the same as nautilus-cd-burner had. I didn’t test it yet. In my opinion it’s a wise decision of gnome to make the move to brasero.

Brasero screenshot

Brasero in nautilus

Totem

This is a good example of a feature that might be required by some people but is useless for most. Quote from the release notes:

While GNOME’s Media Player already has the ability to display subtitles for a movie, this still required you to have the subtitle data available. As of GNOME 2.26, this restriction is gone. Using the new subtitle downloader plugin, the Media Player will automatically find subtitles for you.

I don’t understand why they bother to add in features like that (and remember they did add in youtube support in either gnome 2.22 or 2.24) that are pointless for most people. This should be just a plugin that you can download somewhere but not a new feature mentioned in the release notes.

Updated sound preferences for PulseAudio

Now this is an interesting one! PulseAudio is in Fedora since release 8 and ubuntu has it since 8.04 so it was about time that those volume controls where going to work with PulseAudio instead of against it (or so it seemed sometimes). Sadly the application that gnome posts in a screenshot is nowhere to be found on my ubuntu 9.04 Beta (fully updated) machine so i can’t really say more about it without seeing it for myself.

Multiple monitors

If you have just one monitor you probably don’t care about this but it’s something that was divided in the past. Ubuntu had it’s own application to get this. Fedora had one and there where a few others floating around. Far from an ideal situation. Now Gnome has updated his display program to support multiple screens. This was all possible with the xrandr command line tool but a graphical frontend it quite handy for things like this. It’s becoming a nice tool now and way more centralized then then it used to be.

Epiphany

This browser for (and by) Gnome looks clean but has a lot of potential. I will write a bigger article or perhaps a review about this one later. What they added here is Firefox’s “Awsome Bar“… it looks funny and seems to be running fast from what i’ve seen so far. It’s definitely a browser to check out and see if you like it.

Epiphany - Note the wrong render of the legend box. That's bad and ugly! (no issue in Firefox)

Overall Gnome 2.26 impression

With the previous 2 releases (2.22 and 2.24) i found the release notes weak and more useless stuff that was added then useful stuff. Back then it seemed (to me) that they added what was popular at the time. Google had just bought Youtube and they felt some need to implement that in Totem. This time they did also include stuff that strikes me as useless but the majority seems to be useful for everyday Gnome usage. This release was a good one, despite the additions that i rather didn’t see, for Gnome although not much changed visually. This seems to be the release i’ve been hoping for since roughly 2.20. A release where they finally fixed the things that needed fixing and add the things that are needed.

Next in 6 months: Gnome 2.28

There are already some ideas for the next Gnome version. At this moment only the Artwork section for the next gnome has been filled in and that looks promising. If you want to have a look at it click here.

I hope you liked this small review of interesting new and updated Gnome 2.26 features.

Till next time,
Mark.

After hours of testing i finally found out how to get my microphone to work under ubuntu.
The thing that i had already working “out of the box” is that you could talk in your microphone and you would hear it come out of your speakers but somehow it wasn’t recording it when i tried to record the input from the microphone. So once i got it working i started writing this howto so that others can get a microphone (and skype) working as well. This howto should work in any linux distribution since it’s not ubuntu specific. It is gnome specific so i don’t know how well this works (if at all) in kde.

The first thing i did (and you should do as well) is open a console (ALT+F2 -> gnome-terminal or xterm).
Now type this:
[sourcecode]
alsamixer
[/sourcecode]

now you should see something like this:

My advise would be to just put all at max EXEPT for the values that contain anything like “boost”.. i put them up to test with and it didn’t really improve microphone quality or made it louder. It just made it sound horrible and it was even affecting the normal playback sound as well.

Now once this is done press TAB in that alse mixes stuff. You should now get the properties for “Capture” (seen at the top left corner in those few lines of text) devices:

I’m not sure if anything here helped getting it working but i turned all “boost” things off and the rest on. Feel free to tweak those settings a bit to see if they actually do something with the microphone.

Now, once you’ve done this, you “should” have your microphone setup currectly and it should just work. There are just a few more issues. When you start recording your microphone imput you most likely don’t hear anything when you play it back. That’s because the “Sound Capture” setting in gnome’s sound settings is set wrong.
So open the gnome sound settings: System -> Preferences -> Sound and you should see this:

The way to test if your microphone is actually working is by clicking on the “Test” button behind “Sound capture”. Press test and talk in your microphone. If you hear yourself with a slight delay from the speakers you have it working. If not try every option in the list (in the screenshot it’s on “ALSa – Advanced Linux Sound Architecture” between the “Sound capture:”  and “test”. one of them should be working. Also note that there seems to be double values with exactly the same name but they do act differently! atleast that was the case for me.

Once you’ve done that and you found one that seems to be working (the right one for me was: “HDA Intel something…” which was in the list twice. the top one did it for me) then you can start recording your microphone if you want. Try it out in gnome-sound-recorder but i won’t go deeper in that stuff.

Oke, by now your microphone should be working and you can record your microphone input and it seems to be working fine. If that’s the case then you now install skype (i used this link: http://www.skype.com/go/getskype-linux-ubuntu-amd64 which should be the latest x64 version) Open skype and go to the “Sound Devices” tab in skype.

For me the Sound out and Ringing was just fine but the Sound in was wrong. To get that one good you have to (sadly) test every option in the Sound in list and “Make a test call”… say something and see if it gets out of your boxes after the second beep.

This is how i got it working.
Here are my settings from the volume control stuff in gnome incase you might be interested in those as well.

Note for the image above: i have no clue why the microphone icons have a cross in there. i could turn them off/on whatever i wanted but the setting didn’t seem to be saved and didn’t seem to mather for the microphone.

It should all be working fine now.

I hope this howto has been helpfull for you. If you found another solution or have something to add to this feel free to post so in the comments.
Good luck,
Mark

I was playing around with gnome and openbox (and compiz) and to my surprise i didn’t had any decorations in gnome anymore when i switched back to just gnome (no openbox nor compiz). I did a search on google to try and find the fix but sadly there wasn’t any good one. People with similar problems got the suggestion to add metacity in the gnome-session tool which should also work but isn’t the solution because it simply isn’t in there when everything is working and when you didn’t screw with other windows managers yet.

So i did a search on my other pc where it was all working fine to see where metacity really has to be enabled. It turns out that you have to be in gconf to do that!
But not on this gconf location: “/desktop/gnome/applications/window_manager” like what was suggested in ubuntu’s forums. You have to be in this location: “/desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager” illustrated by the screenshot below.

And make sure the key (selected row in the image): “windowmanager” is set to “metacity“.
You can access that same tool by pressing: ALT +  F2 then type in: “gconf-editor“.

If you don’t have that tool or don’t know how to get it you can insert the metacity value directly with this line:
“gconftool-2 -s -t string /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager metacity”
You can just enter that line in the run box (again by pressing ALT + F2).

Also note that if you encounter a bug like this, no decorations while you had them, and you didn’t edited files yourself but just installed and removed packages that your distribution provides then it’s a bug in those packages and should be reported. So if it’s not reported please do so to help your distribution get better.

I hope this helped anyone with a similar issue,
Mark.

I recently tried to play a ASF stream under linux.
I first tried it the most obvious way for fedora users with a default installation is to install the livna repository (now merged in rpmfusion) and install the gstreamer bad and ugly plugins.

The Fedora version i used was: Fedora 10 x64 fully updated.

The Totem way (total failure)
So after the installation i tried to play the stream. At first everything seems to be fine… till after a few seconds. Totem starts buffering, plays a bit, freezes the image and buffers a bit, plays a bit, freezes the image and buffers a bit and so on. It plays about 2 seconds then freezes and buffers before playing for another 2 seconds…. you get the point.

Totem’s buffering is absolutely horrible! i tried changing various buffer settings in gconf and changed the connection setting in the totem options. Totem simply seems to ignore any changes. I just can’t get it working in Totem.

Because totem is so useless in buffering (kinda important for a video player!) i say that that player is just a complete waste of time for the gnome developers and a shame they can’t even properly fix buffering while they do add in useless features like youtube support. Without proper buffering that feature is as useless as totem is right now. To totem devs: get totem’s buffering fixed or remove it completely

The Xine way (total failure)
I haven’t tried a lot in xine to get this working but installing it on fedora and trying to play a asf stream with it is simply not working. Perhaps i missed somehing obvious. Just not working here.

The VLC way (failure)
VLC is starting the same as Totem. It shows some video. After exactly 10 seconds it keeps playing (or that’s what the time counter says) it does not play any sound or video. Kinda sad.. I would’ve expected VLC to just work. I didn’t investigate this problem further but i’m sure it can be fixed.

The mplayer way (working)
Finally a player that works. Or not really. At first it didn’t work at all. it throw 5 lines on the console about a million times and i couldn’t figure out why it was happening. After i asked for some help on the #mplayer channel (on irc in freenode.net) it turned out that the stream i was trying to play demands a player that sends a “valid” user-agent string. It got fixed (in my case) by adding this line to the mplayer config file:

echo user-agent=WMPlayer/10.0.0.4058 >> ~/.mplayer/config

The only bad thing is that it took me about 2 hours to find that out. Mplayer wasn’t exactly throwing any errors that indicated anything of a missing or wrong user agent.

So that’s how i got a asf stream working under linux. It took me a few hours but it’s working just fine now under mplayer.

I hope this helped anyone with a simulair issue.

and then some parts of deb’s or rpm’s are even sub devided in other distributions:
RPM
- PClinuxOS
- Mandriva
- Fedora
- And a ton others

DEB
- Ubuntu
- Sabyaon (Sorry, not a deb using system. Thanx, Patrick)
- Debian
- Again a ton others

This on it’s own isn’t a problem. The problem is that nearly each distribution is so much different that
the same package type (rpm) form fedora won’t work on mandriva or the opposite. And it’s the same case with the deb
based distributions. What you can conclude from that is that there is a huge ammount of people making packages
for distributions but that work das to be done a dozen times to get it working on atleast all the big
distributions (try to install the KDE4 packages from fedora on Ubuntu) which is just so extremely time
consuming and not effectively done at all! So that all has to change and that idea is comming now.

In order to change this all there needs to be one single big package database that works on all the
linux distributions. One compiling cluster and one management system for them. Now imagine that there
would be one place to do all that! that would solve the issue of not having a generic package type.

Now lets dig in this a little deeper. Imagine that you only would have to supply the following information
when submitting a new package for a certain distribution:
- Where files need to be saved
- What patched need to be applied
- Does there need to be an icon anywhere (desktop/menu)
- And some generic package information

Then let the cluster compile it and search for files it provides/requires and which ones need to go in the %files
directive (in rpm atleast) then you don’t have to worry about it anymore and making new packages would go a lot
faster if the compile cluster could determine those things. For that it also needs to be ble to determine the code
it’s written in, what includes are being used and a ton of other things to check but that’s all possible. Extremely
hard but possible to make and would probably require years before it’s complete. Now the best thing would be that
if a package has been added to the database that any other participating distribution in that database can also use
that same package without making any modifications. Oke.. it (should have) the ability to include it’s own patches
or things like that.. Example: If you would make a K3B package for a EU based distribution you can just include the
mp3 support (and some other things) but if you make it for an USA based dist those things will likely need to be
turned off because of possible patent lawsuits. But in general the idea is that you have one place for all of it
and any dist can use it once it has been made once!

Now for this to happen a few other things need to happen first.
- All distribution (that participate) need to agree on the locations where they place files (libraries, images etc.)
- They all need to make deals on the standards they want and don’t want to use
- NO bypasses to fix something that another dist doesn’t have yet.. if it means it could break packages
- And i’m sure there is a LOT more

This will also have a few downsides for dists that participate.. they will all have to make the same changes in order
to stay compatible with each other so that all those packages can still be used on all dists but i’m sure that
it’s something that the dist people can work out. There will also be dists that will likely refuse to join because
they simply disagree with some of the choises or whatever reason.. but i expect that to be just a handfull of
dists (mostly the paid ones i guess).

Gnome 2.22 introduced quite a few new features and not all of them are working nicely.
The automatic adjusting of the brightness in Gnome 2.22 is a good example of a horrible feature. The idea is good but it simply isn’t working out, at least on my notebook, so therefore it’s best to just turn it off.

In the “Power Management Settings” is a option to turn it off, or that’s what you would think judging the name. The setting is: “Dim display when idle”. Turning that off won’t help a bit. might be a bug, might be intentional, but it’s not working.

The real trick to turn this setting off is in the gconf settings. In your distribution install the package: “gconf-editor” (in fedora it’s with “yum -y install gconf-editor”).

Now press ALT+F2 and type: gconf-editor. The editor will popup. Now go to this location: /apps/gnome-power-manager/backlight/enable and you should see something like this:

Uncheck the “enable” and your done. No more irritating backlight changes.

Hope that helped for you,
Mark.