Video containers are shit
Thu, 08 Oct 2009 14:51 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
This is going to be a rant, so skip it if you don't care.
Video playback is a pain in the ass. It's not just about codecs and players, but the video containers themselves are shit. I only had one container that has not caused problems yet. Everything else bugged sooner or later.
WMV regularly fails to resume video playback after pause in Media Player Classic. No idea why, but pause just doesn't work here.
MP4 caused some weird problems in mplayer, where the video length is all wrong and the audio and video go out of sync. No idea what's wrong with those shitty files, but I pretty much can't watch those files like this. And to make matters worse, mplayer is the only video player that has decent performance on Linux with Compiz running. The only way to fix these files was to remux them to MKV.
AVI files sometimes come without an index, requiring rebuilding of said index. I just don't get how a encoder can fuck up a video so much that it's unplayable on some players. And why doesn't anyone check before redistributing this files?
The only container I'm happy with is Matroska (MKV). The playback works in every player I use and I have yet to encounter shitty behaviour in any player.
Tags: mkv avi mp4 wmv video mplayer
checkcrc
Fri, 04 Sep 2009 14:32 - Daniel - Other - Comments (0)
Tags: checkcrc crc32 checksum c gcc automake autoconf gnu gpl v3 make
eee PCs Boot Booster
Thu, 03 Sep 2009 13:12 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
All eee PCs have a feature called Boot Booster. This caches the Bios and Video Bios onto the HDD and speeds up booting by a few seconds.
To enable it you have to set up a primary partition on the first HDD with at least 8 MB and the type code 0xEF.
After the next reboot the Bios will cache itself into this partition and a new option is available in the Boot options called Boot Booster. Enable it and the eee PC will skill Bios loading and Bios configuration and will directly load the Boot Loader.
Tags: bios eee asus
Debian for eee PC
Wed, 02 Sep 2009 15:53 - Daniel - Other - Comments (2)
I used fluxflux for quite some time on my eee Pc, but I didn't really like the PCLinuxOS it was based on. It worked quite well for some time, but the last release is kinda aged and after upgrading the OS I had some serious problems. Since I prefer Debian based systems anyway I took a quick look at Debian Lenny and Ubuntu.
Ubuntu has a special version for netbooks called Ubuntu Netbook Remix. It's not as heavy as a full Ubuntu install, but it's still quite big. Also I has a few problems with the eee 701.
Debian on the other hand can be installed with only a minimum system that uses very little space (I know, ubuntu can do that too with it's alternate installer CDs) and supports pretty much everything on the eee 701 thanks to the work of the DebianEeePC Project.
Installing it is very simple. Just follow the steps of the HowTo. I installed just the standard system and later added the x.org, gnome-core, gdm, network-manager and iceweasel by hand. After that the OS install is just about 1 GB and some stuff even is optional. For example you can skip gdm and network-manager tofree a few MB if you don't need a fancy graphical login and manage your connections manually.
The only thing that doesn't work at the moment is changing the volume with the function keys, but I don't really need that anyway.
To sum it up, Debian on the eee PC is very nice. Boot time is lightning fast and the hardware works "out of the box". If you think about installing another OS on your eee PC, Debian would be a good choise.
Tags: linux ubuntu fluxflux debian asus eee
irssi and character encoding
Tue, 01 Sep 2009 01:30 - Daniel - Other - Comments (0)
I just spend way to much time trying to get irssi to join a channel with an umlaut in it's name. After trying about every combination of /recode ans /set recode* settings I could think about, checking if the encoding of every system and terminal emulator is correct and set to utf-8 and trying to start screen w/ and w/o -U I finally find something working
Setting the charset of gnome-terminal to iso-8859-1 produces horrible, unreadable Mojibake, but I can finally join the channel. After adding the channel to the autoconnect list I can join this channel w/o needing to switch the charset of gnome-terminal.
The channel name still looks messed up, but sending and receving special characters works, so I guess I can call it a success.
Charset problems just suck.
Tags: character set charset irssi irc