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Media Solutions Ubuntu

Joining Videos using Mencoder

Mencoder is an extremely powerful video converter that is capable of converting video from almost any format to any other format.  One of the simplest exercises to do with Mencoder involves joining two videos to make a single video.

To join the videos all you need are the videos and Mencoder installed on your system.  You can install Mencoder on your Ubuntu box using the command

sudo apt-get install mencoder

Now lets say you plan to join videos a.mpg and b.mpg to a video c.mpg

Go to the command line (to the folder containing the videos) and execute the command –

mencoder a.mpg b.mpg -ovc copy -oac copy -o c.mpg

Thats it!  You can join more videos with a single shot but remember that the order in which you have listed the videos the final video will be created in the same order.

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Media Open Source Solutions

Mplayer without Text

I upgraded my desktop to Kubuntu Karmic 9.10 yesterday and realized an unique problem. There was no text displayed in the OSD(On Screen Display).

Mplayer without Text

If you open the file in command prompt mode you will see the following message:

subtitle font: load_sub_face failed.

The reason for was basically that Mplayer could not find the required font file to display the text. To solve the problem you need to open the .mplayer directory in your home directory. And do one of the two following things:

  1. Copy any font file of your choice to that directory and rename it subfont.ttf (You will find fonts at /usr/share/fonts)
  2. Open the config file in the .mplayer directory and add the following lines:
    font=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Times_New_Roman.ttf
    subfont-text-scale=2.5

Ps: You can replace the link to your favourite font after the font= command.  Also using Method 2 will let you even set the size of the font

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Categories
Device Open Source Solutions

Downloading Garmin GPS Data in Ubuntu

One of the simplest ways to download Track, Waypoint and Route information from your Garmin GPS in Ubuntu is using gpsbabel.

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Install gpsbabel via apt-get

sudo apt-get install gpsbabel

Connect the gps via the cable provided to the serial port of the computer or via a serial to USB converter to the USB port on your desktop/notebook.  To extract the infrormation all you need to do is, execute the following command:

gpsbabel -r -t -w -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o gpx -F data.gpx

The above command copies Routes(-r), Tracks(-t) and Waypoints(-w) from a garmin device (-i garmin) located at Serial-USB interface (-f /dev/ttyUSB0) and saves the info (-o) in the standard gps format (gpx) in the file data.gpx. You can omit the information you dont require and even choose other fromats like kml for google earth:

gpsbabel -r -t -w -i garmin -f /dev/ttyUSB0 -o kml -F data.kml

You should now have a file “data.gpx” which can be used to retrive or map your gps data.

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Solutions Web

AdBlock for Opera 10

If you are like me and totally obsessed with Opera 10, but still a new user to the browser, then you might be wondering how to do a few things on it. One of my biggest problems was to get an Ad Block system up and running in the browser. A little web search gave me the way to do it.

Here are my notes:

  • Opera requires you to save a java script file that does the adblocking for it.  I found one here
  • Save the file into a folder of your choice.  I suggest creating a new folder as you will need to specify the folder not the file in future steps
  • Open Opera and hit “Alt – P”
  • In the corresponding dialog, click on the advanced tab
  • Click on “JavaScript Options…”
  • Hit “Choose” and navigate to the folder where you stored the file and hit “Ok”
  • You might need to refresh the pages for the adblock to take effect.
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Media Open Source Solutions

XBMC – No Cast Info from IMDB

XBMC
Image via Wikipedia

If you have been using the latest release of XBMC you might have noticed that XBMC does not seem to pick up the cast information of a movie from IMDB.  The problem here is that Imdb recently made minor changes to its api  and the infomation we are looking for is not available in the same location.

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The Fix

You just need to open the imdb.xml file in “/usr/share/xbmc/system/scrapers/video/” directory in linux systems(you will need to open the file as the superuser: sudo nano/usr/share/xbmc/system/scrapers/video/imdb.xml ) and “system/scrapers/video/” directory under your Xbmc installation directory in Windows.

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