Zen of Linux

Not everyone is using *nix OS on their computers. Recently, I had a problem with another machine that was stuck in an endless loop of the login screen, completely preventing a proper startup of the machine.
The story was that the machine got a few hardware problems after transport which lead to DRAM replacement and changes […]

While wanting to use DVD::Rip, Thoggen DVD Ripper and GnomeBaker to copy (or backup) a DVD today, I encountered the strange “Error trying to open: device or resource busy” on my Ubuntu box today.
I solved this by freeing the dvd drive from system access with:
sudo umount /dev/sr0
and everything worked. BTW: I recommend GnomeBaker for easy […]

Live http streaming (specs here) is essentially a number of short video segments (~10 seconds each) and a permanently updated index file (.m3u8) that tells the iPhone where to fetch the next segment. Each segment is x264 video in a mpeg ts container.
You can setup a working streaming chain using ffmpeg as input, a segmenter […]

Compiling a recent/up-to-date vlc from source, from the latest SVN can be a pain as vlc has LOTS of dependencies. It can be, but it must not. Below I’m goint to present a number of strategies to take the hurdles and get a (more of less) working version of a recent vlc.
I’d like you to […]

When you use ffmpeg to, for example, extract audio and video as seperate streams, or if you import it into Blender’s fabulous NLE, the Sequence Editor, you might encounter a different length of the audio and video part of the video. Call this audio video offset, audio video mismatch or simply audio video runtime/length difference […]

This post is meant as a FAQ, an introductory guide and a general reference manual for  streaming video with ffmpeg’s FFserver. It’s is mainly the stuff I found out while setting up ffserver myself, and fills in some bits the official docs leave out.
Be sure to use a very up-to-date version (and proper combination) of […]

Before you start, it might be useful to again read the post How do I compile stuff.
Okay, here is how you build a recent binary of ffmpeg from source. Please be aware that configure switches and library neames tend to change over time and as this post ages might need adjustment.
We will need a very […]

Having an eye on recent developments in the field of storage, data archival and file systems, I think one can say that one of the more interesting approaches towards saving data on disk is the idea to flatten folder hierarchies and in turn introduce a filesystem that is based on tags. Each file can be […]

Recently, while using an USB memory stick formatted in FAT32, I accidentally deleted a few files. My first idea while sitting on a Windows machine was to seek for a simple utility from the DOS world to get the files back. I thought it would be a no-brainer, but after wading through tons of Google […]

Recently, I installed a dual-boot OS on a brand-new laptop, absolutely fresh system, no OS, no formatted disc. I started with Microsoft XP and after the basic install was complete, I added vlc-0.9.9 to test DVD playback. Surprise: I did not work. Although vlc should be able to playback a DVD without any further decryption […]