Linux Audo/Video FAQ Development

[greensh]

First off, I want to congratulate everyone here on the interesting articles and links being posted... and my apologies. I've been delinquent on posting (please don't spank me) because I didn't receive regular emails that anyone posted here. Okay now for the first goodie. This is my little guide on a complete/correct installation of MPlayer. You can goto www.mplayerhq.hu and get the latest pre3 or opt like I do for the bleeding edge CVS version (for that just D/L the latest CVS snapshot tarball). Then get the other packages I list in this guide from www.freshmeat.net and/or divx.com, etc. I don't provide specifics for those installs, but ask questions here if you get stuck... this is just covering MPlayer and is everything I can remember going through on Yoper after a fresh install. Following will be a section of my encoding script if there's any interest. It handles the toughest video I've seen yet; NTSC/mixed music videos and movies (clips) are not even challenging )

Installation of MPlayer/Mencoder

condensed version so you might not need to RTFM (Read The 'Fine' Manual)

install -d /usr/lib/win32
tar zxvf extralite.tar.gz
tar jxvf win32codecs.tar.bz2

Reorganize the win32 directory (if necessary) so it's the parent and change all ownership/permissions. Using mc for this is much easier.

Install the following codecs (if necessary); DirectFB, lame, xvid, libdv, divx5

Install libdvdcss, libdvdread, libdvdnav, chaplin, and rar

tar jxvf MPlayer-XXXX.tar.bz2
unzip MPlayer-XXXX-patch.zip
mv config ~/.mplayer
unset CFLAGS
sudo chmod 777 /dev/dvd
sudo chmod 777 /dev/dsp
sudo chmod 777 /dev/dsp1
sudo chmod 777 /dev/rtc
sudo chmod 666 /dev/fb0
unset CFLAGS
./configure --prefix=/usr --confdir=/etc/mplayer --enable-largefiles \
--disable-tv --enable-menu --enable-gui --enable-shared-pp --disable-sighandler \
--with-freetype-config=/usr/bin --with-reallibdir=/usr/lib/win32

make
make install (as root)

mkdir ~/.mplayer
cp etc/codecs.conf ~/.mplayer
cp etc/example.conf ~/.mplayer/example.conf
cp etc/input.conf ~/.mplayer/input.conf
cp etc/example.conf ~/.mplayer/config (edit this file to suit your setup)

extract a font directory to ~/.mplayer/font
(where 14 is the font size. You can chose your font size of 14, 18, 24 or 28)

tar jxvf font-arial-iso-8859-1.tar.bz2

(or use this instead, but not recommended):
ln -sf /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/TTF/luxisri.ttf ~/.mplayer/subfont.ttf

unzip a skin to ~/.mplayer/Skin/default

dmesg | grep DVD
ln -s /dev/<dvd drive> /dev/dvd
chmod 666 /dev/<dvd drive>
chmod 777 /dev/dsp
chmod 666 /dev/fb0
chmod 777 /dev/rtc

Ensure no sound servers (i.e. Arts in KDE) are active or these will prevent OSS from working with /dev/dsp!

Add the following two lines into /etc/rc.d/sysinit.rc:

#RTC (Real Time Clock)
echo 1024 > /proc/sys/dev/rtc/max-user-freq

You need these for avidemux:

mad-0.14.2b.tar.gz
a52dec-0.7.4.tar.gz

[shevegen]

Today I switched to Linux entirely (got tired of Windows finally..), a bit prematurely as I was using Debian Woody 3.r2 on my old 1999 PC to test extensively before making a full transition(somehow I havent got the X Server to work yet on the debian PC, but its cool to work with c++ and perl there and i am addicted to simple but powerful things, this way IMO you learn most and fastest... well except for the X-Window stuff... ), and am now sitting on my somewhat newer Athlon with Suse 8.2 (eh, a bit old, but the graphical UI works nicely and i browse with firefox so its fine for me).


I know quite some things about encoding etc under Windows and Xvid, but am a bit lost with Linux as there is so much more INFORMATION. q

Enough of my idle self-chatting.

* _I_ think that a FAQ for encoding etc... Under Linux is a perfect idea - but __without__ chatting about distributions, please.

* Also, any FAQ should include many good URLs. Well, if some URL seems to be not good enough, dont include it... but be sure to include some good resources.

* I would go for a WIKI (i love wiki) ___BUT___ it should include a ("static") CORE html page which is maintained by few people, like in a forum thread here (just switch to the Xvid's faq in this forum, this is quite what i mean).

I can help out - or try to help out - with whatever is necessary including mirroring the FAQ and contributing to a knowledge base, but right now i am the one who must learn before i can try to be a teacher....

[hans-jürgen]

Originally posted by jggimi
[*]A/V players
[*]MPEG-4 video tools
[*]Audio transcoding tools

There are two Wiki pages on Audiocoding.com that give a short overview about these topics, so I thought I might add them here:

http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/w...MPEG-4+players and
http://www.audiocoding.com/modules/w...+for+Linux/BSD also mentioning multimedia players like Mplayer, VLC, Xine, Real and Helix Player etc. Furthermore there are pages about the different MPEG standards with many links to sites like the official FAQs from the MPEG and others.

The new FAAC project page on Freshmeat.net offers an overview of Linux multimedia software using the AAC encoder and/or decoder FAAD2 in the Dependencies section and provides links to existing ports, RPMs and source code packages:

http://freshmeat.net/projects/faac/

Freshmeat also lists the available software projects (mainly for Unix, Linux and Mac OS X) in different categories, so having a look at their multimedia/video/audio folders will bring up some useful applications, too.

[shevegen]

very good, i start contributing to them (made locale links on my video faq site to not forget it, bookmarks tend to get messy if i use them )

hope i be an avid and quite good linux user in 2 or 3 weeks of activity

[BITS]

i have to agree with a couple here, ANOTHER "how to install linux" guide is EXTREMELY not needed. im suprised i dont see "how to install linux" spam in my email...its so abundant.

i say focus on nothing but the a/v. i mean, you really dont see people here asking how do i install windows? its just not related to these topics. and if users cant figure out how to install Linux from the information available on the net already, then imagine how unmotivated they are. you going to be the entire forums tech support for a large amount of distros installed, configured, and trouble shooting them in many different ways? i'll pass on that.

i would really love to see a capturing faq for linux, ive read a couple, but ive never had hardware that i liked enough to use that would run. to me if you can pull off analogue capturing, or .dv capturing on the Linux platform, it would seem like you would get a grip pretty quickly. ive never tried capturing yet on linux. ripping a dvd is easy, but authoring i have never seen on linux (excluding emulating a app).

in the end though i always come to this, if you can get it done already on one platform, then use it. dont fix it if it isnt broke.

what i would REALLY like to see, is a mp4 authoring application on linux. im willing FOR_SURE to throw in my extrememly limited C or java skills to dev one of those...that would be nice. Hell, i havent even seen a mp4 creation guide for linux, how about one of those?

[hans-jürgen]

Originally posted by BITS
what i would REALLY like to see, is a mp4 authoring application on linux. im willing FOR_SURE to throw in my extrememly limited C or java skills to dev one of those...that would be nice. Hell, i havent even seen a mp4 creation guide for linux, how about one of those?

MPEG-4 on Linux has been the "business" of the MPEG4IP project for a long time now, so you will find some useful applications and also documentation on their site and forum. Since the documentation hasn't been very good and hard to find in the past, there are some external guides for MPEG4IP like the one from Everwicked.com and an article in the Linux Journal, but both are outdated already (e.g. with their recommended FAAC settings).

Anyhow, you can capture live video and audio with mp4live and either write MP4 files with it or send the bitstream through RTSP to the internet. They also offer a well-known file muxer called mp4creator, but no MP4 editor. AVI transcoding can be done with a Linux script called mp4encode, but this is not their main interest, since Cisco (the company behind MPEG4IP) is all into internet live streaming of course.

Another open source MPEG-4 project is GPAC, they started with Windows versions and have ported their player and muxer to Linux in the meantime, as far as I know.

The IBM Toolkit for MPEG-4 is platform independent, because they use a Java VM for their freeware applications (player and muxer), but they are not open source.

Last but not least you can also create MP4 files with VLC, Mplayer and probably some other multimedia players that use the ffmpeg library (not sure about Xine).

[dwflo]

May I add another distro? Try SimplyMEPIS 2004.4, or an earlier version.

I am new to Linux, but I get so frustrated with Windoze, I wanted something better, got tired of all the "fixes and patches".

I downloaded all the distros I could get from FreeBSD, to Suse. They all were difficult simple to install, but either did not function properly after rebooting, or left me at a console. Not having enough knowledge of the Linux commands for the different consoles, I wanted an installation the was GUI based.

The SimplyMEPIS CD is a "Live" version that can be installed to a hard drive. There is an installation utiliy available in KDE.

I found a problem with my C-Media sound card not working in KDE. Attempting to get the problem solved, using the 2004.4 release.
Video works fine, but haven't used the provided software to capture. Still learning the ropes.

There is plenty of software installed from multimedia players to CD/DVD burners. And plenty others to download for DVD authoring, to ripping. The only problem with some software, is getting it installed. A lot have to be compiled before they can be installed. Others come in "Packages" that are installed with a package handeling utility.

Hope this info is of some value.

[Sir Integral Hellsing]

dwflo: FreeBSD isn't a Linux Distribution, it's a operating syste of it's own, but it is similar to Linux in many ways.

My opinion on this matter is that you should skip everything regarding the OS, and focus on applications.
For example, someone could write a guide about how to make an XviD avi, someone could write a SVCD guide, someone else a capturing guide etc.
Personally I'm looking for the best way to do a DVD9->DVD5 rip and would much appreciate if someone wrote a guide on how to do it.
When I'm sufring on Linux forums I often feel that some people have a far greater experience with Linux than with Multimedia/Video.
It'd be great If you Guru's here on Doom9 could write some guides, I would gladly contribute but I'm not using Linux atm, due to a shared family PC

[KpeX]

I've been working on the FAQ lately, one section I have little to zero experience with is capturing. If anyone is interesed in writing a FAQ section on either analog or DVB capturing (or both), feel free to post it here or PM me. Remember to include what hardware works well, helpful utilities (including installation steps if necessary), and any other tips and tricks you'd find helpful. Keep in mind that the target is not to explain all the ins and outs of capturing, but rather to transition someone who already has a basic knowledge of capturing to a linux/unix environment.

[rootkit]

Part 8, audio encoding

i have an eAAC+ encoder here: http://teknoraver.campuslife.it/software/mp4tools/

Cheers,
Matteo

[fisher mathew]

Hi, I certainly agree with you. Your advice is really very helpful for us.

Thanks a lot!

[lpn1160]

DVD9->DVD5

http://www.linuxquestions.org/linux/..._to_DVD5_guide
with some tweaking this is the way I still do, DVD9->DVD5. Has,does & will continue working for me
enjoy