Linux and the Insignia Pilot Video MP3 Player

Last month I picked myself up an 8GB Insignia Pilot video MP3 player from Best Buy for Christmas.

I looked at a number of MP3 players before deciding on the Insignia Pilot. I had two main requirements: it had to work with Linux and it had to support Ogg Vorbis audio. The Insignia Pilot does both of these and more. It supports an impressive list of formats: MP3, WMA, WMA Lossless, WMA DRM, WMA Pro, OGG, WAV, Audible, MPEG4 (30 fps), WMV (30 fps) and JPEG.

The Insignia Pilot supports 320x240 MPEG4 video at 30 fps. Very nice. The installation CD includes a Windows based application that will convert video clips and images into a format compatible with the Pilot. This is great if you are running Windows, however, not so helpful if you are running Linux.

Over the next few days I learned more about video codecs and encoding than I had planned to. The Anything But iPod site was a great source of information and thanks in part to this initial thread on supported video formats, MPlayer and hours of reading the documentation for MEncoder and Xvid followed by trial and error I have a workable solution.

First copy the DVD (which you own) to your hard drive using the following,

mplayer dvd://1 -dumpstream -dumpfile dump.vob

Next is the encoding process. The Pilot's screen is 320x240, however, if the DVD is in widescreen format and you want to preserve the ratio you need to scale the video to 320x176 instead.

mencoder dump.vob -oac mp3lame -lameopts cbr:br=96 -srate 44100 -af resample=44100:0:0 -af volume=20 \ 
-ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=384 -sws 2 -vf scale=320:176,harddup \
-noskip -skiplimit 1 -ffourcc XVID -ofps 29.97 -o output.avi

With the above settings I can encode the Matrix to 481.1 MB. For me, these settings provide a reasonable trade off of size over quality. If one wants a slightly higher quality you can change the audio and video bitrates to cbr:br=128 and vbitrate=512 respectively.

Linuxfest Northwest 2007 - Bellingham, WA

PythonDog and I once again made the yearly trek to Bellingham, WA for Linuxfest Northwest. This year's Fest spanned two days rather than the usual one and, in my opinion, it continues to get better each time.

The presentations I attended were varied:

• Jabber with ejabberd - Aaron Klemm, DigiPen Institute of Technology
• Open sourcing Second Life - Rob Lanphier and Phoenix Linden, Linden Lab
• From HTML to XUL, Web to Desktop - Shane Caraveo, ActiveState
• Why Plone? (An Intro) - Brian Gershon and Andrew Burkhalter, Seattle Plone Users Group
• Up and Running (Fast) - Andy Carrel, Google
• One Laptop Per Child - Jesse Keating, Red Hat
• How Sites Scale Out - Brian Aker, MySQL AB

My favorite sessions were by Linden Lab (Second Life), Google (Up and Running), Red Hat (OLPC) and MySQL (How Sites Scale Out).

Although I do not consider myself much of a virtual socialite, the concept of what Linden Lab is doing with Second Life appeals to a part of me. It is a social medium and, like any medium, it allows the creative an outlet to express oneself and hopefully, in turn, reach a receptive audience.

Listening to what Andy Carrel had to say about Google and the daily issues they face with the vast amounts of hardware and data is mind boggling. One of the things he said that set me thinking was that of programmer effectiveness. Google engineers create services that run on building-sized computing platforms. Their computer is made up of thousands of CPUs, lots of DRAM, networking devices, and disk drives. I consider myself fortunate if I have a second server to help load balance a service.

Jesse Keating with Red Hat gave a great presentation on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. The little green laptop is a marvel of engineering and a testiment to what they are trying to accomplish considering who their target audience is - the third world, underdeveloped countries, kids. Each child gets their own laptop to take home and bring back to school. The short and long term implications of what this could mean for their development as individuals and a nation is awe inspiring.

Next year's Linuxfest is already on my calendar. I can't wait.

Fedora Core 6 - GeForce3 Ti 200

I upgraded my main home computer to Fedora Core 6 (FC6) this past weekend. It has faithfully run Fedora Core 3 for the last couple of years, however, I was so impressed with FC6 on my laptop I decided to update the main computer as well.

After completing the installation I usually look to The Unofficial Fedora FAQ for answers on the usual little quirks that come with each release, however, they appear to have not updated the site for FC6. Instead, I turned to Fedora Core 6 Tips and Tricks for quick references to installing the most popular free add-on software packages.

The first thing I always do after a fresh install is update my yum configuration to include the livna and freshrpms repositories,

rpm -ihv http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedora/linux/6/i386/RPMS.freshrpms/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm
rpm -ihv http://rpm.livna.org/fedora/6/i386/livna-release-6-1.noarch.rpm

Installing Xine DVD Player
With the above repositories setup, installing the Xine Video Player is as simple as entering the following yum statement,

yum install xine xine-lib-extras-nonfree libdvdcss

and letting it resolve the other package dependencies. The libdvdcss library is what allows one to play commercial DVD movies.

Installing the Nvidia Drivers
One of my other motivations for upgrading to FC6 was the new OpenGL accelerated desktop effects provided by Compiz. Upon grabbing the latest drivers from Nvidia I discovered that my video card is now listed as "legacy" and is no longer supported in the most recent driver downloads. I read that Compiz needs at least version 96xx of the Nvidia drivers to work. I had to try several different ones until I found that the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9631-pkg1.run package worked correctly.

My final modified xorg.conf configuration file is below which contains the necessary entries to add the Nvidia OpenGL drivers as well as the transparency effects.

# Xorg configuration created by system-config-display

Section "ServerLayout"
        Identifier     "single head configuration"
        Screen      0  "Screen0" 0 0
        InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
EndSection

Section "Module"
        Load  "dbe"
        Load  "extmod"
        Load  "type1"
        Load  "freetype"
        Load  "glx"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Identifier  "Keyboard0"
        Driver      "kbd"
        Option      "XkbModel" "pc105"
        Option      "XkbLayout" "us"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "nvidia"
        VendorName  "NVIDIA Corporation"
        Option      "AddARGBGLXVisuals" "True"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        DefaultDepth     24
        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     24
        EndSubSection
EndSection

I am still amazed it runs as well as it does on my aging Pentium III 866 Mhz.

X-Plane 8.50 for Linux - No Sound

Beginning with the last couple of release candidates and then the final release of X-Plane 8.50 for Linux I was dismayed to discover I no longer had sound. Thanks to a thread I found on forums.x-plane.org it turned out to be a problem easily corrected by upgrading my OpenAL audio API to the latest version.

I started X-Plane and placed myself at CYVR (Vancouver International). Once again I could hear the rain pelting against the windscreen of my 172.

CYVR 180500Z 09009KT 10SM -SHRA FEW020 BKN045 OVC060 07/07 A3010 RMK SC2SC4SC2 SLP193

As of February 11, 2006 the most current version of OpenAL is openal-0.0.8-1.

Fedora Core 6

I downloaded and installed the latest offering from the Fedora Project this past weekend: Fedora Core 6 "Zod". For me the fastest mirror continues to be the one graciously provided by Telus in Canada. As with the last Fedora release, this one installed without a problem on my Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 notebook. Sound and wireless networking worked perfectly out of the box.

In addition to being one of the slickest looking releases, it appears to run faster than Core 5, which was even faster than Core 4. It is amazing to me, and a testiment to open source, that each release of an operating system can offer more in terms of features, yet still run more efficiently on my aging Pentium III notebook than the previous version. Wouldn't it be nice is all operating systems worked that way?

Linuxfest Northwest 2005

This past weekend I attended Linuxfest Northwest in Bellingham, WA with a buddy of mine who came down from Canada. There was an exhibit room set up with various vendors and groups as well as a packed presentation schedule with events running throughout the day.

Although there were a number of speakers I would have liked to have heard, we only had time to sit in on three. All three represented great achievements in open source development. The three presentations we attended were:

• Clam AntiVirus - Clam AntiVirus is a GPL anti-virus toolkit for UNIX. Its main purpose is in the integration with mail servers for the purposes of attachment scanning.
• Asterisk - Asterisk is a complete PBX in software. It runs on Linux and provides all of the features you would expect from a PBX and more.
• MythTV - MythTV is a suite of programs that allow you to build the mythical home media convergence box on your own using Open Source software and operating systems.

They were all good presentations and it was easy to see that a lot of work has gone into each project to bring it to the standard it shares today. I personally can't wait to find a spare computer to set up a MythTV box and hopefully rid myself of the numerous VHS tapes that are scattered around the living room.

Fedora Core 3 Sound Problems

What I discovered after my previous post is that while I now had sound on my Toshiba 4600, it sounded like garbage. I started up XMMS to listen to a few oggs and when I turned up the volume the music came across fuzzy and distorted. No amount of fussing with the mixer controls or XMMS would correct it.

I discovered that going into the preferences (Ctl+P) of XMMS the Output Plugin was set on "eSound" and switching it to the "ALSA" driver fixed the sound and made it crystal clear.

Fedora Core 3 on Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600

I recently upgraded my notebook from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora Core 3. It was a smooth install with the exception of two common annoyances: no sound and no wireless network connection. This problem was different from my Fedora Core 2 installation on the notebook in which it did not even see the wireless card, and having no time to fuss with it, I re-installed FC1. In FC3 both the Intel 82801BA/BAM AC'97 audio card and the internal Intersil PRISM2 wireless card were detected, however, I could not activate them.

After searching the Fedora Forum I came across this link in which greeners posted a solution which worked on his 4600. Apparently there is a problem with IRQ 11 being used by the ACPI module and it interferes with both the sound card and the wireless NIC interface. The solution is to add an option to the kernel load statement in the grub loader configuration.

Edit the /etc/grub.conf file and append "pci=noacpi" to the end of the kernel line as illustrated below:

title Fedora Core (2.6.9-1.667)
        root (hd0,0)
        kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.9-1.667 ro root=LABEL=/1 rhgb quiet pci=noacpi
        initrd /initrd-2.6.9-1.667.img

Reboot the notebook and you should have a working sound card now. To enable the wireless card I simply went into the Network Configuration and added a new "Wireless Device" device type as eth1.

Fedora Core 3 and PyOpenGL 2.0 Installation

According to the website, PyOpenGL "is a cross platform Python binding to OpenGL and related APIs." Since I have started playing around a bit with Python this new year I was curious to see how the language could be used for graphics, and specifically, 3D graphic development. In the past I have tinkered with OpenGL a bit, however, it has usually been by means of programming under C and using SDL as the library.

I was a little daunted after viewing the installation page and seeing what needed to be done, however, being new to Python I was pleasantly suprised to find that most of the OpenGLContext dependencies could simply being installed by entering,

python setup.py install

after untarring the archives into a temporary directory. It doesn't get much easier than that.

Pay close attention to the requirement for GLUT 3.7. On Fedora Core 3 RedHat has taken to installing freeglut, which is a completely open sourced alternative to the OpenGL Utility Toolkit (GLUT). In theory, it should be a fairly complete drop-in replacement for GLUT, however, I could not get PyOpenGL to install with it on my system. I read a few posts mostly pertaining to Fedora Core 2 and similar issues and with the latest alpha release of PyOpenGL-2.0.2.01.tar.gz the author has attempted to have the installation procedure detect the presence of freeglut, however, I was not able to get it to work.

In the end I uninstalled freeglut, downloaded and installed GLUT 3.7 from source and then reinstalled the latest alpha release of PyOpenGL. After receiving no further errors, I went into "/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/OpenGL/Demo/GLUT" and typed in,

python gears.py

and voila! I had hardware accelerated rotating gears doing about 1400+ fps on my Pentium III 866.

Fedora Core 3 and Nvidia

I have had the Fedora Core 3 CDs burned almost since they came out and have been waiting for an ideal time to upgrade the Fedora Core 1 install on my desktop. Since there never is an ideal time to do a system upgrade I decided to let it run while working on my laptop today.

If you are doing the same for the first time I strongly recommend you follow the Fedora Core 3 Installation Notes as it is a valuable reference and can help you avoid a few pitfalls. I had the page bookmarked and never bothered to read it until after I had installed FC3. Read the notes before you install. Seriously.

The install went great and I immediately downloaded the latest Nvidia linux display driver 1.0-6629, read their installation notes and proceeded. After rebooting the result was a system that would hang on the message, "Configuring kernel parameters." If left alone the system would eventually boot to a login prompt. After a brief panicked search on Google I found this reference which mostly worked for me.

What I did to solve the problem and get FC3 back into a graphical state was modify the above to this:

1. Interrupt GRUB from booting by pressing any key, edit the bootparameters by pressing the "e"-key, and remove the "rhgb"-parameter from the boot parameters. Then continue booting normally. (This will skip the graphical boot in Fedora.)
2. Fedora might complain about not being able to the graphical display, however, ignore it and cancel all questions until you get to the login prompt.
3. Login as root, and enter "/sbin/modprobe nvidia" to load the nvidia-module.
4. Enter "cp -a /dev/nvidia* /etc/udev/devices/"
5. Finally, modify the /etc/rc.local file using a text editor (eg. "vi /etc/rc.local") and at the end of the file add the line, "/sbin/modprobe nvidia" This should fix the boot problem.
6. Save and exit and you should be back at the command prompt.
7. Reboot the system and you should be back in business

I have seen posts in the meantime that suggest using RedHat's up2date to update the udev packages before applying the Nvidia driver solve a lot of the problems and should make the above unnecessary especially step 4 above as that is the only way to make the changes stick through a reboot.