So I just installed Debian on my laptop by setting up a DHCP and TFTP server on my desktop, and booting the installer through PXE, having the entire distro downloaded straight through without needing a single CD, and my e-penis is now bigger because of it.
Who doesn't love an OS that takes half a day to "try" to get a scroll wheel working to no avail on their bluetooth mouse =D . I work at a linux provider and I'm trying to get my Asus laptop all set up. Everything else is fine now, I just have no sound. To be more specific I have a M51SN Mobo, with an intel chipset and I use a realtek audio driver in my windows side, but it does not work on linux but it looks like it has the right name for the audio. Is there further tweaking in yast I can do? or should i blow that up in yast and reinstall something?
Say I'm looking for files beneath the current working directory that end in EITHER
a.avi
or
g.avi
Why doesn't
ls -R | grep -i a\|g.avi
work? What I really want to do is something like (a|g).avi but then I get syntax errors; I guess grep doesn't like parenthesis. I suppose I could just use [ag] but it seems like this should work and now it's bugging me.
Well firstly because '\|' means literal '|' so unless you have a file called a|g.avi its not going to work.
On the other hand, "ls -R | grep -i '[ag].avi' " will work fine.
But you're asking for a better example involving the OR operator |, so let's use better variables.
Instead of a.avi and g.avi let's have apple.avi and grape.avi
Firstly, let's use egrep instead of grep to get full regex syntax.
Secondly, let's put it in single quotes so we don't have shell trying to parse ( or piping with |.
Afterwards we can comfortably use the command: egrep -i '(apple|grape).avi'
Was that what you were looking for?
EDIT: Gah, END in a.avi or g.avi.
Okay, use this: egrep -i '(a|g).avi$'
Ok, single quotes. That's what I was looking for. And yeah, the reason I was using the escape character was that the shell kept trying to parse | as a pipe, and I couldn't really think of anything else. Thanks!
Note that I have no useful reason at all for wanting to do this, I just like playing around with the shell and regexps and I figure someday it'll come in handy.
Ok guys I am really new to this Linux world (in fact this is my first Linux install) and I am having a lot of trouble getting xubuntu to run on my dads old IBM thinkpad (390E, 333ghz, 256mb). When I place the live cd in the computer the status bar appears and it loads through but when it gets to the desktop it freezes, it doesn't even show the two taskbars...just the cursor and and a red themed wallapaper...and the cursor is stuck . I have no idea what the problem is, should I try using a different version of xubuntu? I was trying Hardy Heron atm, maybe I should use Dapper Drake instead? or does it even matter what version I use? ... please any help on this will be appreciated, I want to get this old geezer up and running...walking as soon as possible.
I think with only 256MB ram you're going to have a lot of trouble running the livecd. You'll need to use the alternative install disc to run a text-based installer. Once it's installed it should run decently.
rocka4him... Sounds familiar. :-D
If the alternate install disk has issues also, try burning it at a lower speed. Might also be worth verifying the MD5SUM to make sure the file is complete.
I don't think you told me that the computer was 333MHz when I recommended Xubuntu. After installing, look into using IceWM. It's more minimalist than XFCE4, but faster. Similarly, Opera will also be a lot snappier than Firefox.
I searched the thread, and I noticed some other people had flash difficulties, and I'm running into something similar.
I want to use my PS3 as a media server, so I installed YDL on it. My plan was to use sweet, sweet hulu.com for my TV needs, but I can't for the life of me get any sites to recognize my flash plugin.
I removed FireFox2 and installed the FireFox3 Minefield release candidate, then installed the latest flash plugin from adobe.com. Hulu and youtube still tell me to go get the latest version of flash.
What am I missing here? Would this be less of a PITA in Ubuntu? (keep in mind I haven't used Linux since three versions of RedHat ago)
Are you sure you actually installed the latest flash version?
On a somewhat related note. Screw you vlc. Thanks for adding v1.0 to the stable trunk svn, but having it totally borked.
I spent all day yesterday trying to compile it. Then i found the error I had stopping my plain old vlc 8.6 from serving video to the ps3, and the world was a better place.
Are you sure you actually installed the latest flash version?
On a somewhat related note. Screw you vlc. Thanks for adding v1.0 to the stable trunk svn, but having it totally borked.
I spent all day yesterday trying to compile it. Then i found the error I had stopping my plain old vlc 8.6 from serving video to the ps3, and the world was a better place.
I don't think it's 64bit, but I honestly don't know much about the PS3's architecture. It's a PPC, right?
I'm not sure what version got installed. I downloaded 9.xxxxxx from adobe, but during the installation process, the package manager showed a line that looked like "ver 7.03". This is baffling as all hell.
Yes, the PS3 is a PPC processor. Adobe hasn't released a PPC version of Flash, so there's no way to get Flash running on a PS3.
Well god damn it. I read articles on that, but they were from two years ago, so I figured I'd ask here.
Coincidentally, whatever PS3 update just came down the pipe got hulu working through PlayOn, so I guess this hassle was for nothing?
Still, I appreciate everybody's help. PA
Adobe hasn't, but one of the (admittedly not as good) open source flash implementations (Gnash or Swfdec) might do it for you. Last I heard, at least one of them could handle youtube decently.
So, with the upcoming release of Ubuntu 8.10, and the inclusion of 2.6.27 kernel .. both of with have features attractive to my laptop and server ... I am considering doing a full teardown of the server since its been a while since i cleaned it out (its in a closet) and i upgraded the software via packages over its lifetime.
While I have it open, i am thinking of popping in some upgraded space... I currently have 2 drives, a 40gb and a 160gb inside, with / on the 40 and the 160gb holding /home .. Is it possible to split /home across the 160gb & another drive (160gb or bigger) without resorting to RAID or serious performance issues ?
This is an old hyperthreaded dell box that does quite well, but it could use more space.
You can use LVM to merge multiple physical drives, but be warned that if either drive dies the partition and all its data will be lost.
I'd advise against upgrading to 8.10, also. If what you're running now works, keep it. If you want to upgrade, upgrade to 8.04 -- it's a long-term support release.
You can use LVM to merge multiple physical drives, but be warned that if either drive dies the partition and all its data will be lost.
I'd advise against upgrading to 8.10, also. If what you're running now works, keep it. If you want to upgrade, upgrade to 8.04 -- it's a long-term support release.
I have 8.04 now.. I was coupling basic server maint. with a new release. I find that the features of 8.10 and the latest kernel are very much what I would like. Some for server, some for laptop.
I don't intend to do anything until its out of beta though
I upgraded to 8.10 a few days ago. They upgraded NetworkManager which is now very unwieldy when it comes to regular ethernet connections if you have a wireless card at all, and the New Human theme looks like shit.
If I had such as were to be called an HTPC, is there some practical way to use it for two televisions in two different rooms?
For example, in my bedroom and in my living room which are in two separate areas.
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head would be to connect the computer directly to one TV, and use a receiver of some kind (e.g. XBox 360, that Apple Media...Thing) on the other. Then, just use that receiving device to be a client on the media server of the computer.
I've been using my 360 to watch movie files from my den PC in this manner for a while. I had never heard of PlayOn before Tycho mentioned it on the front page, but now I'm watching hulu over my PS3 on the bedroom TV. Cable TV can go fuck itself for all I care now.
If I had such as were to be called an HTPC, is there some practical way to use it for two televisions in two different rooms?
For example, in my bedroom and in my living room which are in two separate areas.
What kind of distance are we talking? And are both sets HD?
The easiest is the method already suggested, just using a box of some kind in the other room to access the media off the main HTPC...Xbox 360, even a modded oXbox.
But suddenly I can't help but wonder how much signal an RF modulator puts out. Run coax from the living room to the bedroom, which is cheap. Then control with...hmmm, bluetooth would probably be out of range (so no Wii remote), but if you have one you could use any wi-fi enable Palm/PocketPC...or a DS with that Opera web browser?
Ok .. who here enjoys compiling ffmpeg and converting audio / video ?
I have an mkv file that i am trying to convert to a .mp4 (from h264 / ac3 6 channel to h264 / aac 6 channel) and the channel assignments are funky. everything has been shifted 'left'... center is left , right is center, right rear is right, etc..
I dunno if its the original ac3, or ffmpeg converting to aac, or the ps3 screwing it up. There are posts going back a year about this issue, but no resolution.
Ok .. who here enjoys compiling ffmpeg and converting audio / video ?
I have an mkv file that i am trying to convert to a .mp4 (from h264 / ac3 6 channel to h264 / aac 6 channel) and the channel assignments are funky. everything has been shifted 'left'... center is left , right is center, right rear is right, etc..
I dunno if its the original ac3, or ffmpeg converting to aac, or the ps3 screwing it up. There are posts going back a year about this issue, but no resolution.
I don't think ffmpeg has an option for dealing with channels like that, but mencoder/mplayer has a filter that lets you remap them. The basic usage (taken from the docs):
ffmpeg lets you set channels like 2 or 6 (5 + .1) but doesn't let me map like mencoder.. i forgot it let me do that.
I remember reading the exact post you reference .. i need to check it out.. I dunno if my default mencoder will do h264, etc.. i might need to start building that
ffmpeg lets you set channels like 2 or 6 (5 + .1) but doesn't let me map like mencoder.. i forgot it let me do that.
I remember reading the exact post you reference .. i need to check it out.. I dunno if my default mencoder will do h264, etc.. i might need to start building that
I'm using an SVN build of mencoder (r27667) from the smplayer project and the x264 build it depends on (libx264-64). I'll note that I encode away from h264 because my PC is an old one that doens't like HD videos in h264, so I transcode to HD Xvid in a Matroska container.
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Your computer is 64-bit, but can't handle h264 o_O?
It isn't, and the package name doesn't mean that it is 64-bit. The one Ubuntu supplies is libx264-57, so this one is just a version bump. You know how shared libraries usually have a number after the ".so" file extension? It's like that.
EDIT: I'll also throw out that SD h264 is fine, as are some HD videos (Code Geass R2, for example).
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
I built an external libx264 build then what comes with ffmpeg due to issues (so i hear) with the ffmpeg default implementation. I also have a build of yasm in there somewhere to greatly speed up encoding operations.
All this is academic, as the video is fine.. its specifically the encoding of the audio. Converting 5.1 ac3 to 5.1 aac switches the channels around . The ffmpeg -devel and -user boards have posts dating back 2 years+ in regards to this... and the trunk revisions claim to fix audio channel screwups.. but i am getting it with this specific file.
I have another mkv with a source of DTS and that appears to transcode just fine. (i need to check it again)
so its either :
The mkv audio channel is already mixed up
The ac3 source to aac destination is considering the center channel to be left, etc due to how those formats are stored according to :
since the ffmpeg guys seem to blow off the issue, I am leaning towards its the source itself. I have a number of test files made with various iterations of mp4 / avi extensions with various options set. I'll find out.
I also lean towards the file since the audio is out of sync with the video, and i think that is the cause of the ffmpeg errors if I try to simply repackage the mkv to a mp4 with h264/ac3
Either way, I think I need a current mencoder to extract the audio, redo the channel order, so I can put it into a proper mp4.
I built an external libx264 build then what comes with ffmpeg due to issues (so i hear) with the ffmpeg default implementation. I also have a build of yasm in there somewhere to greatly speed up encoding operations.
All this is academic, as the video is fine.. its specifically the encoding of the audio. Converting 5.1 ac3 to 5.1 aac switches the channels around . The ffmpeg -devel and -user boards have posts dating back 2 years+ in regards to this... and the trunk revisions claim to fix audio channel screwups.. but i am getting it with this specific file.
I have another mkv with a source of DTS and that appears to transcode just fine. (i need to check it again)
so its either :
The mkv audio channel is already mixed up
The ac3 source to aac destination is considering the center channel to be left, etc due to how those formats are stored according to :
since the ffmpeg guys seem to blow off the issue, I am leaning towards its the source itself. I have a number of test files made with various iterations of mp4 / avi extensions with various options set. I'll find out.
I also lean towards the file since the audio is out of sync with the video, and i think that is the cause of the ffmpeg errors if I try to simply repackage the mkv to a mp4 with h264/ac3
Either way, I think I need a current mencoder to extract the audio, redo the channel order, so I can put it into a proper mp4.
If you're not using b-frames mencoder should be able to write directly to an MP4 container, and you can copy the video with "-ovc copy".
I don't have any files with surround on my PC, but I've been able to reencode to AAC from the video like this:
Both ways produce input that MP4Box will accept. Add the channels filter to that and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. You can extract the audio from the Matroska container with mkvextract if you'd like, and I would recommend using "mkvmerge --identify" to get the track IDs rather than mkvinfo (which is very, very verbose).
For testing you can add the options "-ss" and "-endpos" to encode only a portion of the track. "-ss" will specify when it starts, and "-endpos" will determine the duration to encode, not stop encoding at that point in the file (so "-ss 3:00 -endpos 4:00" will encode from 3 minutes in to 7 minutes, not one minute as you might expect).
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
I ended up dumping that particular file.. I think the audio sync issues (+4 sec off) plus this other trouble is not worth it. I'll grab a better version.
I can't just copy the audio.. as its going to the ps3, and it won't take DTS or AC-3 .. AAC (or pcm) it is. FFMPEG would complain unless I specifically told it what to do with the audio, but i suspect it has to do with the wildly out of sync audio.
I played with mencoder, and it did not want to encode h264 .. this is with the version build by default on Ubuntu 8.04 .. and i just don't feel like compiling it. I will if i ever need to mux the channels.
I would rather use ffmpeg.. since thats what most of those scripts use anyway.. If i remember correctly, mkvextract was just a shell script to pass variables to ffmpeg to pull the audio and video to seperate files.. as are most of the mkv2ps3 , etc scripts. Some use mencoder though. There should be no other need to use any helper programs other then pure ffmpeg.
Bottom line.. I think the video was just fucked. Thats the gamble you get via p2p ..
I played with mencoder, and it did not want to encode h264 .. this is with the version build by default on Ubuntu 8.04 .. and i just don't feel like compiling it. I will if i ever need to mux the channels.
Here are Hardy packages for mplayer and mencoder, and here is where you can get the libx264 that they depend on. They are provided by the smplayer project, which is my preferred mplayer front-end.
If i remember correctly, mkvextract was just a shell script to pass variables to ffmpeg to pull the audio and video to seperate files..
Not at all. It's part of mkvtoolnix, which are applications designed for the Matroska container and makes use of the official libmatroska library. It also provides a GUI for mkvmerge which includes a chapter editor and the like. You can extract attachments (most notably fonts) and subtitles from the container, which I find handy for a script I wrote to automate hardsubbing.
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
Thanks for the links.. but I already have libx264 built for ffmpeg.. I assume mencoder can build on this as well.
I was not aware mkvextract was a seperate stand alone tool.. usually searches for 'mkv to ??' result in people pawning off their shell or perl scripts they wrote that take a number of variables and feature some complex if/then logic.. but ultimately run a call to ffmpeg or mencoder.
I am going to try it out, mencoder did seem to do my test stuff pretty fast.. but i couldn't get the resulting file to play on the ps3.
It could come in handy, but i am still convinced that ffmpeg / mencoder will work for 99% of all the files I will ever need to pull in or convert. Except for the odd one that i think was just not properly made.
Trying to do a straight video copy but audio transcode from a mkv to a mp4 container, ffmpeg threw out warnings about video / audio shens.. and that I don't think would have been solved by any package without a lot of trial and error. Its easier to download another mkv built better.
Also, I like to automate all this as much as possible. my current process is i drop a .torrent in a certain directory, and on its completion its moved to a 'TV' or 'Movie' folder depending on where I started the torrent. Mediatomb is my Upnp program that should play any avi i pull down.. but the odd mkv must be put into a new container, since i lack the processing power for real time transcode / viewing.
The less I touch this file, the better. This is all on a headless server in the closet, so GUI apps are pretty useless to me as well.
EDIT: I see now that flash 9 support has been added in the latest ps3 firmware ... Hulu might take care of some of my needs now.
God damnit. You know how every so often you find some program/command that is incredibly useful and you wonder how you managed to live without it? I've used quite a bit of DOS in my time as a kid and have used Linux since 2000 (virtually all the time since 2004), and I just discovered two of those that have always been there and that I had never seen them used in any of the docs I've read over the years: pushd and popd. I stumbled across those while reading a DKMS configuration file.
Barrakketh on
Rollers are red, chargers are blue....omae wa mou shindeiru
EDIT: I see now that flash 9 support has been added in the latest ps3 firmware ... Hulu might take care of some of my needs now.
I've been using PlayOn to great success, but I didn't realize this until you mentioned it. I'd much rather have native browser control, so I appreciate the mention!
I have watched a couple family guy episodes via hulu .. and I am not too impressed with Hulu on the ps3.
I can stretch the browser screen to my full tv width, but hitting 'full screen' via hulu screws it all up. Its a toss up to have it on via hulu, or pull it via torrent and have it added via mediatomb.
And to rehash my previous arguments.. FUCK ffmpeg now. Its useless.
Posts
That's a win for Debian.
a.avi
or
g.avi
Why doesn't work? What I really want to do is something like (a|g).avi but then I get syntax errors; I guess grep doesn't like parenthesis. I suppose I could just use [ag] but it seems like this should work and now it's bugging me.
On the other hand, "ls -R | grep -i '[ag].avi' " will work fine.
But you're asking for a better example involving the OR operator |, so let's use better variables.
Instead of a.avi and g.avi let's have apple.avi and grape.avi
Firstly, let's use egrep instead of grep to get full regex syntax.
Secondly, let's put it in single quotes so we don't have shell trying to parse ( or piping with |.
Afterwards we can comfortably use the command: egrep -i '(apple|grape).avi'
Was that what you were looking for?
EDIT: Gah, END in a.avi or g.avi.
Okay, use this: egrep -i '(a|g).avi$'
Note that I have no useful reason at all for wanting to do this, I just like playing around with the shell and regexps and I figure someday it'll come in handy.
rocka4him... Sounds familiar. :-D
If the alternate install disk has issues also, try burning it at a lower speed. Might also be worth verifying the MD5SUM to make sure the file is complete.
I don't think you told me that the computer was 333MHz when I recommended Xubuntu. After installing, look into using IceWM. It's more minimalist than XFCE4, but faster. Similarly, Opera will also be a lot snappier than Firefox.
I want to use my PS3 as a media server, so I installed YDL on it. My plan was to use sweet, sweet hulu.com for my TV needs, but I can't for the life of me get any sites to recognize my flash plugin.
I removed FireFox2 and installed the FireFox3 Minefield release candidate, then installed the latest flash plugin from adobe.com. Hulu and youtube still tell me to go get the latest version of flash.
What am I missing here? Would this be less of a PITA in Ubuntu? (keep in mind I haven't used Linux since three versions of RedHat ago)
Are you sure you actually installed the latest flash version?
On a somewhat related note. Screw you vlc. Thanks for adding v1.0 to the stable trunk svn, but having it totally borked.
I spent all day yesterday trying to compile it. Then i found the error I had stopping my plain old vlc 8.6 from serving video to the ps3, and the world was a better place.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
I don't think it's 64bit, but I honestly don't know much about the PS3's architecture. It's a PPC, right?
I'm not sure what version got installed. I downloaded 9.xxxxxx from adobe, but during the installation process, the package manager showed a line that looked like "ver 7.03". This is baffling as all hell.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
Well god damn it. I read articles on that, but they were from two years ago, so I figured I'd ask here.
Coincidentally, whatever PS3 update just came down the pipe got hulu working through PlayOn, so I guess this hassle was for nothing?
Still, I appreciate everybody's help.
Wait... there is a new ps3 update today? or you pulled an older one just now?
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
Adobe hasn't, but one of the (admittedly not as good) open source flash implementations (Gnash or Swfdec) might do it for you. Last I heard, at least one of them could handle youtube decently.
I haven't booted into the PS3 OS since I finished MGS4.
I'm pretty sure I downloaded 2.43.
While I have it open, i am thinking of popping in some upgraded space... I currently have 2 drives, a 40gb and a 160gb inside, with / on the 40 and the 160gb holding /home .. Is it possible to split /home across the 160gb & another drive (160gb or bigger) without resorting to RAID or serious performance issues ?
This is an old hyperthreaded dell box that does quite well, but it could use more space.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
I'd advise against upgrading to 8.10, also. If what you're running now works, keep it. If you want to upgrade, upgrade to 8.04 -- it's a long-term support release.
I have 8.04 now.. I was coupling basic server maint. with a new release. I find that the features of 8.10 and the latest kernel are very much what I would like. Some for server, some for laptop.
I don't intend to do anything until its out of beta though
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
As in literally, shit. Like, from a butt.
For example, in my bedroom and in my living room which are in two separate areas.
The only thing I can think of off the top of my head would be to connect the computer directly to one TV, and use a receiver of some kind (e.g. XBox 360, that Apple Media...Thing) on the other. Then, just use that receiving device to be a client on the media server of the computer.
I've been using my 360 to watch movie files from my den PC in this manner for a while. I had never heard of PlayOn before Tycho mentioned it on the front page, but now I'm watching hulu over my PS3 on the bedroom TV. Cable TV can go fuck itself for all I care now.
Broke?
Or made your life more spicy?
What kind of distance are we talking? And are both sets HD?
The easiest is the method already suggested, just using a box of some kind in the other room to access the media off the main HTPC...Xbox 360, even a modded oXbox.
But suddenly I can't help but wonder how much signal an RF modulator puts out. Run coax from the living room to the bedroom, which is cheap. Then control with...hmmm, bluetooth would probably be out of range (so no Wii remote), but if you have one you could use any wi-fi enable Palm/PocketPC...or a DS with that Opera web browser?
I have an mkv file that i am trying to convert to a .mp4 (from h264 / ac3 6 channel to h264 / aac 6 channel) and the channel assignments are funky. everything has been shifted 'left'... center is left , right is center, right rear is right, etc..
I dunno if its the original ac3, or ffmpeg converting to aac, or the ps3 screwing it up. There are posts going back a year about this issue, but no resolution.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
I don't think ffmpeg has an option for dealing with channels like that, but mencoder/mplayer has a filter that lets you remap them. The basic usage (taken from the docs):
The example uses mplayer, but it should work with mencoder as well.
EDIT: I think what you might want (corrected from a mailing list post) would be channels=6:6:0:1:1:2:2:3:3:4:4:0:5:5
I remember reading the exact post you reference .. i need to check it out.. I dunno if my default mencoder will do h264, etc.. i might need to start building that
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
I'm using an SVN build of mencoder (r27667) from the smplayer project and the x264 build it depends on (libx264-64). I'll note that I encode away from h264 because my PC is an old one that doens't like HD videos in h264, so I transcode to HD Xvid in a Matroska container.
It isn't, and the package name doesn't mean that it is 64-bit. The one Ubuntu supplies is libx264-57, so this one is just a version bump. You know how shared libraries usually have a number after the ".so" file extension? It's like that.
EDIT: I'll also throw out that SD h264 is fine, as are some HD videos (Code Geass R2, for example).
All this is academic, as the video is fine.. its specifically the encoding of the audio. Converting 5.1 ac3 to 5.1 aac switches the channels around . The ffmpeg -devel and -user boards have posts dating back 2 years+ in regards to this... and the trunk revisions claim to fix audio channel screwups.. but i am getting it with this specific file.
I have another mkv with a source of DTS and that appears to transcode just fine. (i need to check it again)
so its either :
The mkv audio channel is already mixed up
The ac3 source to aac destination is considering the center channel to be left, etc due to how those formats are stored according to :
ac3 (3/2) - L, C, R, SL, SR
aac 5.1 - C, L, R, SL, SR, LFE
The ps3 is reading the aac wrong.
since the ffmpeg guys seem to blow off the issue, I am leaning towards its the source itself. I have a number of test files made with various iterations of mp4 / avi extensions with various options set. I'll find out.
I also lean towards the file since the audio is out of sync with the video, and i think that is the cause of the ffmpeg errors if I try to simply repackage the mkv to a mp4 with h264/ac3
Either way, I think I need a current mencoder to extract the audio, redo the channel order, so I can put it into a proper mp4.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
If you're not using b-frames mencoder should be able to write directly to an MP4 container, and you can copy the video with "-ovc copy".
I don't have any files with surround on my PC, but I've been able to reencode to AAC from the video like this:
or:
Both ways produce input that MP4Box will accept. Add the channels filter to that and I don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. You can extract the audio from the Matroska container with mkvextract if you'd like, and I would recommend using "mkvmerge --identify" to get the track IDs rather than mkvinfo (which is very, very verbose).
For testing you can add the options "-ss" and "-endpos" to encode only a portion of the track. "-ss" will specify when it starts, and "-endpos" will determine the duration to encode, not stop encoding at that point in the file (so "-ss 3:00 -endpos 4:00" will encode from 3 minutes in to 7 minutes, not one minute as you might expect).
I can't just copy the audio.. as its going to the ps3, and it won't take DTS or AC-3 .. AAC (or pcm) it is. FFMPEG would complain unless I specifically told it what to do with the audio, but i suspect it has to do with the wildly out of sync audio.
I played with mencoder, and it did not want to encode h264 .. this is with the version build by default on Ubuntu 8.04 .. and i just don't feel like compiling it. I will if i ever need to mux the channels.
I would rather use ffmpeg.. since thats what most of those scripts use anyway.. If i remember correctly, mkvextract was just a shell script to pass variables to ffmpeg to pull the audio and video to seperate files.. as are most of the mkv2ps3 , etc scripts. Some use mencoder though. There should be no other need to use any helper programs other then pure ffmpeg.
Bottom line.. I think the video was just fucked. Thats the gamble you get via p2p ..
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
Here are Hardy packages for mplayer and mencoder, and here is where you can get the libx264 that they depend on. They are provided by the smplayer project, which is my preferred mplayer front-end.
Not at all. It's part of mkvtoolnix, which are applications designed for the Matroska container and makes use of the official libmatroska library. It also provides a GUI for mkvmerge which includes a chapter editor and the like. You can extract attachments (most notably fonts) and subtitles from the container, which I find handy for a script I wrote to automate hardsubbing.
I was not aware mkvextract was a seperate stand alone tool.. usually searches for 'mkv to ??' result in people pawning off their shell or perl scripts they wrote that take a number of variables and feature some complex if/then logic.. but ultimately run a call to ffmpeg or mencoder.
I am going to try it out, mencoder did seem to do my test stuff pretty fast.. but i couldn't get the resulting file to play on the ps3.
It could come in handy, but i am still convinced that ffmpeg / mencoder will work for 99% of all the files I will ever need to pull in or convert. Except for the odd one that i think was just not properly made.
Trying to do a straight video copy but audio transcode from a mkv to a mp4 container, ffmpeg threw out warnings about video / audio shens.. and that I don't think would have been solved by any package without a lot of trial and error. Its easier to download another mkv built better.
Also, I like to automate all this as much as possible. my current process is i drop a .torrent in a certain directory, and on its completion its moved to a 'TV' or 'Movie' folder depending on where I started the torrent. Mediatomb is my Upnp program that should play any avi i pull down.. but the odd mkv must be put into a new container, since i lack the processing power for real time transcode / viewing.
The less I touch this file, the better. This is all on a headless server in the closet, so GUI apps are pretty useless to me as well.
EDIT: I see now that flash 9 support has been added in the latest ps3 firmware ... Hulu might take care of some of my needs now.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
I've been using PlayOn to great success, but I didn't realize this until you mentioned it. I'd much rather have native browser control, so I appreciate the mention!
I can stretch the browser screen to my full tv width, but hitting 'full screen' via hulu screws it all up. Its a toss up to have it on via hulu, or pull it via torrent and have it added via mediatomb.
And to rehash my previous arguments.. FUCK ffmpeg now. Its useless.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.
When you deal with 5.1 audio.. the bugs that have been present for 1 year plus start to come up. Its getting damn annoying.
Librarians harbor a terrible secret. Find it.