Yesterday saw an update of my favourite multimedia player, and I had missed it…

VLC player is now at stable release 1.1.10 – apart from bugfixes and codec updates, this is also a security update (no known CVE number yet) so everybody is enccouraged to upgrade his installed version.

Get Slackware packages from my repository or one of its mirrors. And remember, if you need to encode mp3 or aac audio (there is no functional difference in decoding audio between all my packages) you need to grab the package which is inside the “restricted_slackbuilds” directory. Patent trolls prevent me from hosting those packages in the US on slackware.com.

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ (master)
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/vlc/
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/vlc/

MP3/AAC patent restricted:

• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/

Enjoy! Eric

* VLC 1.1.8 available

Another minor release in the 1.1 series, version 1.1.8 saw the light yesterday. Bugfixes and updates for the translations are its main features, but several small enhancements were made to the codec modules.

New encoders for dirac video (now using the schroedinger implementation) and webm /vp8 were added but to be honest, I have not looked at those since I rarely encode audio or video. Feedback welcome of course!

Noteworthy is the fact that VideoLAN celebrated its 10th birthday of going open source this february – the software was initially developed as a french student project under a closed-source license. Hilarious promotional video there… typical french humour?

Get the Slackware packages here (built on Slackware 13.1, will work on later versions too):

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/ (US-safe versions, i.e. without MP3 or AAC encoders)
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ (includes MP3 and AAC encoding capabilities)

The “US restrictions” are ludricous crap, but there you go… otherwise I would not be able to host the packages on the slackware.com server. Of course, mp3 and aac decoding is not a problem at all.

And for you KDE 4.6 users, remember having this problem with the “Media > Open” file browser dialog box taking 30 seconds to appear, that issue has been resolved. The fix was applied on the KDE side (it was gone with KDE 4.6.1) but I thought I’d mention it here regardless because it was a nuisance. See https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 for a nice discussion between KDE and VLC developers. Interesting to read on https://bugs.launchpad.net/kubuntu-ppa/+bug/708527 is, that while we do not have this bug anymore in Slackware’s KDE 4.6.1 (well, my own KDE 4.6.1 for Slackware 13.37 to be precise), it appears that Kubuntu’s KDE 4.6.1 still suffers from it…

* LibreOffice 3.3.2 … wow that was fast!

The LibreOffice development really shows the power of collaboration. Little over a month after their previous “micro release” 3.3.1, here we have 3.3.2 already. It shows plainly that LibreOffice is diverging fast from its origin OpenOffice.org. How is that possible? Well, the most obvious reason is the growth in numbers of developers. What was impossible while SUN and later Oracle held the reigns, is now showing its worth: people are contributing code, and with more people starting to dig at the deeper levels of code, this momentum of development will only accelerate.

Specific highlights for the 3.3.2 release are the code cleanups: german-only comments have been replaced and no longer used code has been removed. If the schedule is not slipping we’ll see the big release 3.4.0 in May. This is supposedly the release that is going to make the large step away from OpenOffice.org.

I created some Slackware packages for you (built on Slackware 13.1, works on Slackware 13.37 too). Using the new LibreOffice menu icons instead of the old OpenOffice seagull logos, its looking prettier even! I added a dictionary to the italian language pack, but other than that I did not diverge from the way I built the previous 3.3.1 packages.

One word about the dictionaries (which I included for en-GB, en-US, es, fr, it, nl language packs): they are installed as “shared dictionaries” i.e. they will show up in your extension manager as locked and unchangeable. You can still install your own dictionary on top of that, if you find one that is more advanced or better suited to your work. This personal version will be installed into your ~/.ooo3 user directory and will have preference over the shared version.

Get packages here:

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ , or
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/libreoffice/ (fast mirror)

Enjoy!  And tell me if you like these packages (or if you see room for improvement).

Eric

VLC 1.1.6 which is now available as a source tarball fixes a security hole that was reported in december 2010 which makes it a recommended upgrade.

A lot of other changes and bugfixes went into the new VLC , you can read all about that on the release notes page. I think that now, the waiting is really for the next revision of VLC (1.2.x) to come out of the git repository and be released as stable. That has been in development for a long time now, and offers a completely re-developed mozilla plugin (the plugin package which accompanies VLC 1.1.x is not really a reliable piece of work) and of course a whole lot of feature enhancements compared to the maturing 1.1.x series.

One of the things that the 1.1.6 version should have fixed is the annoying behaviour in KDE 4.6 where, if you select “Media > Open file” it takes 30 seconds to open a file browser. After that first delay, every subsequent file-open dialog will open instantaneously – strange isn’t it? There is an open bug report for this issue: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=260719 and it shows a lot of discussion but no real fix since the KDE and VLC developers basically point to each other to provide a fix. Looks like fixing this in KDE is going to be difficult and VLC would be able to work around the issue. Unfortunately, the code that went into VLC at the last minute (see http://git.videolan.org/?p=vlc/vlc-1.1.git;a=commit;h=ac11f9c0e27905087afdfb46180ece227a4d76e7) does not fix it for me.

Enough said. Before I point you to the download location for my Slackware VLC packages, let me humour you with this VideoLAN promotional video made by Adam Vian: http://images.videolan.org/images/vlc-player.mp4 (download first, then load it in VLC). Very funny, worth watching.

Slackware 13.1 packages for vlc-1.1.6 can be found here (32-bit and 64-bit, they will work on slackware-current too of course):

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/vlc/
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ (mirror site, this package has mp3 and aac encoding capabilities)

Rsync access: rsync://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/

Have fun, Eric

What the VLC graphical interface can not yet do, is allow you to encode WebM video. Lucky for us, VLC has a command-line interface as well, with a humongous amount of options whose learning curve is even steeper than that of vi

The VLC command-line allows to encode/transcode WebM video! Want to try it out?

Assume you have an existing video file, let’s say “my_first_video.avi” in an arbitrary video/audio encoding format. We are going to transcode that file to WebM format, the resulting file will be called “my_first_video.webm”, containing VP8 video and vorbis audio streams. This is the command do achieve it:

cvlc my_first_video.avi  –sout “#transcode{vcodec=VP80,vb=800,scale=1,acodec=vorbis,ab=128,channels=2}:std{access=file,mux=”ffmpeg{mux=webm}”,dst=my_first_video.webm}”

(note: the commandline is not completely visible in this blog post, but you can select the lines with your mouse and that will select the full commandline)

When the command prompt returns, your transcoded WebM video is ready! If you use “vlc” rather than “cvlc” then you will see a VLC window appear but instead of playing the video, it will just show the slider moving forward which is actually a good indicator of how far the transcoding has progressed.

Eric

Until now, the free software world was not equipped with anything capable of producing Blu-Ray video discs. With the video encoding now taken care of (Blu-Ray audio can be produced with free AC3 audio encoders), all that is left is the authoring tool. This should be less of a challenge than writing the encoders. The VLMC movie creator project which uses the VideoLAN library (which in turn contains the X264 library) will hopefully pick up this exciting new capability.

Read all about it on Dark Shikari’s developer-blog: http://x264dev.multimedia.cx/?p=328

Eric

In the past week, I have been messing a bit with the VideoLAN Movie Creator (VLMC). This is a new project – not yet released in a stable version – from the VideoLAN developer community. It is meant to become “a free video editing software, offering features to realize semi-professional quality movies, but with the aim to stay simple and user-friendly.”

The VLMC project has not yet released source releases, let alone pre-compiled binaries. The only place to go is the git repository and checkout the source code. Not everybody wants to try and have a go at retrieving source code from a git repository, so I have written a Slackware build script to create a proper package. The VLMC has a single dependency, which is libvlc. This library is part of the VLC multimedia player. Many of you may already have installed VLC on their machine, but there is a complication: VLMC requires bleeding-edge VLC source code, i.e. you will have to use a git snapshot for VLC as well. Building a package from VLC’s git code does not work out-of-the-box using my vlc.SlackBuild which currently produces a package for the stable 1.0.4 release. Several changes to the script were needed to adjust for new and obsoleted features.

I decided not to add my Slackware package for the VLC “snapshot build” to my Slackware package repository because this is unstable code, and I (as well as the VLC developers) can not guarantee that it works at all at any given time. Therefore I have created a place on the internet to share the VLC and VLMC packages that need to be installed together (note that this VLC package necessarily replaces any other version of VLC you may have installed, but that is the price you pay for your desire to be an early tester of VLMC…)

See http://alien.slackbook.org/vlmc_testing/ for the packages. From time to time I may decide to update the snapshot versions.

Translating a Qt applications

One thing I noticed is that VLMC still lacks a dutch translation. I think it will be nice to have a dutch translation of this program once it has been released, because I think it will become popular in the way VLC is already popular.

I have never translated a Qt application, so I had to look up how to approach this. It turns out that Slackware’s Qt package already contains all the tools required for the job! In order to create a language translation for a Qt application, you need the Qt Linguist application, which is a GUI for working with “*.ts” translation files. This program was hidden on my hard disk… it does not show up in my KDE menu. You can start it by running “linguist“. In KDE, you can press <Alt><F2> to open the command run interface.

First of course, I needed to extract all the text strings from the VLMC source code that are in need of translation. And to create this initial “.ts” file, Slackware’s Qt package contains the “lupdate” tool which is a commandline utility. This is how I created the file “vlmc_nl_nl_NL.ts” which is my starting point for the duch translation:

$ cd vlmc-20100111
$ LANG=nl_NL lupdate vlmc.pro -ts ts/vlmc_nl_nl_NL.ts

I then proceeded with starting Qt Linguist and loading this new “.ts” file. Next comes the task of adding dutch translations for the original english strings. Well… here I am, with a nice GUI and no time…

This is something I need to finish some other time I’m afraid. To get this exactly right I need to install the dutch language translation file for KDE and learn about the commonly used dutch phrases in order to make the dutch version of VLMC “blend in” with the rest of KDE. I really hope to work on this soon and send the fruit of my labour to the VLMC developers… time’s up for tonight.

Note: Documentation for Qt Linguist is available online: http://doc.trolltech.com/4.6/linguist-manager.html

Have fun! Eric