Alien Pastures

My thoughts on Slackware, life and everything

Month: May 2010 (Page 1 of 2)

VLC and creating WebM video

May 26, 2010 / / 13 Comments

The VLC packages which I created to accompany the release of Slackware 13.1 support the playback of WebM video, the Google-sponsored new free video format.

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

Slackware 13.1 is here

May 24, 2010 / / 10 Comments

Just to add another message to the turmoil of cheering blog posts 🙂

Slackware 13.1 has been released today.

Read all about it in the official announcement or  read the ANNOUNCE.TXT directly.

As usual, it is recommended (but not mandatory) to buy a copy of the DVD or CD-set which helps funding the development of the distro (no, I am not getting any money out of that). The ISOs are of course available for free, and Bittorrent is the fastest way to get them: http://www.slackware.com/getslack/torrents.php

Alphageek’s “sligdo files” are a very fast way of creating byte-exact copies of the official ISOs in case you already have a local mirror-copy of the full Slackware 13.1 tree. The ISOs you create with sligdo (http://alphageek.dyndns.org/linux/sligdo/) will pass the GPG verification test. I just hope he will have those sligdo files ready for downlooad in time. If not, I have copies here: http://alien.slackbook.org/sligdo/ .

If you want to know more about how to create a Slackware USB installer if your computer does not have a CD or DVD drive, read this older article of mine: ??http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/installing-slackware-using-usb-thumb-drive/ – or for the Windows users: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/welcome-windows-user/

If you install or upgrade to the 64-bit version of Slackware 13.1 and want to have a system which is capable of running 32-bit software too (Slackware64 itself is a pure 64-bit distro), then you can make your Slackware64 multilib – read all about the process (which is fairly easy and straight-forward): http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib

To celebrate the occasion, I have created Slackware 13.1 packages for the VideoLAN Player (VLC) with added support for the new WebM video format which has the potential of becoming the default  video format in the implementation of the HTML5 “video” tag. Packages here (look for vlc-1.1.0.rc – at the moment of publishing this post I am still building them on a fresh Slackware 13.1…): http://www.slackware.org.uk/people/alien/restricted_slackbuilds/vlc/ . An example .webm video file is here if you want to try: http://www.jbkempf.com/~jb/yt3.remux.webm with thanks to Jean-Baptiste Kempf of the Videolan team.

Have fun! Eric

Google Open Sources VP8 Codec

May 19, 2010 / / 3 Comments

The press has seen a lot of commotion lately about HTML5 and its out-of-the-box video support through the new < video > tag.

Ogg Video – being the open source and royalty-free container used for the HTML5 video tag – is not favoured by the big players with commercial interests in web standards and content. There is really only one alternative to Ogg’s Theora video codec which is widely accepted: and that is the H.264 codec used for instance in Apple’s MP4/Quicktime video container.

But H264 video (also well-known because Youtube streams its content in H.264) is not royalty- or patent-free. The MPEG-LA company has formed a patent pool for H.264 and administers license fees for its use in applications and appliances.

However it was decided that creating, distributing and viewing Internet H.264 video content is royalty-free until at least the year 2015, as long as that content is being made freely available. A lot of people interpret this ruling as “H.264 is a free and open standard“… but this is not true. The patent holders (Microsoft and Apple being part of that group) maintain that even after 2015, H.264 video will stay free from royalty fees. I don’t know about you, but those two companies are among the ones I do not trust at all when they make statements like that.

So, a lot of folk kept an eye on Google after that company acquired On2, the creator of the VP8 video codec (and several more). On2 had already opensourced one of their older video codecs. This was their VP3 codec which was given to the Xiph.Org foundation and became…. the Theora codec. It was rumoured that Google would let history repeat itself and opensource VP8. And today, that has indeed happened.

Google announced that they release the VP8 video codec under a royalty-free open-source license. They have defined a new video container, called WebM, which will use VP8 for video  and Ogg Vorbis for the audio stream. Basically, WebM is a Matroska container (MKV) with some restrictions. The image quality and compression rate of VP8 is comparable to that of H.264, something which can not be said about Theora. I believe that this new video format is destined to become the true rival to H.264 in HTML5.

Microsoft had recently announced that they would only support H.264 video in their implementation of HTML5, but the company stated today that it prepares to add support for the VP8 video codec in Internet Explorer 9. IE9 will use the VP8 codec… if the user has installed it on Windows. Well, it’s a start. And Adobe plans to include VP8 in the Flash 10.1 player. They have to, after the crusade started by Microsoft and Apple to replace Flash Video on the web with H.264.

Interesting times ahead! Now, what would happen if Google decided to switch Youtube’s videos from H.264 to VP8? That would be a big statement. If they plan this, it will be like droppping a bomb in the cradle of Internet content providers.

VideoLAN’s VLC media player (one of my favourite open source projects) already has the code to support VP8 once that codec gets added to ffmpeg, the engine of so many media players. The VideoLAN foundation also hosts the open source x264 encoder which is arguably the best free H.264 encoder available. There will be freedom of choice, people! That is always commendable.

Speaking about freedom – I am praising this Google initiative of course, but I do not want to be negative about Ogg. A lot of people seem to complain about it’s shortcomings but it was – and is – a truely free video container format. If not for Google and their VP8, the Ogg format would still be the only choice for truely free content creation. I totally love Xiph.Org. Read this excellent article by the hand of its chief engineer Monty (Christopher Montgomery) in which he defends what is dear to him: http://people.xiph.org/~xiphmont/lj-pseudocut/o-response-1.html

And now, time for a beer.

Eric

Preparing for a release is tedious

May 18, 2010 / / 6 Comments

Now that Slackware is nearing a new release (that would be 13.1 of course), it is again obvious how tedious this process of finalizing is. Even though I am not the maintainer, just someone on the side (albeit pretty close to the fire) there are so many small issues to be taken care of… I am glad about all the people installing the release candidate and reporting their findings through http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/slackware-14/ , Freenode’s ##slackware channel and other means (email, this and other  blogs). It’s typical that there is always a flurry of bug reports right before a release. Apparently many folks out there are triggered by the message “this is Release Candidate…” and decide that Slackware-current is stable enough to try it out.

I welcome any remarks about installing slackware-current over a network (NFS/HTTP/FTP/Samba) and using LVM/LUKS. If anything should be added to the README files, this is the moment, and it will pass soon.

There are (again) several items on my private TODO list which I did not find time for during this release cycle… I want to write a script to create a Live DVD out of the installation ISO (for demonstration purposes) – nothing like the Linux-Live scripts which enable you to convert a running Linux system to a Live CD… those scripts are awfully complicated and I want to have something basic. I also wanted to work on the mkinitrd_command_generator.sh and the liloconfig scripts – I want to make it easier to create an initrd.gz during installation, for use with the generic kernel and especially in those cases where an initrd is required like when you are using LVM, or LUKS encryption.

Something needs to be left for the future I guess, so that I have something to look forward to 🙂

On the other hand, I am glad that I managed to update the usbimg2disk.sh script though so that you can create a complete USB installer for Slackware quite easily now (without destroying the data on your USB stick even, if you want). Read my old blog post for usage instructions. The move to KDE SC 4.4.3 in Slackware 13.1 is something I am delighted by as well – I had not thought Pat Volkerding would accept this version into 13.1. Perhaps I should now shift my attention to the development of KDE 4.5 packages…

On another note, the http://slackbuilds.org/ site has closed the submission form in anticipation of the new Slackware release. The admin team needs time to get the database ready for accepting new entries and there are very interesting new features coming up. Be sure to watch the site closely in the near future!

Have fun, Eric

New multilib gcc and glibc coming up for Slackware 13.1 RC1

May 14, 2010 / / 9 Comments

Hi folks

As the Slackware ChangeLog states:

Fri May 14 19:37:13 UTC 2010
Good hello! We will call this update Slackware 13.1 RC1. With this, the
kernel, compiler, and glibc versions are “golden”, and everything is
pretty much ready to release. Last call for bug reports…

I’m in the process of building the multilib versions of the new gcc and the recompiled glibc packages which entered Slackware-current today. Pat Volkerding caught me with this update while I was on holiday, so I did not have the time to prepare packages before.

In the meantime, if you are running Slackware64-current and using my multilib gcc/glibc , then you can just update to the latest -current excluding Slackware’s non-multilib gcc and glibc. My updated packages will be available tomorrow.

Cheers, Eric

EDIT 15-may-2010:

I have uploaded the multilib versions of glibc and gcc for Slackware 13.1 here: http://slackware.com/~alien/multilib/13.1/. A detailed multilib setup HOWTO for Slackware is here: http://alien.slackbook.org/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=slackware:multilib

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