myrddin.org: weblog

Something I was going to add to the last post, but probably deserves its own.. is how I convert my downloaded tv episodes to a format readable by my Video iPod.. Once you have the resulting mp4 file, it can be copied to the iPod using the usual method.

ffmpeg -i battlestar.galactica.306.avi -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 \
-maxrate 2000 -b 1500 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 \
-acodec aac -ar 44100 -ab 128 -s 320x180 -aspect 16:9 \
battlestar.galactica.306.mp4


You can script this in any number of ways. What I personally do is have a script that monitors a certain directory that is run from cron, when it sees a new avi file there it will go off and pump out a ‘video iPod friendly’ mp4 file of of a similar name. This is handy as I can then plug in the iPod later and the conversion is already done and I don’t have to remember the command to convert it again

Thinking about it.. one could also add something similar to this to my .bashrc file:

avi2ipod() {
fn="${1}"
if [ -f ${fn} ]; then
out=”$(echo ${fn}|sed ’s/avi$/mp4/’)”
ffmpeg -i ${fn} -f mp4 -vcodec mpeg4 \
-maxrate 2000 -b 1500 -qmin 3 -qmax 5 -bufsize 4096 -g 300 \
-acodec aac -ar 44100 -ab 128 -s 320×180 -aspect 16:9 \
${out}
fi
}


And then you can just go off and do something like:

avi2ipod /mnt/media/tv/battlestar_galactica/battlestar.galactica.306.avi

Which will in the above example create you a suitable file called /mnt/media/tv/battlestar_galactica/battlestar.galactica.306.mp4

Filed under: m.o

Now that I work near the city I occasionally get the train into work. Well, in the several weeks so far I’ve caught the train only one week, and have driven the car or motorbike to work every other week.. but anyway, when I’m on the train I like to watch tv episodes my shiny new 80Gb Video iPod. This way I can watch a normal 42 minute episode and still listen to a good 5 or 6 music tracks before I have to get off at my stop.

The iPod sure has made the train trip oh so much more bearable, I’m really *not* a public transport person… The headphones that come with the iPod really are quite good in their own right but I’m not a fan of ‘in ear’ headphones, even tho the iPod headphones really comfortable when compared to others, they still annoy me. Another thing that’s a pain in the ass is the going through train tunnels and people chatting loudly on the train and so on.. I’m forever turning the volume up so I can hear the iPod over the ambient noise and down again when I deafen myself cause its too loud!

A few weeks ago I was in a local Apple store and in particular I was looking at their nice little Sennheiser stand. One thing that caught my eye was a pair of the PX200’s as they collapse down into a small carry case that I can easily throw into my laptop bag. This ability to collapse the headphones caught my attention as they are a closed headphone so noise doesn’t escape or get in to a certain extent improving my listening experience and the experience of those innocent bystanders who constantly whinge about being able to hear other commuter’s iPod’s while at high volume. Even though I don’t whinge about it myself, I personally don’t like being able to hear some other tosser listening to Justin Timberlake or other such freak of nature… Moving right along.. while I was checking out the headphones I was told about the same headphones but a pair, the Sennheiser PXC 250’s, that have a Sennheiser noise cancelling feature whereby small microphones are embedded into the headphones and a small device that attaches to your belt inverts the phase of those ambient noises and feeds them back into the headphones, effectively cancelling out those annoying noises! The headphones are specifically marketed at those consumers that travel by bus, train or plane. This was enough, I was convinced! I had to order a pair and they arrived after a couple of days which was good.

They would have to be the most impressive set of headphones I’ve owned so far. They certainly make my Phillips closed ear headphones sound like rubbish in comparison. the device that attaches to your belt takes 2 x AAA batteries and while at first I thought it would be a little annoying, really isn’t.. When the noise cancelling device is turned on, it is like as if a heavy door has been closed to block out the noisy outside, everything almost comes to complete silence! Albeit there is a very slight hum when the device isn’t plugged into the iPod and playing music, but whats the point of that really? What made them even more handy was that for the past week and a bit I’ve been in and out of noisy server rooms, of which I could be in a very noisy atmosphere for a day at a time. Without ear protection I’m sure I would have had some industrial deafness (if I didn’t have that already), but with the new headphones, it was almost like as if I had turned all the servers off and I was able to quietly listen to tunes all day/week!

I think now that I have myself a pair of Sennheisers, I really don’t think I can go back to anything else. I think the next on my list will be a pair of eN-250’s.. *drools*

Filed under: m.o

Apparently I’m referred to as Mr Perfect by my old team.. rather amusing really..

Oh and the person who thought I was referring to him in a previous post, I wasn’t, it was someone else. So who was I referring to? *attempts to cause more controversy*

Filed under: m.o

I thought I’d escape the wrath of Serial Attached SCSI, dodgy vendors and not having suitable source code when I left my previous job.. however it turns out that the shitfight had only just begun!

Previously I had a handful of xSeries machines that had SAS raid controllers of which there were no source code released for. This meant we were at the whim of the vendor to release binary modules for relevant distro kernels. There was one scenario in particular where the was only 1 binary module released, for a kernel that was about 2 years old! It was one of those fuck arounds that I had hoped to have left behind. This as I found out last week was not going to be the case.

My new employer has another hardware vendor that also have started producing hardware based on the new Intel dual core rigs which have embedded Intel raid controllers. The 2RU database servers aren’t much of an issue as the kernel module for their SAS raid controllers are in the 2.6.17 kernel and work quite well, however there are a significant number of new 1RU boxes for smaller tasks like web/application servers that use the embedded controller of which there are no open source kernel modules available. A quick visit to the Intel website uncovers some binary modules for those nasty RHEL and SLES servers (not the most up to date kernel versions either I might add so that also doesn’t help me in the slightest!).

I’ve since made a bit of progress in the last few days, but we’re still waiting for the vendor to pass on the relevant source so I can go off and install *lots* of sexy new machines. It has been a fair bit of a run around which isn’t surprising at all. The vendor doesn’t really know what they are doing at all and keep going back to Intel, Intel don’t seem to be willing to cough up either relevant kernel modules or the source as appropriate.. I really felt like pulling out my hair today.

Now to move onto the other part of the topic, I installed ‘ubuntu edgy’ last week on my new work slappy. I did it because I couldn’t install debian on it straight from the installer *shock horror*.

I spent a good half a day trying to convince debian stable and testing installers to install on my new Dell work laptop but they wouldn’t have a bar of it. I could have quite easily have done the install by booting off a live linux cd containing a recent kernel, doing a simple bootstrap install and going to my usual unstable/experimental combo, but I succumbed to Nicholas’ ranting about Ubuntu so I thought I’d give it a go. Surprisingly enough it was really easy to install, but that was most likely to do with the more recent kernel used by the installer. I must say that ubuntu is very ‘pretty’ looking… I’m really not into ‘pretty’ looking as opposed to functionality though… I have my own ways of doing things, which really isn’t what Ubuntu is about… Either way, I’ve had it installed on this laptop for a week now I think and I haven’t trashed it (yet). I’m even using it with firefox 2.0 to write this entry, downstairs over wireless… Yes, it really is quite simple to get ubuntu (or debian in general for that matter) configured with wireless, however, I don’t like using clickity clickity gui tools to do so, I prefer cli (voodoo: man interfaces #:P) I’m a shit stirrer aren’t I? hehe

Dammit, spent too much time getting side tracked .. slaptop flattery is almost.. flat.. *beep*beep*beep*

Filed under: m.o