free the bird - Part 33

Video editing on linux Part 1: Cinelerra

I have set a goal of importing all our home video (yes all the raw footage, hours of us staring at the camera :>) and incorporating it into the mythtv experience.

First step: get a clue. Looks like cinelerra is the FOSS advanced video editing software of choice, even though everyone seems to agree it’s been opened with a bad can opener and you’ll probably slice yourself on it now and then. The first hurdle: getting it installed. As always, gentoo makes things dead-easy, but there were a couple steps to get it to compile under AMD64, here they are so you don’t bang your head:

emacs /etc/portage/package.keywords
  media-video/cinelerra-cvs ~amd64
emacs /etc/portage/package.use
  media-video/cinelerra-cvs -mmx
emerge -DavuN cinelerra-cvs

Note that this is a package pulled from cvs, a first sign to proceed with caution. The date on the most recent package is 20070122 – apparently the developer of cinelerra doesn’t work too closely with the community, and the community developers have to occasionally take a snapshot and clean the hell up out of it – so you don’t want it to happen too often. The gentoo package compiles fine on AMD64, but only if you specifically disable mmx support (weird, eh?). Anyway, as always, upwards and onwards…

Comments | Sunday, June 10, 2007 [ cinelerra ]

MythTV case sweetness

I took my time and tried to pick the best case I could for my MythTV box. I ended up picking an Antec case that included a beautiful chassis, great cooling features including separate airflow chambers and two large silent sidepanel fans, a generous mini-ATX form factor with just enough room for all the gear, silicone-cushioned drive mountings, and a couple cool bells and whistles – a large volume knob and LCD display panel.

I have loved everything about the case, but I always figured it was going to take some serious hacking to get the volume knob and LCD panel to ever work under linux. When I finally sat down today to tackle the job, I found out there was lots of support! Apparently the knob/LCD/infrared port combination are a packaged product called the Soundgraph iMon, and they have become a popular addition to many media center cases.

With a little guidance, I have the front panel totally hooked up to MythTV now, which does a great job of filling the display with all kinds of juicy information: the currently playing song, the currently playing TV show or movie, the current recording, the time (when otherwise idle), etc. To get the volume knob working, looks like I’ll need to rig up lirc mo betta…

Comments | Wednesday, April 25, 2007 [ hardware ]

MythWeb and VLC for dead-simple video broadcasting!

While recently incapacitated, I took some time to get MythWeb set up and running. It was no sweat – just installed apache with PHP support on my Myth box, and installed MythWeb. gentoo makes it all easy as pie.

The icing on the cake is to install VLC on the client. (continued…)

Comments | Sunday, April 22, 2007 [ video * vlc ]

Set up sqlite static lib and a C++ wrapper in 15 minutes

DOWNLOAD: sqlite source + vs2005 static library solution + wrapper

sqlite is a sweet little answer to database storage for stand-alone applications. CppSQLite is the best C++ wrapper I found (NOTE: there are many). I didn’t find any quick instructions to get the C code statically linked into a Visual Studio 2005 C++ app, so here they are. At the end, I had all the code wrapped nicely into my application with a size increase of 132kb – and no dependencies! Whoop.
(continued…)

Comments (45) | Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Terminus Est comes to linux

With very little work I was able to get John’s excellent game to run under linux. He wrote it well using cross-platform libraries (SDL and fmod), so it was only a matter of really minor compatibility tweaks. Check out his Soloforge website for the latest news. Nice job John! Sorry it took me so long to get to this!