XBMC on Karmic with VDPAU and VDR

If I read the title “XBMC on Karmic with VDPAU and VDR“, then I think not many people out there, beside the experts, understand what this is all about. It’s about a good looking Media Center for Linux, which can handle HD content from your camcorder or HDTV streams from cable or satellite. Read here about the available PPA repositories, the differences between them and how to set this whole thing up, without loosing the overview. Continue reading “XBMC on Karmic with VDPAU and VDR”

Creating 3gp Videos with Linux

For the impatient: Read here the compendium.

Recently I’ve bought a mid-range mobile phone for my wife. It’s a Nokia 2700 Classic for about 100€. At this price level you don’t have a sophisticated video support regarding recording or playback. You don’t have avi, wmv or flv support. The only video format the mobile phone understands is 3gp. Continue reading “Creating 3gp Videos with Linux”

Workaround buggy Mondo UI on Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)

Mondo is an excellent backup tool for Linux, which can do a backup of a running system and afterward perform disaster recovery, if your system should ever crash.
It is open source and is part of the Debian repository. In order to install it just perform a Continue reading “Workaround buggy Mondo UI on Jaunty Jackalope (9.04)”

My five must-have settings for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)

I’ve recently upgraded successfully from Intrepid Ibex (8.10) onto Jaunty Jackalope (9.04) – Err – yes – I’m talking about Ubuntu, to be more precise, about Kubunu x86_64. The upgrade was quite a success, and actually the first one, after which my system was still usable, although I heavily screwed around in it.

Here are my first impressions, and a few must have mods or settings. Continue reading “My five must-have settings for Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope)”

VDPAU and Window Manager on Jaunty Jackalope – Ubuntu 9.04

Today I did it. I’ve upgraded my system from Intrepid Ibex(8.10) onto Jaunty Jackalope (9.04). My Ubuntu x86_64 installation offered me, as always, a couple of new packages for update, and as I wanted to update, a message box told me, I could do a whole system upgrade onto Jaunty Jackalope. So I did and it worked. I took a very long time (>1h), but I had no unpleasant surprises afterwards.
All special sources.conf entries in my apt-get config have been commented out, and I started from scratch using a new Ubuntu installation.
Continue reading “VDPAU and Window Manager on Jaunty Jackalope – Ubuntu 9.04”

VDPAU: stable 180.44 and 185.19 beta driver

There are two major highlights about the two last released Nvidia VDPAU drivers. The first one is, that the stable driver 180.44 fixed an ugly bug in the x86_64 branch, concerning the VC-1 playback. And the second even better news is, that the ugly resource problem seems to be fixed in the 185.19 beta driver. Even systems with on-board graphics adapters (shared graphics memory) seem to work now without any issues anymore.

Here are the the release news from the VDPAU point of view: Continue reading “VDPAU: stable 180.44 and 185.19 beta driver”