Walk Alone

You know the scene - wandering around in the music shop, looking for that elusive DVD… and looking… still looking… till one of the attendants shows up with a VCD. Sad. If you really want a DVD, you can get it (though if you do, do let me know how), but by this time, I’ll wager that most of us will settle for taking the VCD. I did. And when I came home, I looked up the net for how to convert those VCDs into a home-made DVD.

As I’m using Ubuntu, my first stop was Ubuntu Forums.

Step 1 - Extract the videos.

vcdxrip -p --cdrom-device=/dev/hdd

If the command is “not found”, try after installing vcdimager. These give you the AVSEQ files that we all know contain the real stuff . The files are MPEG-1 with an MPG extension. The reason you have to rip the VCD and cannot copy the DAT files is because those DAT files aren’t there in the first place! Read up on the VCD format. Go look on Google or Wikipedia for the details. Repeat the command for all the VCDs and line up the files. It helps if you rename them sequentially.

Step 2 - Install tovid. Tovid has RPMs and DEBs for many operating systems - take your pick. Read and follow the installation instructions carefully - there are dependencies to take care of.

The remaining steps are followed from smorgasbord.net. I’ll simply put them here as I used them. Be sure to move to the directory where you have kept your MPG files.

Step 3 - Convert all those files to DVD format

tovid-batch -dvd -pal -infiles *.mpg

This is the longest part - 2 VCDs took near about six hours for my 1.7 GHz P-IV with 736 MB DDR RAM.

Step 4 - Make a directory in your current directory - call it dvd (or anything you want).

Step 5 - Add the movies to your DVD.

dvdauthor -o dvd FILE

Remember, ‘dvd’ is the directory you have just created. Repeat this for all files. Keep in mind the sequence - they will play in the order you have added them.

Step 6 - Make up the contents.

dvdauthor -o dvd -T

This “finalizes” the DVD, in a manner of speaking.

Step 7 - Make the ISO.

mkisofs -dvd-video -o dvd.iso dvd

There are a lot of ‘dvd’s in that. The first -dvd-video tells the utility to make a Video DVD. The second dvd.iso is the name of the ISO file generated. The third dvd is the directory where all the generated material lies.

Step 8 - Burn it! For me it was a matter of right-clicking and selecting ‘Write to disc…’.

That’s it. What you now have is the DVD pack of the VCD movie you bought. Pop it in and it will play all the clips in order. While you will certainly miss the menus and stuff you expect from a DVD, you won’t have to get up to change VCDs in the player! And the DVD quality is a bonus.

It plays great on VLC (if you select DVD without menus - the ‘dvdsimple’ command). Gets stuck on Totem - doesn’t go beyond the first clip - which is all of 12 seconds. Will check it out later on a friend’s DVD player.

Its been three days since I have installed Ubuntu 6.06 LTS - the Dapper Drake. Am I looking back back? No way!

This is how my desktop looks (size- 90 KB). Pretty cool - I have a handle to everything I need. That is not to say there aren’t any problems. I’m not yet out of the woods. Some things to note :

• The firewall GUI, Firestarter, doesn’t load up in the “systray” on startup. That icon is more of a placebo - I have confirmed that my machine is secure, iptables is always up and running. The GUI is needed only when I need to modify the rules.
• Fonts- Everything in Ubuntu looks fresh and new - guess why? No MS fonts and I like it that way.
• I need to run the EasyUbuntu script to setup stuff like “non-free” media codecs and stuff. I can do it manually from Synaptic but hey, there is an automated alternative available! Thats low on my priority though.
• I’m testing Pacenet’s peformance like never before. Wget (I’m downloading the AMD64 ISO for Amey as a return favor) has given me an unprecedented amount of speed samples - thats real world data, not a simulated bandwidth test. Now I only need to figure out a way to parse the log files and get the average speed…

I had no problems on the applications front, just like I predicted. Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org and The Gimp. There was a GUI front-end for wget resembling Wackget in win32 - gwget - but I found the wget utility itself to be the most convenient; I’m using it to download the ISO as I write this. So far, I haven’t come across a good replacement for IrfanView - the default Eye of GNOME comes close, but doesn’t have IV’s nifty image editing features. About the only surprise was Bit Torrent - it was dramatically different from the win32 version.

I’ll loiter around till the ISO gets downloaded successfully. After that, it time for setting up localhost. Once that is up, it would be time to overhaul the site.

Now that I’ve got my system fully operational, its time to move. But, (pity!) I got exams. So I have to postpone the move upto June. And its a good thing too. Dapper Drake is coming out on June 1. So when I move, I will move to the latest version of Ubuntu. But in the meantime, here’s the POA (thats something I learnt from my CATty friends).

1. Download Dapper Drake from Breezy Badger. Four things - linux hours, cd-writng experience, linux bit-torrent experience and pacenet outage handling experience (those pesky 25xxx errors).
2. Install Dapper Drake and get the net connected . Get Firestarter.
3. Migration shouldn’t be much of a hitch - I’m pretty much used to the suite of applications - Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, GIMP, Dia, GAIM, Bit-Torrent, etc.
4. Transfer my stuff from Windows to Linux, specially the mailbox.
5. Figure out the various paths - Apache, PHP, MySQL, Perl.
6. Install Java, only because I want to continue with my applet stuff.
7. FF plugins - Java, Flash, Shockwave and FF extensions.
8. Media codecs - audio and video - maybe VLC player will do?
9. Sync up localhost. Check out sitecopy and an FTP client.

I expect to finish most of this by 15th June.

Along with this, I’m going to overhaul my site (AGAIN). When I get a domain and a paid host, that is.

DokuWiki is coming back. I like TiddlyWiki but I’m going to use it like I mentioned earlier - for special jobs like a CD front-end and stuff like that. DokuWiki is more in tune with what I have in mind for my site. In addition to the usual stuff, the wiki will hold my Linux tips/configs - useful when I have to upgrade.

Well, well, I did it! This post is being written in Firefox 1.0.7 running on Ubuntu 5.10, the Breezy Badger.

Unbelievably, the only thing stopping me from connecting through Pacenet was not a dialer, not its 64 kbps rule but its “encrypted” password. The algorithm was silly. Once I got hold of the algo, it took me less than five minutes to get online.

The only things remaining are of course, the firewall and software repositories. I also have to see how the pppoe utility handles service outages.

Oh well, I’m coming back with a vengeance when Dapper Drake is released.

Its submission time. If you have been tracking this blog since its first post, you know what that means - no posts till exams are over. Sucks. But hey, I have to do it just one more time and then its over for ever.

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I configured my USB printer to print from DOS. Details here. It requires Windows 2000/XP. The short version is - share your printer and map the network share to LPT1. If you don’t have a LAN connection (even a cable modem connected to a NIC will do), use Microsoft Loopback Adapter, as shown here. Once done, you are ready to fire print requests from DOS. I tested listing a DIR output and a file from Turbo C++ IDEv3. It is slow. I read somewhere else that win32 was putting in a delay of 15 seconds for network printers (remember, DOS sees a “network” printer) - something to do with print spooling. It can be removed with a registry hack, but thats OK. Also, right now I have no way to change the default fonts and layout. The font is fine but the layout is almost touching the paper’s edges.

Here’s how the plan went on my PC. “System error 66″ resulted becuase I hadn’t shared my printer yet. The commands are preceeded by the prompt.

C:\>net view \\makubex00
There are no entries in the list.

C:\>net use lpt1 \\makubex00\hp3325
System error 66 has occurred.

The network resource type is not correct.

C:\>net use lpt1 \\makubex00\hp3325
The command completed successfully.

C:\>net view \\makubex00
Shared resources at \\makubex00

Share name Type Used as Comment

——————————–
hp3325 Print LPT1 hp deskjet 3320 series
The command completed successfully.

C:\>dir > lpt1

C:\>

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I’m going to install Ubuntu 5.10 after the exams. Took me about 4 days to download on Torrent. This time, I kept my client running and got a share ratio of 52%. I had set an 80% or 300 minutes - whichever is earlier - limit. For the record, the share ratio by the time the download finished was 10%. Anyone wanting Ubuntu 5.10 for x86 and willing to wait till December 25, feel free to contact me for details - after December 25.