Archive for September, 2005

I hacked together a very simple C# command line audio player that uses libvlc.

It supports the following formats:

MP2, MP3, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Speex, FLAC, Apple Lossless, AC3, CDDA, WMA 1 and 2.
MOD formats: MOD, XM, IT, S3M, 669, MTM, STM.

Source Code: snd123-1.0.2.tar.bz2 (MD5: a315990e0ab58f30ca80589e251e2932)
Ubuntu Breezy package: snd123_1.0.2-1_i386.deb (MD5: f81e05b3bd9ed7cd8a0f5b458af78de6)

Syntax examples:

snd123 ~/Music/song.mp3
snd123 cdda:/dev/cdrom
snd123 http://a1864.phobos.apple.com/Music/y2005/m05/d25/h16/s05.yoplcihv.aac.p.m4p

I’ve released version 1.0 of SharpMusique. Ubuntu Breezy package is now available.

ChangeLog: Improved album support. Proper build system.

I was looking for something in my archive and found the receipt for the first DVDs that I bought: The Fifth Element and The Long Kiss Goodnight (both Region 1). I thought I bought these in 1999, but the receipt shows that it was actually in August 1998. I paid 585 NOK. That’s 92 USD with today’s currency rate. Today I would have to pay 32 USD.

I’ve committed a Bonjour services discovery module. Avahi rocks!

Ben Waggoner has made a HD trailer of The Island available.

Specs: 18 Mbps CBR MPEG-2 video, 448 Kbps 5.1 AC-3 audio

BitTorrent download: The+Island+ATSC.ts.torrent

Update: Followup by Ben Waggoner:

I’ve made a followup test – same source, but at 8 Mbps VBR in four different codecs:

The+Island+8+Mbps+VBR.torrent

The goal here is to test content at a data rate where you could do a 1080p 2-hour feature on DVD-9 media. The trailer is very high motion, so it’s not exactly a fair test, but the results should be interesting.

Instructions for compiling VLC with VC-1 (WMV9) support under Ubuntu Breezy

Install dependencies available from the Ubuntu repositories (main and universe)

$ sudo apt-get install libwxgtk2.6-dev libdvbpsi3-dev libmpeg2-4-dev libmad0-dev libasound2-dev libesd0-dev x11proto-video-dev libdvdnav-dev liba52-0.7.4-dev libflac-dev libfreetype6-dev libid3tag0-dev libogg-dev libpng12-dev libspeex-dev libtheora-dev libvorbis-dev libxml2-dev zlib1g-dev gcc g++ automake1.9 autoconf libtool subversion cvs libx11-dev

Install libdvdcss (DVD support)

$ mkdir ~/videolan ; cd ~/videolan
$ wget http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8.2/contrib/libdvdcss-1.2.8.tar.bz2
$ tar -jxvf libdvdcss-1.2.8.tar.bz2 ; cd libdvdcss-1.2.8
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr ; make ; sudo make install

Compile faad2 (AAC support)

$ cd ~/videolan ; wget http://downloads.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc/0.8.2/contrib/faad2-20040923.tar.bz2
$ tar -jxvf faad2-20040923.tar.bz2 ; cd faad2-20040923
$ ./configure --prefix=/usr ; cd libfaad ; make

Compile ffmpeg (support for H264 and many other codecs)

$ cd ~/videolan ; cvs -z9 -d:pserver:anonymous@mplayerhq.hu:/cvsroot/ffmpeg co ffmpeg
$ cd ffmpeg ; ./configure --enable-pp --enable-gpl ; make

Compile libvc1 (WMV9 support)

$ cd ~/videolan ; wget http://nanocrew.net/sw/libvc1-1.0.tar.gz ; tar -zxvf libvc1-1.0.tar.gz
$ wget http://USERNAME:PWD@www.smpte-vc1.org/TrialPublication/Decoder/VC1_reference_decoder_release6.zip
$ unzip VC1_reference_decoder_release6.zip
$ cp VC1_reference_decoder_release6/decoder/*.[ch] libvc1-1.0/src/.
$ cp VC1_reference_decoder_release6/shared/*.[ch] libvc1-1.0/src/.
$ cd libvc1-1.0 ; ./bootstrap ; ./configure --prefix=/usr ; make

Install VLC

$ cd ~/videolan ; svn co svn://svn.videolan.org/vlc/trunk vlc-trunk
$ cd vlc-trunk ; wget -O – http://nanocrew.net/sw/vlc-libvc1.diff | patch -p0
$ ./bootstrap ; ./configure --with-ffmpeg-tree=../ffmpeg --enable-faad --with-faad-tree=../faad2-20040923 --enable-esd --enable-flac --enable-theora --enable-libvc1 --with-libvc1-tree=../libvc1-1.0 --disable-hal
$ make ; sudo make install