Geeky Ninja » Linux

WinFF – a media convertor for (almost) any format

Sharninder — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 17:04:55 +0000

How many times have you come across a movie or a video clip and wished that you could put it on your iPod and watch it on the go ? Or came across a DivX encoded video and wished that you could burn it to a DVD and play it on an old style DVD player ?

With the increasingly fast broadband connections that most of us have these days, videos are becoming as much a part of our daily internet consumption as text is. But, unlike text, videos are not portable – You can’t just take a video from one source and play it anywhere you want. Of course, with media players like VLC, this is less of a problem but even VLC can’t help you if you want videos from a random site to work on, say, your iPod.

If converting videos and juggling between the different file formats is becoming too much for you to handle, you should give WinFF a try.

WinFF is an open source GUI for the excellent command line video convertor, ffmpeg. It combines an easy to use graphical interface with the feature set of ffmpeg to produce a one stop solution for all your video conversion needs.

WinFF is available for both Windows and Linux.

To get started with converting videos to your preferred format, download one of the pre-build installers for your preferred operating system and follow the usual installation procedure.

The first step to converting videos is to launch WinFF and click on the Add button to add a video to the queue.

If you have more than one files to convert, you can add all of them to the queue and WinFF will convert all them one by one. Very helpful when you have a full folder of videos to go through.

The next step is to select the output format for the converted files. WinFF does a very good job of categorizing and hiding the complexity behind all the different types of media that ffmpeg can work with.

From the Convert To dropdown, select the type of video that you want to convert to. This will select the codec that the video will be encoded with. For an iPod, I chose the iPod+iTunes option.

WinFF then lets you select a device preset which lets you further fine-tune the output videos.

Choose, the one that suits your taste, select an Output Folder and you’re ready to hit Convert.

The actual conversion can take some and so, if you ask me, this would be the right time to go get a mug of coffee (or a bottle of beer) for yourself.

Have you ever struggled with video conversion before ? Which software did you guys use to convert your videos then ? Let me know in the comments.

Download youtube videos to your computer on Linux

Sharninder — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 13:30:35 +0000

Youtube is by far the most popular site for sharing videos. The only problem with uploading your videos to youtube is that there really is no easy way to download those videos back to your computer. Your only option than is to view them online. There are also times when you watch a video so hilarious/interesting that you want to keep a copy for your own use.

To get over these restrictions, a lot of people have written really neat utilities which let the user download videos directly from the site. In this post, we’ll be talking about one such utility for Linux.

Youtube-dl

Youtube-dl is a console only application which is the simplest utility I’ve found till now for downloading videos from youtube.

To install youtube-dl, if you’re using Ubuntu, use apt-get.

apt-get install youtube-dl

Now, using a browser, browse to the video that you want to download. Copy the URL of the video page.

Now, at the console, give the following command.

youtube-dl

That’s all. youtube-dl will now download the video to your computer and save it in the default .flv format which Youtube uses to save it’s videos. FLV files can be easily played back on Linux using the excellent VLC media player.

How to create a secure and private network

Sharninder — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 06:18:57 +0000

Picture this – You’re out on the road for work or pleasure and have this sudden urge to listen to that one song from your collection which is stored on your desktop back at home. Or you’re a freelancer and need access the draft proposal you made for a client which is again on your desktop sitting in your home office.

You can’t keep your desktop or other machines at home exposed to the outside world over the Internet, because, franklt speaking, it’s a dangerous world out there. But you still need safe and easy (and secure) access to all your data. How do you do that ? Did someone say – “Create a VPN!”

Enter Hamachi.

What is Hamachi ?

Hamachi is a piece of software that lets you create a private, secure network of your own. It is what people in the industry call an instant zero configuration software VPN – virtual private network. With a Hamachi created network, you can continue using your machines from thousands of miles away, as if they were in the next room. Anything that works over a local network, should work using Hamachi and you will not even notice the difference.

Hamachi works on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X and in this post today, we’ll be using it to network a Windows and a Linux (Ubuntu) machine.

Installing Hamachi on Windows

Download the windiows based installer for Hamachi and install it like any other Windows application. Hamachi is free for non-commercial use, so if that is your use-case, you can select that option while installation.

Once Hamachi is installed, it’ll take you through a small tutorial which you should read to get familiar with Hamachi. At the end of the tutorial, you’ll be asked to click on the power on button. Hamachi is now ready to be used.

Create a Network

Now comes the fun part. Click on the network button and chose “Create a New network” from the menu. Give your network a name and a password. Remember this password as it will be required to connect any other machine to this network.

Your Hamachi setup on the windows side is done.

Installing Hamachi on Linux

Installing and running Hamachi on windows is a little bit more involved because there is no fancy graphical installation to do the heavy lifting for us.

Download Hamachi for Linux from the same location as before. The Linux version comes as a .tar.gz archive. Extract the file, open the terminal and browse to the directory where you kept the extracted files. Give the following command as the ‘root’ user.

make install; tuncfg

You don’t need to be running as the root user to run the rest of the commands. The next command is used to create a cypto identity for your machine.

hamachi init

Now, give the following commands in sequence to start the hamachi daemon, login to hamachi, join a network (requires the password that you set earlier), and go online in the network.

hamachi start hamachi login hamachi join hamachi go-online

If, at this time, you look at the hamachi GUI in the windows machine, you should be able to see the Linux machine logged in to the network you created earlier.

That’s it. Now that both the machines are in the same network and you can use them as if they were sitting right next to each other, even if you’re physically sitting miles away.

Hamachi is the easiest zero configuration VPN solution that I’ve seen and I’m sure you all will find a use for it at one time or another.

Are there any other VPN solutions that you guys use ? Let us know in the comments.

How to schedule tasks in GNOME using gnome-schedule

Sharninder — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 18:14:47 +0000

Most Linux/Unix veterans use cron to schedule tasks on their machines and it is a very powerful utility for what it does.

The problem with cron is the cryptic syntax which tends to scare away most new users and the fact that a user has to use the terminal to create a new job.

In this tutorial we will explain how to use a graphical front end to cron, called gnome-schedule.

Gnome-schedule is a graphical front-end to cron and at, another utility to execute commands at a specified time . It is completely GUI driven and the user does not need to have any prior knowledge of cron or it’s syntax.

Installing Gnome-schedule

To get started with gnome-schedule on Ubuntu/Debian, install it using the apt-get install command:

apt-get install gnome-schedule

Once, gnome-schedule is installed, it can be launched from the Applications -> System Tools -> Scheduled Tasks menu entry.

Scheduling a new Task

To schedule a new task, click on the New button in the menu bar.

There are three options to create new tasks, either create a recurring task (This will use cron at the backend), or create a one time task (This will use at at the backend) or use a template.

For our purpose here, we’ll create a recurring task. Click on New -> Recurring task and you should see the following window which will let you define the task.

The advanced radio button will let you chose exactly when do you want the task to be run. ‘*’ here stands for ‘all’. So, the above task will be run on Day 1 of every month at 0 hours and 0 minutes. The handy preview, in case you didn’t notice, tell you exactly what option have you selected.

You don’t need to manually enter the times. Click on the Edit button next to the text field and you will be able to select the exact time of the task using a simple GUI.

Once a task has been created, the gnome-schedule application can be closed and cron will take care of executing the task at your chosen time and interval.

gnome-schedule also lets you create templates for tasks that you schedule frequently. Although, I don’t use this option a lot since I don’t really have that many tasks to be scheduled at any given time, some people might find this option useful.

gnome-schedule is an absolute time saver and negates the need to learn the complex cron syntax for newbies. It presents almost all the power of cron to the users with a nice and easy to learn interface.

Are there any other scheduling applications that you guys use ? Let me know in the comments.

Elisa – Open Source Cross platform Media center

Sharninder — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 14:07:01 +0000

Ellisa is an open source media center that can play DVDs, VCDs, video files and even display your photos. The support for video files is extensive and the player can handle almost any video that you might throw at it.

Elisa is extensible and is based on a very neat plugin architecture, which means that if there are features that you miss from the default install, they’re usually just a plugin away.

In the true spirit of open source, Elisa is available for both Linux and Windows with a Mac OS X port on the way.

Once you’ve installed Elisa, the application starts right away and the first thing that it does is scan your hard disk for all the media that it recognizes.

The scan is done in the background and Elisa uses very little resources while the scan is going on, so you can continue using your computer as you normally would.

As I mentioned earlier, Elisa also supports plugins and comes bundled with a lot of very useful ones. To enable plugins, go to the plugins configuration menu.

Browse over to the plugin library and you’ll be able to see the list of plugins that are available for you to enable. Chose the plugin that you want to enable and you’re all set. No restarting of the application, no dependencies to take of. As easy as pressing a button :-)

Elisa is a very capable Media center application that can easily give it’s more established cousins a run for their money.

If you’re an Apple Frontrow or Windows Media Center user, give Elisa a try and I’m quite sure you won’t be disappointed.

What other Media Center applications do you guys use ? Let us know in the comments.

Play Space Invaders in Openoffice Calc

Sharninder — Wed, 04 Mar 2009 13:25:48 +0000

Who said open source developers were a boring bunch of people. I’m quite sure that person hasn’t met the developers of Calc.

For those of you who’ve been living under a rock until now, Calc is the Spreadsheet part of the OpenOffice.org suite and today we are going to unearth a very cool easter egg game programmed within Calc by the developers.

Open a Calc Spreadsheet and type =GAME(“StarWars”) into any cell. The text should be typed exactly as written.

As soon as you press return, a game called StarWars Galaxy will launch which is basically a clone of the popular space invaders arcade game.

The game and instructions are in German, but it is pretty self explanatory and you can start playing rightaway using the keyboard.

The left and right arrow keys move the Canon and the space bar is used to fire shots at the aliens.

I used to be a big fan of the original Space Invaders and have already spent quite a bit of time playing this one. I’m sure you guys will enjoy this game too.

No of any other cool Easter eggs ? Let us know in the comments.

How to install *.rpm files in Ubuntu

Sharninder — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 14:35:39 +0000

Ubuntu (and all Debian based) distributions use the .deb format for application packages and these days most developers writing applications for Linux provide a .deb package.

But, even then there might be times when you want to install an application which is available only in the .rpm format. If you use Ubuntu or any other Debian distribution, Alien might be able to help you.

Alien is a program that converts between the rpm, dep, stampede slp, and slackware tgz file formats. If you want to use a package from another distribution than the one you have installed on your system, you can use alien to convert it to your preferred package format and install it.

Alien is available in the Ubuntu repository so you can install it by using the following command

$ sudo apt-get install alien

To convert an rpm file to deb, use the following command

$ alien -d -k package.rpm

Where package.rpm is the rpm package that you want to convert. The ‘-k’ option is to tell alien to keep the same version number on the resulting .deb as the rpm file.

Alien can also convert .deb packages to .rpm and the command to do that is

$ alien -r package.deb

Where package.deb is the deb package that you want to convert.

Disable spatial mode in GNOME’s Nautilus file browser

Sharninder — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 21:24:46 +0000

I’m a big GNOME fan and have been using it ever since it was first released.

Ofcourse, like all software, not all is good with the GNOME project also and some of the decisions made by the developers are just plain absurd to me. One such decision was making the Spatial mode on Nautilus as the default.

Nautilus, for those not familiar with it, is the default file browser/manager bundled with GNOME and the spatial mode basically means that each folder or file opens in a window of its own. There are other advantages to the spatial mode, I agree, but this is the one that I found the most irritating.

To make Nautilus behave and get rid of the spatial mode, open the gconf-editor application from the run menu and browse to the following key: apps -> Nautilus -> Preferences

Now, check the always_user_browser property.

That’s all. Now, go ahead and enjoy Nautilus and GNOME the way they’re meant to be.

Clone an Ubuntu system using Synaptic Markings

Sharninder — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 16:19:06 +0000

How many times have you had to reinstall the OS on your computer and then had to install all your favorite pieces of software by hand. I’m sure it’s quite painful. And even more so when you forget to install a couple of software and then have to install them in a crunch when you need them the most.

The Synaptic Package Manager bundled with Ubuntu (and available for Debian and most other debian based distributions) has a very cool solution. Synaptic is a graphical package manager for debian based distributions and is the default package manager installed for Ubuntu and is quite popular on that platform.

Synaptic lets the user export (and import) a file which contains details of all the software that is installed on the system.

The file is called a “Markings” file. To create a Marking, fire up Synaptic and click on File – > Save Markings. Provide a name and you’re done.

Now, the next time you reinstall Ubuntu, just fire up Synaptic and click on File -> Read Markings and point it to the Markings file that you created earlier. That’s all.

This works the best if you’re installing the same version of Ubuntu or Debian as the one the Markings have been created on. And if you do try to use this trick on a newer version of Ubuntu, Synaptic might complain about a couple of version mismatches between software … nothing that some manual apt-get‘ing can’t solve.

How do you guys handle OS reinstallations ? Do you write down all the software that you use and then reinstall them by hand ?

How To Recover data from an iPhone backup

Sharninder — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:31:54 +0000

My sister lost her iPhone a couple of days back and with that all her contacts, notes and calender entries that she had painstakingly stored on the device.

Her only hope of getting all that important data back was the backup that she had taken a couple of days earlier and she asked me to help her out.

This was my first time dealing with an iPhone backup and I didn’t know where to get started trying to recover data from the backup.

Well, truth be told. The iPhone is not the most open among gadgets. And it isn’t easy to get your data off it. Apple has tried it’s best to hide any iPhone related information from the user’s view. And they have succeeded to an extent, atleast the primary consumers of Apple’s goods don’t really care where (or more importantly, how) the data is stored, as long as Apple provides an application to access it.

In the iPhone’s case, the application is iTunes and the only way to put this data back on to the device is to use iTunes … unless you know where to look for it.

On a computer running windows vista, the data backup is stored in the following location:

C:\Documents and Settings\USERNAME\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup

Under the backup directory, you will see a directory which looks like a unique ID. This is the directory in which the backup is created, everytime you backup your iPhone using iTunes.

In this directory, you will see a number of files with the *.mdbackup extension.

The .mdbackup files are the actual backups of all the applications and settings of your iPhone. So, the first thing you should be doing is, make a backup of these files :-)

If you use an editor to view these files right now, all you’ll see is garbage, cause these are not text files. They are what Apple calls Binary plists. And to decrypt them, you ideally need a Mac and this utility.

I used the command line version of the utility since I only had console access to a mac and that worked for me.

I first copied all the *.mdbackup files, that I had collected from the iTunes backup folder, to the Mac and ran the following command to zero in on the files that actually had any useful data. I was the most interested in the Contacts data, so that’s what I searched for first.

grep ‘AddressBook’ *.mdbackup

AddressBook is the name of the application which stores, well, address book data on an iPhone. It is only named Contacts in the interface. The actual application name is AddressBook and when I searched for that string in the backup files, I got three files as a result.

I opened the first file using a text editor and it turned out to be the one I was interested in. The word AddressBook is in the beginning of this binary file and it also mentions the database name, where all the data is stored. Yay !

So, now to get to that data base file, we need to use the decoding utility that we downloaded earlier.

So, we’ve got our database file. The decode iphone utility will put it in the following folder structure

/Users//MobileSyncExport/Library/AddressBook/

Open the database with the following command:

sqlite3 AddressBook.sqlite

and you’ll be dropped to the sqlite prompt. At this point, you need to understand the schema of this database a bit before you can proceed further. Give “.tables” command and you should see the following output.

At this point, I had to use a bit of trial and error to figure out which table holds what data. To view the schema of a particular table you can use the following command.

.schema

Using this command on the ABPerson table gave me the following result.

There was other information also, but this is basically what I was interested in. So, this particular table was all the information about the a Person, except the phone number. To look for the phone number, I had to look at another table – ABMultiValue. And the two tables are linked through the ROWID and record_id fields in the ABPerson and ABMultiValue tables respectively.

It turns out that the ABMultiValue tables lists all the phone numbers and a quick “select * from ABMultiValue” gave me the answer I was looking for. So, now I finally know where all the data is. To collect all the data in a single place, I used the following SQL query.

select ABPerson.first,ABPerson.last,ABMultiValue.value from ABPerson,ABMultiValue where ABMultiValue.record_id=ABPerson.ROWID

Once I’d confirmed that this was indeed the correct data, I gave the following command on the sqlite prompt

.output backup.txt

That made sqlite put all output into the backup.txt text file rather than the console. And I was set. Ran the above select statement once again and I had all the phone numbers in a nice text file.

How was that for a weekend project, eh ?

In a future post, we’ll talk about taking out the notes and Calender entries from a backup file. The procedure is almost the same, so if you guys can figure it out yourself till then, post the solution in the comments.

Geeky Ninja » Linux

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