Archive for the ‘Linux Audio & Video’ Category
Thursday, September 29th, 2011 ffmpeg is the de-facto standard for Video conversion on Linux and BSD platforms. I was more than happy to find out that ffmpeg is capable of converting an .ogv file format to .flv (Flash compressed Video).
Ogg Vorbis Video to Flash’s conversion on Linux is a real piece of cake with ffmpeg .
Here is how to convert .ogv to .flv:
debian:~# ffmpeg -i ogg_vorbis_video_to_convert_.ogv converted_ogg_vorbis_video_to_flash_video.flv
...
Conversion of a 14MB ogg vorbis video to flv took 28 seconds, the newly produced converted_ogg_vorbis_video_to_flash_video.flv has been reduced to a size of 9MB. This is on a system with 2 GB of memory and dual core 1.8 Ghz intel CPU.
Tags: BSD, bsd platforms, cake, conversion, core, CPU, de facto standard, Debian, dual core, ffmpeg, file, file format, Flash, flv, format, freebsd, ghz intel, intel, intel cpu, Linux, memory, Ogg, ogv, piece of cake, platform, size, standard, system, video conversion, Vorbis
Posted in FreeBSD, Games Linux, Linux Audio & Video | No Comments »
Monday, September 26th, 2011 
While checking my sister’s notebook running Ubuntu GNU/Linux. I decided to check the gui package installer for some new Linux games that entered Ubuntu 11.04. A quick view over the games and I come across awesome game called PixBros
The game is combining three great arcade games from my young years Bubble Bobble, Snow Bros and Tumple Pop . The game really brought some joy to my boring lifeand here it comes I’ve written a small article to share my little joy.
In the game you can select one of three characters and play a remake version of Bubble Bobble on your Linux Desktop. Besides that the music is absolutely awesome like it is with most of the classic arcade games 😉
The game characters graphics is also trendy, like you can see in the screen below:
The game history is also intriuging and in the old-school arcade games spirit.
The game is published under GPL v2, so its one more great game in the family of free software games 😉
PixBros has also port (binary installer) for Windows, Nintendo Wii and few other platforms. As a multi-platform game its very suitable for little Children to develop their reflexes and intellect. Therefore for parents who wants to use free software to grow up their kids mind, PixBros will fit well with other games likeTux Math, Tux Paint, Tux Typing which are stimulating the kid to learn
The game is also great for big kids like me and other arcade maniacs as well 😉
I have only one small note about the game just like with many other Linux games, by default the game starts in minimized screen and trying to play it in fullscreen is only possible by using the menus available from within the game itself.
This kind of behaviour reduces some of the initial game enjoyment and maybe in the future releases of the game let’s say when it reaches stable version 1.0 it will be nice the game to start in fullscreen by default.
The creator team of PixBros – Pix Juegos has 4 other games created, all of which are primary developed for GNU/Linux and downloadable from PixJuegos game dev crew official website . Unfortunately the crew official website does not English translation.
The other games from PixJuegos one can enjoy are; A Remake of the classic Atari frog game again for Linux (available for install via a deb package on latest Ubuntu 11.04):
A Super Pang modern remake – Pix Pang , below is a screenshot for all those that can’t remember Pang 😉
Super Pang
Here is also a screenshot of PixJuegos’s PixPang running on Linux:
PixGuegos game development team has also two other games in their site portfolio; this are Garnatron and PixDash . Here are screenshots:
Congrats to the guys of PixJuegos for their great Linux games! I wish them a lot of success and a lot of productive years in Linux game development 😉
Tags: arcade game, arcade maniacs, bubble bobble, classic arcade games, Desktop, family, free software games, fullscreen, game, game characters, game history, GNU, gnu linux, great game, GUI, gui package, initial game, intellect, kid, lifeand, Linux, linux desktop, linux games, little joy, Math, Nintendo, nintendo wii, package, Pang, Pix, platform game, screen, screenshot, small article, snow bros, software, stable version, team, Ubuntu, wii
Posted in Entertainment, Games Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | No Comments »
Monday, September 26th, 2011 
A friend of mine gave me a VCD with some coptic Orthodox Christian exorcism, where there pope was chasing some evil spirits from possessed muslims who came to the Coptic Orthodox Church in egypt. The video was made to be in VCD and as you can expect this did not worked out of the box with Totem and VLC out of the box.
Putting in the VCD video inside my cdrom poped up an error like the one in the header of the post.
In order to make the video play I had to use the old school and now a bit obsolete mplayer.
Hence in order to play the VCD on Debian Linux I had to install mplayer and w32codecs packages first e.g.:
debian:~# apt-get update && apt-get install mplayer w32codecs
Second to play the video from gnome-terminal, I had to switch to the mounted cdrom location /media/cdrom0 and launch the video with mplayer cmd like so:
debian:~$ cd /media/cdrom0/vcd
debian:/media/cdrom0/vcd$ mplayer vcd://2
...
In some cases it might be necessery to play the video with mplayer command like:
debian:/media/cdrom0/vdd$ mplayer vcd://2 vcd://3
Watching it with mplayer from console has some downsides as I couldn’t make the fast rewind work, but still it’s way better than nothing.
Too bad in Debian Squeeze 6 gmplayer is no longer installable. The gmplayer can probably be installed if mplayer is compiled from source, but I’m too lazy to try it out.
I’ve red also in some forums online that gxine is capable of playing the VCD play nice, but I couldn’t install it from my existing Debian repositories so I did not give it a go.
Tags: cd media, cmd, codecsSecond, command, coptic orthodox christian, coptic orthodox church, Debian, debian cd, debian linux, debian repositories, ERROR, evil spirits, exorcism, fast rewind, gmplayer, Gnome, gxine, location, mine, mplayer, muslims, necessery, old school, online, order, poped, post, rewind, squeeze, totem, update, VCD, vdd, video, video play, VLC, way, work
Posted in Entertainment, Everyday Life, Linux Audio & Video, Various | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 27th, 2011 I just had some fun as, my work day is over. I was curious if I can send message directly to a logged in Gnome user on Ubuntu / Debian environment.
After quick investigation I’ve found gxmessage which is available as deb package for both Debian and Ubuntu.
I installed it and use in the following way:
root@linux:~# apt-get install gxmessage
hipo@linux:~$ ssh root@remotehost.com
hipo@remote-desktop:~$ DISPLAY=:0; XAUTHORITY=~owner_of:0/.Xauthority; export DISPLAY XAUTHORITY
hipo@remote-desktop:~$ gxmessage 'Heya what's up ;) Wanna have a cake?"
Below you see what pops up on the screen on the remote-desktop Gnome Desktop 😉
Tags: cake, deb, deb package, Desktop, export, export display, Gnome, gnome desktop, gnome user, gxmessage, gxmessagehipo, investigation, Linux, package, remote desktop, remotehost, root, root linux, screen, ssh, terminal, terminal session, Ubuntu, use, way, work, Xauthority, XAUTHORITYhipo
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | No Comments »
Monday, July 25th, 2011 
If you have to use Skype as a mean to call your employers and you do some important talks related work via Skype it might be a good idea to keep a voice logs of Skype peer to peer calls or the conferent ones.
On Windows it’s pretty easy to achieve voice skype calls recording as there is a plenty of software. However on Linux I can find only one application called skype-call-recorder
As I’m running Debian Squeeze/Wheeze (testing unstable) on my notebook, I decided to give skype-call-recorder a try:
I’m using a 64 bit release of Debian, so first I tried installing the only available version for Debian which is natively prepared to run on a i386 Debian, however I hoped it will run out as I have emulation support for i386 applications.
Thus I proceeded further downloadded and installed with the force-all dpkg optionskype-call-recorder-debian_0.8_i386.deb
root@noah:~# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/skype-call-recorder-debian_0.8_i386.deb
root@noah:~# dpkg -i --force-all skype-call-recorder-debian_0.8_i386.deb
...
However installing the debian i386 version of skyp-call-recorder seemed to not be starting due to problems with missing /usr/lib/libmp3lame.so.0 and /usr/lib/libaudid3tag.so libraries.
Thus I decided to give a try to the skype-call-recorder amd65 version which is natively aimed to be installed on Ubuntu release 8/9.
root@noah:~# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/skype-call-recorder-ubuntu_0.8_amd64.deb
root@noah:~# dpkg -i skype-call-recorder-ubuntu_0.8_amd64.deb
Installation of skype-call-recorder with this package went smoothly on Debian, the only issue I had with it is that I couldn’t easily find/launch the program via Gnome Application menu.
To work around this I immediately edited /usr/local/share/applications/skype-call-recorder.desktop e.g.:
root@noah:~# vim /usr/local/share/applications/skype-call-recorder.desktop
In skype-call-recorder.desktop I substituted the line:
Categories=Utility;TelephonyTools;Recorder;InstantMessaging;Qt;
with
Categories=Application;AudioVideo;Audio;
A consequent quick Gnome logout and login again and now I have the program launchable via the menus:
Application -> Sound and Video -> Skype Call Recorder
The only thing I dislike about Skype Call Recorder is that the program current interface is build based on QT KDE library and thus when I launch it, the program launches a number of KDE related daemones like DCOP which eat my system an extra memory, still I’m happy even though the bit high load I can record the skype voice sessions on my Debian GNU/Linux.
Tags: amd65, application menu, AudioVideo, call recorder, deb, debInstallation, Desktop, dpkg, freak, Gnome, gnome application, Install, InstantMessaging, lib, libaudid, libraries, Linux, login, logs, noah, notebook, package, recording, root, share applications, Skype, software, Sound, squeeze, tag, Ubuntu, vim, wget, work
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, Skype on Linux | No Comments »
Sunday, July 17th, 2011 It seems Skype has troubles installing on 64 bit Ubuntu via Ubuntu’s Graphical Package Install manager which in Ubuntu 11.04 is called (Ubuntu Software Center)
During my attempt to take advantage of the nice GUI apt frontend, I encontered the error:
Wrong Architecture amd64
And Skype install failed, as you see in below’s picture (which you might be unable to read since it’s stating the error in Bulgarian 😉
The error is quite understandable, since the Skype deb package which tried to install was built for the i386 architecture.
Since the Software Center was not intelligent enough to work around the issue, I finally fixed it myself using the good old apt-get in terminal, like so:
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install skype
...
apt did not even complain that the package had a different architecture for i386 and installed skype without any errors as well Skype worked immediately even though the arthictural difference.
This is probably because even though it’s a amd64 Ubuntu it has a kernel module loaded to support i386 binaries 😉
Now my sister can enjoy her skype on the shiny Ubuntu 😉
Tags: amd, apt frontend, architecture, arthictural, attempt, binaries, center, deb, deb package, ERROR, frontend, Graphical, graphical package, Install, issue, kernel, manager, Module, package, root, sister, Skype, software, software center, terminal, Ubuntu
Posted in Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video, Skype on Linux | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 19th, 2011 
Yesterday I was at a friend of mine who has recently installed Ubuntu 11.04 to his already oldish Desktop computer.
The system was 1.4Ghz (amd) with 512 RAM and some kind of Dell Trinitron 19 inch monitor
Even though he tried hard to make his NVIDIA GeForce FX 5500 ‘s drive to work properly with Ubuntu Natty Narwhal, he just has messed it even more.
As I always like helping people and I’m joyful for people who want to migrate to Linux, I took some time to make his NVIDIA GeForce work with this Ubuntu release.
First I tried to make it work by using some of the official NVIDIA Linux drivers located on nvidia.com following some online tutorial for Ubuntu claiming that it works but actually it didn’t, so finally after a bit of experimentation I found a way to make this video card work.
Here is how:
1. Install the following Ubuntu packages
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install nouveau-firmware nvidia-173 nvidia-173-kernel-source
nvidia-cg-toolkit nvidia-common nvidia-current nvidia-glx-173 nvidia-settings
...
2. Load in the kernel and set to be auto loaded on boot nvidia’s driver kernel module nvidia-173
root@ubuntu:~# depmod -a;
root@ubutnu:~# modprobe nvidia-173
root@ubuntu:~# echo nvidia-173 >> /etc/modules
3. Stop temporary (Gnome dipsplay manager) gdm
root@ubuntu:~# service gdm stop
...
4. Use nvidia-xconfig to generate a working version of /etc/X11/xorg.conf for Nvidia
root@ubuntu:~# nvidia-xconfig
..
nvidia-xconfig will generate new /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration corresponding to the Nvidia GeForce Fx 5500 and will move the old xorg.conf to xorg.conf.backup.
5. Start the gdm manager to be running again
root@ubuntu:~# service gdm start
...
Now the Xserver will start in a terrible mode of 640×480, probably because Ubuntu was unable to define correct VerticalSync and HorizontalSync for the 19 inch Dell Trinitron monitor or for some other weird reason, to fix this it’s quite easy though.
The fix to the NVIDIA GeForce 5500 running in 640×480 mode is done straigh via Gnome menus.
6. Use Gnome’s System -> Preferences -> Monitors to set raise up the Xserver resolution
Navigate to Gnome’s menus:
System -> Preferences -> Monitors
Here you will have to select more appropriate resolution and a different refresh rate, which in my case was 1024×768 and further on to store the settings press the Apply button.
One oddity here was that according to the Monitor Preferences the refresh rate was running on 54 Hz which I don’t believe was the case as I guess it’s some kind of Gnome or Ubuntu bug. I changed the 54 Hz Refresh Rate to 50 Hz as using the 54 Hz refresh rate as the screen had a minor vibrations observable if one takes a thorough look on the screen.
Setting the NVIDIA GeForce 5500 driver to work with 50 Hz Refresh Rate in Gnome loooked like the Windows’s 85 Hz RR and looked quite nice so I left it this way.
Finally to test the newly installed driver 3D acceleration I used glxgears.
7. Install glxgears in order to be able to test that 3D acceleration on Nvidia works fine
root@ubuntu:~# apt-get install mesa-utils
After installing mesa-utils which nowdays contains glxgears executable one needs to execute the glxgears binary.
root@ubuntu:~# glxgears
Immediately after a window containing the glxgears should popup on the screen, like shown in below screenshot
glxgears showed 3d acceleration works fine as the performance for 3d rendering shown was quite good and therefore 3D acceleration was running fine.
And that was it now the video works like and my friends, can enjoy the fun to have a generally virus Free OS 😉
Tags: amd, card, com, dell trinitron monitor, Desktop, desktop computer, drive, firmware nvidia, geforce 5500, geforce fx 5500, Gnome, Install, kernel module, kernel source, Linux, linux drivers, Load, manager, monitorEven, narwhal, nvidia, nvidia geforce fx 5500, packagesroot, RAM, root, s driver, screen, time, toolkit, Ubuntu, ubutnu, video, video card, weird reason, work, xconfig, Xorg, xserver
Posted in Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 1 Comment »
Thursday, April 21st, 2011 As I’m manually configuring a Xserver via xorg.conf I have noticed a block of code in:
Section "Monitor"
Identified "Generic Monitor"
Option "DPMS"
EndSection
That triggered my curiousity to research further what is DPMS . A very quick google search revealed that DPMS’s purpose is to communicate to communicate between the monitor and the computer, to make the computer turn off the (CRT or LED) based monitor if the computer is not used
Thus in short to rephrase DPMS is a power saving handy Xorg feature. I many custom configured xorg.conf like the mine I’m building right now does not include DPMS as many people doesn’t have idea what DPMS is and how to enable it.
DPMS is also an interface to the Energy start power-saving capability if not all, most of the modern day monitor screens.
DPMS enables the Xserver to control automatically the computer screen and thus reduces the overall computer power consumption.
To enable the use of DPMS on my Linux, all I had to do is place a couple of configuration directives in my xorg.conf .:
Here is how I enabled DPMS in my Xorg server:
1. Edit with a text editor /etc/X11/xorg.conf
2. Find the Monitor Section , e.g.:
Section "Monitor"
....
EndSection
3. Add inside the Monitor Section
Options "DPMS" "true"
4. Lookup for the ServeryLayout section , e.g.:
Section "ServerLayout"
...
EndSection
5. Place inside the ServerLayout section For instance the following options:
Option "StandbyTime" "20"
Option "SuspendTime" "10"
Option "OffTime "25"
You might like to change the options StandbyTime, SuspendTIme or OffTime to match your likings.
6. As a last step restart the Xorg server.
Press Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace or by issuing:
host:~# pkill -HUP X
Test that DPMS is loaded properly by reviewing /var/log/Xorg.0.log for example:
host:~# grep -i /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(II) Loading extensions DPMS
Tags: Alt, backspace, capability, computer power consumption, computer screen, configuration directives, consumption, CRT, curiousity, custom, dpms, feature, google, instance, interface, likings, Linux, OffTime, option, place, power, Press, rephrase, screen, screens, Search, server press, StandbyTime, text, turn, Xorg, xserver, xtest
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | No Comments »
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 I’ve been experimenting since some time in order to understand better what is the current situation with Video Desktop Capturing Software available today for Linux and FreeBSD.
My previous investigations has led me to write an article about xvidcap called How to make Video from your Linux Desktop with xvidcap
Though xvidcap works pretty well, it is currently uncapable of capturing the audio stream of a Linux Desktop env and hence part of the interactivity of the videos is missing when used.
A bit of further investigation on the topic has pointed me to 3 free software programs which are capable to record Desktop environment on Linux with sound embedded
The interesting screen video capturing Desktop tools I’ve found are:
1. recordMyDesktop
2. Istanbul
and
3. vnc2swf
Installing them on a Debian based distribution is pleasable, as there are installable debian packages of each one which I installed easily with apt:
debian:~# apt-get install istanbul recordmydesktop gtk-recordmydesktop vnc2swf
RecordMyDesktop‘s package contains a command line little tool which when started directly starts capturing video and audio of the Linux Desktop. After a Ctrl+C is pressed the program quits, saves and encodes the video in ogg-encapsulated theora-vorbis file format.
Here is the output I got in saving a sample file by launching recordmydesktop without any arguments:
hipo@debian:~/Desktop$ recordmydesktop
Initial recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:0 Width:1024 Height:768
Adjusted recording window is set to:
X:0 Y:0 Width:1024 Height:768
Your window manager appears to be Metacity
Initializing…
Buffer size adjusted to 4096 from 4096 frames.
Opened PCM device hw:0,0
Recording on device hw:0,0 is set to:
2 channels at 22050Hz
Capturing!
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
^C
*********************************************
Cached 5 MB, from 207 MB that were received.
Average cache compression ratio: 97.3 %
*********************************************
Saved 69 frames in a total of 69 requests
Shutting down..Broken pipe: Overrun occurred.
…
STATE:ENCODING
Encoding started!
This may take several minutes.
Pressing Ctrl-C will cancel the procedure (resuming will not be possible, but
any portion of the video, which is already encoded won’t be deleted).
Please wait…
Output file: out.ogv
[100%]
Encoding finished!
Wait a moment please…
Done.
Written 692529 bytes
(635547 of which were video data and 56982 audio data)
Cleanning up cache…
Done!!!
Goodbye!
The captured file as I you see in the above output is saved in file out.ogv
RecordMyDesktop has also a GUI interface (written in Python) called gtk-recordmydesktop
Below you see a screenshot of the GUI gtk-recordmydesktop:
gtk-recordmydesktop is a super-easy to use as you already see in the picture, you can either configure it with Advanced button or use Save As button to select where you want the Desktop captured video and audio to be stored.
In Debian Squeeze 6.0, the Advanced GUI button interface button is not working but that’s not such an issue, as the rest of the buttons works fine.
After the recordmydesktop‘s Record button is pressed it will start capturing from your Desktop and the window seen in the above screenshot will disappear/hide in the system tray:
When you press over the white little square in the system tray the screen capturing will be interrupted and a window will pop-up informing you that the captured video and audio is being encoded, here is another screenshot of recordmydesktop encoding a saved Desktop video stream:
After the final .ogv file is encoded and saved to further transfer it into (.flv) I used ffmpeg;
debian:~# ffmpeg -i test.ogv test.flv
...
Now let’s evaluate a bit on the the final results, the produced test.ogv‘s synchronization between sound and video was not good as the sound was starting earlier than the video and therefore even though recordmydesktop used to be highly praised on the net, the proggie developers still needs to do some bug fixing
Further on, I continued and (gave the other Desktop screen capturer) Istanbul a try hoping that at least with it the video and audio of my Linux desktop will be properly captured. But guess what, the results with Istanbul was even more unsatisfactory as the produced videos and sounds, were slow and a lot of frames from the screens were missing completely.
Moreover the sound which was supposed to accompany the video was completely 🙁
Thus I will skip on talking about Istanbul as in my view, this piece of software is far away from being production ready.
I also tested vnc2swf , launched it by: pressing alt+f2 and typing in vnc2swf in GNOME’s run application prompt, just to be surprised by an error …:
The reason for this error is caused by the xserver (Xorg) port 5900 is being closed by default on Debian
However this error is easily solvable, by making the Xserver to listen to a the port 5900, to make the Xorg server on Debian to listen on this port you need to edit the file:
/etc/X11/xinit/xserverrc
and change inside it:
exec /usr/bin/X -nolisten tcp "$@"
with:
exec /usr/bin/X "$@"
and either reboot your Linux or restart only the Xorg server by pressing Ctrl+Alt+BackSpace
Now let me conclude, the results from my desktop video screen capturing experiments prooved that vnc2swf is superior (as it is capable of properly saving a movie with sound and video from a Linux Desktop). It appears this soft is actually the best one you can use to make a video of your Linux desktop.
Sadly my testing has proven that Linux is still lacking behind Windows and Mac in even doing the most simple tasks …
Let’s hope that situation will get better soon and Gnome or KDE developers will soon provide us with better software capable to save properly a video and audio captured from the Linux Desktop.
Tags: audio stream, broken pipe, buffer size, Button, capturing software, ctrl c, current situation, debian packages, Desktop, desktop environment, desktop tools, encapsulated, file, file format, free software programs, gtk, height, interactivity, investigation, investigations, istanbul, Linux, linux desktop, ogv, Overrun, package, recording, recordMyDesktop, screen, screenshot, software, swf, swfRecordMyDesktop, test, time, tool, topic, video, video desktop, width, xvidcap
Posted in Linux, Linux and FreeBSD Desktop, Linux Audio & Video | 4 Comments »
Tuesday, April 19th, 2011 As a Linux user I sometimes face difficulties with watching subtitled, movies. I mostly use Mplayer, Totem or VLC to watch the common video files.
The most common problems I face with subtitles are caused by bad timing, many times the solution to the bad timing issues is very simpleand comes up to changing the default movie player I use MPlayer to VLC or Totem.
However at many occasions trying to watch the movie with different kind of movie player does not help.
In this dark moments I get seriously irritated I am not a regular Windows user, where such kind of problems are almost none as many of the Windows movie player problems does fix bad timing issues automatically.
Luckily there is a work-around to this subtitles timing issues and other mishaps caused by guys who created a Movie subtitle files with a Windows subtitle editor program, subtitles timing, the Linux work-around takes a few more minutes to install a package called Subtitles
The Subtitles text utility is written in Perl and contains two executables subplay and subs .
Subtitles is the Linux subtitle Swiss Army Knife as it is capable of convert, join, split, and re-time of subtitles files
Installing Subtitles tools on Linux is a trivial job and it comes to download and installation of the 2 perl executables.
Here is how:
1. Download Subtitles.tar.gz toolsI have mirrored Linux Subtitles (Subtitles.tar.gz) here originally the binaries are to be found on URL address: http://karasik.eu.org/software/ , issue the commands:
linux:~# cd /usr/local/src
linux:/usr/local/src# wget https://www.pc-freak.net/files/Subtitles.tar.gz
...
2. Unarchive it
linux:/usr/local/src# tar -zxvvf tar -zxvvf Subtitles.tar.gz...
linux:/usr/local/src# cd Subtitles-1.0
3. Compile and install Subtitles system widePitily the Subtitles tools are not currently available as a packages in the repositories of Debian and Ubuntu Linux and thus easy installation without compilation via apt-get is unfortunately not available.
Here is the commands with which to compile and install Subtitles:
linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# perl Makefile.PL
...
linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# make
...
linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# make test
...
All tests successful.Files=1, Tests=17, 1 wallclock secs ( 0.05 usr 0.00 sys + 0.06 cusr 0.01 csys = 0.12 CPU)Result: PASS
linux:/usr/local/src/Subtitles-1.0# make install
Installing /usr/local/share/perl/5.10.1/Subtitles.pm
Installing /usr/local/man/man1/subplay.1p
Installing /usr/local/man/man1/subs.1p
Installing /usr/local/man/man3/Subtitles.3pm
Installing /usr/local/bin/subplay
Installing /usr/local/bin/subs
Appending installation info to /usr/local/lib/perl/5.10.1/perllocal.pod
Now as we have the subs executable installed, Let’s say your movie subtitles displays 5 seconds earlier before the movie scenes (bad timing), all you need to do to adjust your subtitles to show up in correct movie scenes is issue:
hipo@linux:/home/hipo/Movies$ subs -i -b 5 your_movie_subtitle_file_name.sub
now check out the subtitle files once again with your favourite player and the early subtitles display on your movie should be fixed.
Let’s have another scenario, say that your movie file is encoded to display 24 frames per seconds (fps) but the subtitle file is created to display the subtitles for a 25 fps, to solve this situation issue:
hipo@linux:~# subs -i -a 24/25 your_movie_subtitle_file.sub
Another possible scenario where subs command will be a precious asset is if you for example want to merge two subtitle files into one.Let’s say you have subtitles for a movie which are split over in 2 parts and the corresponding subtitles are in 2 different files, but eventually you find a better quality of the movie (DVD quality) in a single file and therefore you need the movie subtitles to be stored in one single file.
In that case to merge the subtitle files from let’s say the files movie_subtitle_file1.sub and movie_subtitle_file2.sub use the command:
subs -z movie_subtitle_file1.sub movie_subtitle_file2.sub
Some few other helpful things you can do with subs on Linux, are for example: splitting a file after a determined period of time, separating overlapped lines, and joining files into a single subtitle.
If you want to remove all the comments of gestures, facial expressions loud laughing etc. which displays usually the annoying (‘[Sneezing]’ or ‘[Music playing]) during the movie screen play, issue:
subs -e 's/[s-]*[.*]s*n*//gs' movie_subtitle_file.sub
Also other interesting Linux tool which is useful if you want to make conversions between subtitle in a (.sub) format to (.srt) format is called sub2srt perl script:
sub2srt’s home page is located on the URL address: http://www.robelix.com/sub2srt/, just to ensure it won’t just disappear with time I have created sub2srt mirror here
The most basic usage of sub2srt linux converting tool is by simply passing input sub and output srt file names like so:
linux:~# ./sub2srt 5rFF-pop.sub 5rFF-pop.srt
sub2srt supports changing of fps rate per second during conversion with the -f option as well as creationg of converted files in dos like end of file (CR+LF) with the –dos option.
Hope this article makes sense. If you find it useful, please drop me a thanks comment 😉
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