catch up if you can
The last week or so has been pretty crazy. I booked my travel for my England/Scotland trip on Sunday, so I will be flying from ROC to EDI on 27 Oct, and then back from LHR to ROC on 3 Nov — just in time to vote in this year’s presidential election. I also converted one of my laptops to use dm-crypt for /home. Clearly this is not perfect and if someone wants to come and snatch the laptop while it’s on and snarf a copy of the RAM to find the key they’ll get the data, but that is a smaller subset of people than who would be able to get data off the machine without encryption. If you use Ubuntu of a recent version, I found the community docs here helpful. The system prompts me for a passphrase at boot now, all automagically. A real testament to the Ubuntu guys and all the work they do.
I have also been playing around with the new release of mediatomb and have been futzing with the new fourcc features to try to get the largest subset of avi’s working on my PS3 that I can — it doesn’t detect the audio type so there are still some that don’t work, and there is still that freaky glitch where Dattebayo encoded fansubs either don’t play at all or freeze after a few seconds. My PS3 transcoding profile now looks something like this:
<profile name="ffmpeg-avi" enabled="yes" type="external">
<mimetype>video/mpeg</mimetype>
<avi -fourcc-list mode="ignore">
<fourcc>XVID</fourcc>
<fourcc>DIVX</fourcc>
<fourcc>DX50</fourcc>
<fourcc>WVC1</fourcc>
</avi>
<accept -url>no</accept>
<agent command="/staff/mernisse/bin/ffmpeg-tr" arguments="%in %out"/>
<buffer size="6144000" chunk-size="131072" fill-size="2048000"/>
</profile>
So basically I transcode any AVI files other than DiVX 4, 5 XViD and VC1 video streams. I will have to adjust this a bit but until I find a command line app that can read the fourcc code without needing X11, that’s going to be somewhat tricky I think, it would be nice if they offered the ability to filter by filename / pathname regexes as well, maybe I’ll open a feature request.
In other news (related to the PS3 and mediatomb because that’s what I use to watch this stuff since I’m too cheap to pay for cable/sat) the Formula 1 season started last weekend. I can’t wait to see how this season turns out. The three-way grudge match between Alonso, Räikkönen, and Hamilton will be killer to watch, not to mention the up and coming challanges from the Red Bull & Toro Rosso teams as well as Honda and Super Aguri. Another exciting year begins!
Tags: technology