Video Transcoding With HandBrake In Linux

HandBrake is a GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder available for major platforms: linux, mac, and windows. HandBrake converts video from nearly any format to a handful of modern ones.

Handbrake can save output in two containers, MP4 and MKV and I've been using it as a MKV transcoder for a while and I'm quite satisfied with it. Even though the official wiki says its not a ripper, I can see it to be quite useful DVD ripper.



Handbrake is available in CLI (HandBrakeCLI) and GUI (ghb) mode. Hence this offers the flexibility to choose the appropriate version according to your linux personality. As of now, we can install HandBrake from PPA and the latest version is v. 0.9.8 released back in July this year.

HandBrake can be installed from PPA. Issue the following commands in your terminal

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:stebbins/handbrake-releases
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install handbrake-cli

Or if you wish to install the GUI version, type:

$ sudo apt-get install handbrake-gtk

I recommend using the CLI version since you can transcode/convert videos much more efficiently if you use the CLI version. But if you are not comfortable with the command line interfaces, the GUI version of HandBrake is also quite good.

Only problem I have felt is the naming convention of the commands for both the GUI and CLI versions of the tool. In order to run two versions of this tool, you need to type HandBrakeCLI for CLI version and ghb for the GUI version. The problem here is with the naming convention for the binaries. I mean, the names handbrake-cli and handbrake-gtk would be more straightforward than these badly chosen names. Otherwise, the tool does pretty good job of video conversion and can be good alternative if you are not comfortable with ffmpeg. Note that ffmpeg is also capable of video conversions of different formats and is a great tool. :)


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How To View Someone's IP and Speed - Epic

Well wanna laugh the whole day? Then, check out the video I found today on google. Don't even try to hold your laugh while watching this video because that's gonna cause a serious mental disorder :P. Before starting, I would suggest you to read Wikipedia entry about traceroute if you don't know about traceroute(Believe me if you understand english, you'll get what it is).





Myself, been laughing the whole day. :P


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Screen Recording Software Solutions For Linux

Windows users have several options to choose from when it comes to the desktop recording (and only paid ones are good generally) but Linux users have fewer options but robust, simple, and best of all, free and open source desktop screen recording tools that we can trust on.

Below are some of the screen recording tools you might want to try:

recordMyDesktop

recordMyDesktop is a desktop session recorder for GNU/Linux written in C. recordMyDesktop itself is a command-line tool and few GUI frontends are also available for this tool. There are two frontends, written in python with pyGtk (gtk-recordMyDesktop) and pyQt4 (qt-recordMyDesktop). recordMyDesktop offers also the ability to record audio through ALSA, OSS or the JACK audio server. Also, recordMyDesktop produces files using only open formats. These are theora for video and vorbis for audio, using the ogg container.

Installation under debian and ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install gtk-recordmydesktop

XVidCap

XVidCap is a small tool to capture things going on on an X-Windows display to either individual frames or an MPEG video. It enables you to capture videos off your X-Window desktop for illustration or documentation purposes.It is intended to be a standards-based alternative to tools like Lotus ScreenCam.

sudo apt-get install xvidcap

Istanbul

Istanbul is a desktop session recorder for the Free Desktop. It records your session into an Ogg Theora video file. To start the recording, you click on its icon in the notification area. To stop you click its icon again. It works on GNOME, KDE, XFCE and others. It was named so as a tribute to Liverpool's 5th European Cup triumph in Istanbul on May 25th 2005.

sudo apt-get install istanbul

Vnc2Flv

Vnc2flv is a cross-platform screen recording tool for UNIX, Windows or Mac. It captures a VNC desktop session (either your own screen or a remote computer) and saves as a Flash Video (FLV) file.

Wink

Wink is a Tutorial and Presentation creation software, primarily aimed at creating tutorials on how to use software (like a tutor for MS-Word/Excel etc). Using Wink you can capture screenshots, add explanations boxes, buttons, titles etc and generate a highly effective tutorial for your users. It requires GTK 2.4 or higher and unfortunately is just a freeware(could not find any source code for it).

Screenkast

Screenkast is a screen capturing program that records your screen-activities, supports commentboxes and exports to all video formats.

If you got any more suggestions, please drop the comment. :)


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Real time video capturing and benchmarking with FRAPS

Fraps is a universal Windows application that can be used with games using DirectX or OpenGL graphic technology. This application software can be used for real time video capturing and benchmarking.

In its current form Fraps performs many tasks and can best be described as:

Benchmarking Software - Show how many Frames Per Second (FPS) you are getting in a corner of your screen. Perform custom benchmarks and measure the frame rate between any two points. Save the statistics out to disk and use them for your own reviews and applications.

Screen Capture Software - Take a screenshot with the press of a key! There's no need to paste into a paint program every time you want a new shot. Your screen captures are automatically named and timestamped.

Realtime Video Capture Software - Have you ever wanted to record video while playing your favourite game? Come join the Machinima revolution! Throw away the VCR, forget about using a DV cam, game recording has never been this easy! Fraps can capture audio and video up to 2560x1600 with custom frame rates from 1 to 120 frames per second!

Download Free Version

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Download Subtitles For Movies While Watching

Hi everybody, my apologies for not posting frequently but I'm busy with my end semester exams. Today, I am going to talk on how you can download subtitles for the movies you are watching in your VLC player or totem media player.

1) VLC: VLC from videolan is one of the best media players and my personal favourite as well. This open source player is simple yet pretty much powerful. In vlc, you can download subtitles for the movies you are watching by installing the lua script for subtitle download.

A little info about LUA: Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. Lua combines simple procedural syntax with powerful data description constructs based on associative arrays and extensible semantics. Lua is dynamically typed, runs by interpreting bytecode for a register-based virtual machine, and has automatic memory management with incremental garbage collection, making it ideal for configuration, scripting, and rapid prototyping.

So all you have to do is grab subtitles finder script and then install the lua file in the proper directory according to your system.

You must put the file in the folder:
- Windows (all users): %ProgramFiles%\VideoLAN\VLC\lua\extensions\
- Windows (current user): %APPDATA%\VLC\lua\extensions\
- Linux (all users): /usr/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
- Linux (current user): ~/.local/share/vlc/lua/extensions/
- Mac OS X (all users): /Applications/VLC.app/Contents/MacOS/share/lua/extensions/

This script currently gets the subtitles from OpenSubTitles.Org and to use this tool, start the movie in VLC and go to View -> Subtitles and then you can search the subtitle from there easily. Also, there is a upload feature though I've not checked it.


2) Totem: Totem is my another favourite player for being simple and quite fast. This one even does not need any extra plugin/extension to be downloaded. The subtitle downloader plugin is already there within the player but most of us don't know that it is available. To use the plugin, just activate it from the Edit -> Plugins and then just go to View -> Subtitles -> Download Movie Subtitles.

If you are looking for some other alternatives, try splayer.

I hope this works well for you. :)

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