I normally try to post here at least a couple of times a week. Lately I just haven’t had the opportunity to post – with good reason: I’m on vacation in Miami and simply haven’t had the chance to connect very much to the Internet.

We’ve been blessed with mostly good weather most of our stay – with only 2 days where rain threw a bit of a monkey wrench in our plans. It’s actually rained about 6 days of our vacation, but luckily enough the rain has been spotty. Most of the time we’ve had clear or slightly cloudy skies.

The photos show a couple of beach shots. There are actually a couple of Miami beaches represented in the photos. The second day we hit the beach the waves and wicked undertow (as you can see by the wave crashing over me in the one photo).

We ate at a couple of nice restaurants, drank at a pricey bar (where the alcohol was more wicked than the waves – think they put about 4 oz in my drink), and had lots of fun with family.

We’ll be back in a few days, but it may take me a couple more to recover and start posting again. Imagine that, recovering from vacation.

First video intro ready to be exported

Over the past year and a half I’ve posted a few Linux and hardware-related videos on Youtube under the channel chaslinux. One thing that’s always bugged me is that it didn’t have a real intro. For a couple of the videos I used OpenShot’s text rendering capabilities to create a basic title, but nothing fancy.

Stumbling on some features of Inkscape made me re-think doing a very basic introduction. The result was the short video I posted this morning (but spent a couple of hours playing around with last night). Initially I figured I would simply export slightly moved graphics to PNG format, but I ended up discovering that Inkscape was exporting to a size outside the video frame (which is why the video shifts slightly).

My ugly mugg

Initially I imported a slightly blurry photo I took with my Blackberry cell phone into Gimp. Before applying any effects I always use levels/auto to adjust colours in a picture. I used a white paintbrush to remove background around me. I started with a large brush then zoomed in with a small brush for finer details. Since I knew I wouldn’t be using the image with all the colours I didn’t try to make the image perfect, I just removed most of the background around me and tried to keep a somewhat even stroke so when the image was converted it wouldn’t look too jagged.

Me on threshold

The next step was converting the image to a more monochrome look. I knew I wanted something like the old iPod print ads (you know the ads, the two colour – one colour plus white).

To accomplish this feat I used Gimp’s threshold feature. I played with different threshold settings, but found the one in the middle really seemed about right – Gimp is pretty amazing that way. Going too far left removed too many details and going too far right on the adjustment made me just too blotched out.

Me in Inkscape

I could have very well done everything in Gimp. In retrospect, seeing what worked and what didn’t I probably would have stuck to using Gimp and turning on and off different layers.

Inkscape has a template for NTSC standard video which is what inspired me in the first place. Before starting any of this project I noticed that when I clicked New in Inkscape I could choose from a good selection of size temples, one of which was NTSC video. With my image imported I traced around the image. Inkscape has a habit of smoothing out edges – I actually unchecked the smooth box to give the Inkscape traced version a little more roughness, but not quite the jagged quality of the original bitmap.

The Pentium CPU

I knew I didn’t just want my ugly mug and some text, so I dug up an old photograph I took of a Pentium 60MHz CPU.

I used Gimp to edit around the CPU much the same way I did my photo.

One trick that helped was using the lasso selection tool to select big areas and areas close to rounded edges. With my selection made I enlarged the brush and just painted white over the selected areas. Using the lasso selection it only took a few minutes to white-out almost everything (and I say almost because I left a small bit by mistake on the left edge).

Mistakes happen, multiple blue CPUs

The fading rolling CPU was actually a mistake gone right.

After importing the bitmap CPU into Inkscape and tracing it I started to separate what I thought was multiple instances of the tracing. It turns out what I was really doing was separating some of the layers of the traced CPU, which created a fading effect. This gave me the idea for the darker and lighter CPUs spinning across the screen (no movement is boring).

When this was all done I combined both images into Inkscape and added some text. I made slight adjustments and then exported the file back to a PNG image. What I didn’t pay attention to was the fact that Inkscape was creating some images larger than the 720×486 frame size I wanted. As a result a few of the images were actually 721×486, which is why the video appears to shift.

In retrospect I probably would have done most of the work in Gimp and simply turned on and off layers to create the same effect.

Once I’d exported all the images I drew them into Pitivi. I limited each image to about 5 frames to keep the length to a short 22 seconds. I’m not real fond of the fact that Pitivi seems to automatically make static images a certain amount of frames. OpenShot makes static images 1 frame and allows you to adjust how many frames that image appears in – I like it better this way.

The audio was found audio from Danosongs.com, royalty free music. I brought the audio into Audacity to crop it down to size and during the process discovered a software bug. The version of Audacity in Ubuntu 10.04 seems to still use the ALSA sound system. When I exported the audio and tried to play it in Pitivi I couldn’t hear it. I’d noticed the ALSA message on Audacity’s start-up and suspected that it had corrupted the pulse audio sound system – a restart fixed the problem and Pitivi played the audio just fine.

The last step was to render the movie. I installed ffmpeg and lame so I could export the movie to .mp4 format. This was uploaded to Vimeo. Why not just use Youtube? Well I use Youtube for somewhat finished projects and wanted to keep it clear of experiments. Youtube gets a lot more hits even if it isn’t necessarily the best video site around – it’s like the old Beta versus VHS argument (quality versus cost/convenience).

The video has a number of flaws including shifting colours and movement caused by frames that are larger than they should be. But this was the first experiment in creating video. Combining what I learned here with the ideas I have for layering in Gimp I think with a bit of time I could throw together a much better intro video…

Technorati Tags: gimp, inkscape, openshot, pitivi, video, vimeo

This is the first attempt at a basic video introduction created mostly using the free and open source Inkscape vector graphics tool.

Technorati Tags: gimp, inkscape, intro video

Clip from the movie Swordfish

In my quest to find the fastest way in Linux to get my DVDs on to my XBMC system I stumbled upon a great way to get all the DVD features and great quality – all very simply.

The dd command is often used to back up entire drives, or partitions to a file or to another device, but it works perfectly well for copying DVDs to an ISO file.

The down side of this method is that it produces very large files. In the case of the movie I tested it produced a 6.6GB file. If you have several terabytes of space this isn’t a big deal. Our XBMC storage is 500GB. At this rate I couldn’t even fit half my DVD collection. Still, having DVD menus, and all the subtitles available without creating extra files is quite appealing.

Here’s an example of the dd command I used:

dd if=/dev/dvd of=movietitle.iso

Note that we’re creating an ISO image here, not an .avi, or .mkv file. We’re doing a copy of the DVD. As far as I know we’re not breaking any DVD encryption here (dd just makes a copy of each sector), but I could be wrong.

Technorati Tags: copy, DVD, XBMC

XBMC showing movies by DVD

If you’ve navigated movies in XBMC by clicking on the navigation buttons – STOP!

Scrolling through a lot of movies takes time, particularly if you want to navigate to the M or N movies (middle). You could change views to Thumbnail view, but there’s a better option when you’re in Poster Wrap.

Each number on the remote control also has letters associated with it. For example on my HP Windows Media Centre remote the letters ABC are on top of the #2. If I press 2 once XBMC jumps to the first movie beginning with the letter A. If I hit 2 a second time it jumps to the first movie with the letter B. A third press of 2 jumps to movies beginning with the letter C. So to get to movies beginning with the letter M I hit the 6 key. Very quick, easy navigation.

Scroll through movies to show off your collection to friends, but if you want efficient navigation use those number keys on your remote.

Technorati Tags: numbers, remote control, XBMC