Dave's Tech Blog
A Third Eye on Technology

I decided to update my About page on my website to show off the new specs I bought recently.  People were starting to tell me that I looked like a 14 year old in the older picture, so it’s about time I updated things a tad bit.

You’ll notice the watch I’m wearing in the picture.  That was a gift from my girlfriend for Valentines Day.  It’s made by Fossil and is called a “Skeleton Watch” because you can see all the gears ticking away on the inside from both sides.  She picked this specific one out because a long time ago I told her about being five years old and dismantling a wind-up alarm clock so I could see how it worked, and taking it to Kindergarten class for show-and-tell.  I don’t know what it is about stuff like that, but ever since I was a kid I’ve always been the kind of person who wanted to understand how all things worked.  It’s one of the coolest and most thoughtful gifts I’ve ever gotten from anyone.

EDIT: The software discussed in this post is still in need of a lot of development, so it is not guaranteed to work for everyone.

SECOND EDIT:  I have found deb files available for download of this software.  See the section about installing Easycam below for further details about downloading and installing.

So I’m getting ready for a very big trip and will be spending a lot of time away from home.  I’ll be a LONG ways away for a pretty long time.  My girlfriend will be staying at home to keep an eye on the place and I wanted be able to communicate with her via webcam while I’m gone.  So I decided to purchase two Logitech Communicate MP webcams from Tigerdirect, each costing about $45 (and they’re damn nice too).

Very few webcams are natively compatible with Linux and require you to install special drivers (sometimes you even have to compile the drivers from source-code… yuck).  Compiling the drivers is something very few users are up to doing to get a simple webcam working.  But I found a pretty useful application that makes this process a snap.  It’s very aptly named Easycam.

Easycam is a little app that will detect the type of webcam you have attached to your PC and automatically install the driver needed to make it work with your applications with just a couple clicks.  However, installing the application takes a few steps.  Don’t worry, I’ll walk you through.

NOTE:  Some of the following instructions are outdated and have been crossed out.  It is recommended that you try to download the deb files and install them individually and not attempt to add the third-party repository to your Software Sources as originally instructed.  Visit this link to download the deb files.  If you are running Ubuntu, you will need the all the deb files except for the qt package.  If you are running Kubuntu, you will need all of the deb files except for the gtk package.  Download them all an double-click on them in this order:  

1. easygspca.deb
2. The easycam2-gtk.deb  or easycam2-qt.deb  package (depending on your OS)
3. Finally the easycam2-core.deb  package.

Once the three packages are installed, proceed past the crossed out section below and follow the rest of the instructions as usual.

I’m basically going to be repeating the instructions found at the Ubuntu Community Documentation for Easycam, with small notes of my own here and there.

Step One:  Adding Easycam Software Sources

Click System>Administration>Software Sources.  You’ll get this window when it’s loaded up:

Click on the tab that says Third-Party Software at the top.

Click on the +Add… button at the bottom.  You’ll get a pop up box asking you enter an “APT Line”.  Paste in the following text:

deb http://blognux.free.fr/ubuntu hardy main

Then click the Add Source button.  This will add the above source to the Third Party Software listing and take you back to the above screen.  Now click the +Add… button one more time and paste in this APT line:

deb-src http://blognux.free.fr/ubuntu hardy main

And then click Add Source.  You’ll see both sources added now.  Click the Close button in the bottom-right now, and then click the “Reload” button:

Step Two:  Installing Easycam

Click System>Administration>Synaptic Package Manager.  Once it’s up, do a search for “easycam”:

Click on the checkbox next to easycam-gtk and click “Mark for Installation”.  (If you’re running Kubuntu, check off the easycam-qt for installation instead).  Then click the apply button at the top (not shown in screenshot above).  Now Easycam is installed and ready to be run.

Step Three:  Running Easycam

To run Easycam, you have to open a terminal window by clicking Applications>Accessories>Terminal.  This will open a window with a command prompt.  You just need to paste in the following text if you’re running Ubuntu:

gksudo 'python /usr/share/EasyCam2/core.py --gtk'

If you’re running Kubuntu, paste this text in instead:

kdesudo 'python /usr/share/EasyCam2/core.py --qt'

After you enter your password, this window will appear:

Click Forward.

The model of your webcam should appear in the little box.  If it doesn’t… this might not work, but for most of you out there it should appear.  Click Foward.

Now click Start The Installation.  This will install the drivers you need. You see a bunch of funky stuff going on in the terminal window.  You can ignore that.  Eventually, the screen will look like this when it’s finished:

The guy who wrote this software is French.  I know the progress bar looks kind of screwed up, but if it looks like the above, it’s finished.  Click Foward.

If you click the Execute menu at the top and then click Webcam, it will launch the little “photo booth” program called Cheese.  This program can be used to take little pictures from your camera or videos.  It’s similar to Mac OS’s Photobooth software.  Here’s a candid shot of me trying it out:

Now you probably want to do something more with your webcam that just take pictures of yourself, right?  I would hope so!  Well if I were you, I’d check out  Skype if you haven’t already.  Skype is a Voice Over IP/Instant Messenger program that you can use to make phone calls from your computer, as well as start audio/video conversations with others who are also using Skype.  I recommend it simply because a lot of people use it and it’s free to signup, and Skype-to-Skype calls are also free.  There is also a Windows and Mac OS X version available so your non-Ubuntu friends can join the party. You do have to buy minutes if you plan on making land-line/cell phone calls (I pay about $30 a year for unlimited United States phone calls), so it’s not a bad deal.  You can download an Ubuntu version of this software by clicking here.

There is one other similar program called Ekiga that you might want to check out.  It is similar to Skype and is open-source.  Though I’ve never used it before so I can’t say much more about it.

The last type of webcam program I was hoping to find for Ubuntu would be something that can record video based on motion detection (set your cam up to be a security camera).  I have seen and tried Windows software that can do this with extra features like alert you via email (and perhaps SMS text messaging) and allow you to view your camera by remote.  The closest thing to this that I’ve heard of is a program called geekast, which you can use with a seperate program called peercast to broadcast your webcam on an IP address if you want.  But the program is severely underdeveloped (the home page for it was down at the time of this writing).  So it looks like the best webcam oriented program you can use right now is Skype, and it’s mighty fine if you ask me (but there is still room for improvement).

Well it’s about freakin’ time!  I’ve been using WordPress as a framework for writing blog entries here on my website since the I started posting some many months ago.  And every time a new version was released, I would have to upgrade manually.  This was nerve-racking because you had to be careful not to accidentally delete certain files from your server, or your whole blog would be wiped out (of course you’d also have to manually backup before doing this).  Worse, the whole upgrading process would take about 15 minutes or longer (depending on connection) because even though Word press only consists of about 1.2 MB of data, it’s split up into hundreds of tiny files, which makes things SLOW over FTP.

But today (which is turning out to be a pretty great day for a lot of different reasons) I logged in to check on my comments and notice the following:

Oooo!!  An update button!  In the past, something like this would direct you to WordPress.com and have you download a zip, extract the few hundred files out, delete certain folders from your server, then upload the necessary files to replace the old ones, THEN go to a special web link on your server to complete/verify the upgrade.  In a word, it SUCKED.  To my delight, this is what I got after clicking the button:

Automatically?  Huzzah!!

Now I know that to advanced web developers, this doesn’t come across as a big deal because if you had shell access to your server, you could just SSH into your server and run a couple of commands that would extract the download and fore-go the need to upload hundreds of tiny files.  But that costs extra and when it comes to web hosting fees, I try to keep things on the cheap side.

So Cheers to the WordPress devs!  You’ve made my life just a little easier.

So… I saw this funky update on The NIN Hotline today about some Rock-afire Explosion “band” (which appears to be made up of Chuck-E-Cheese robot rejects) doing a performance of the Nine Inch Nails song 1,000,000.  I’ve never heard of this Rock-afire thing; is it a TV show?  Anyway, check out the little preview clip below, it gets pretty funny about half way through.

While we’re on the topic of Music Videos, take a look at these others (non-Nine Inch Nails) that I ran across today.  Both of them utilize stop-animation.  The first one is just cool, and the second one is not only cool but pretty damn hilarious as well.

Bubblicious from Rex The Dog on Vimeo.

EDIT:  My idea has been marked as a duplicate of another that was posted back in March of 2008.  So visit this link to go vote for its posted solution.

Every now and then I drop by the Ubuntu Brainstorm website to post an idea that I think would help improve the user experience of Ubuntu Linux. Sometimes these ideas are geared more towards a specific application rather than the operating system and in this case the suggestion I made recently has to do with Firefox.

One of the things that’s bothered me about using Firefox in Linux is the fact that when you click on a link for a file, an Open With dialog box appears, but if you want to open the file with something other than the default application shown, you are forced to browse the Linux root file system. This strikes me as an unfriendly way to have the user select an alternate application. If anything it wreaks of Linux elitism, the kind that acts like nothing is wrong with the way things are currently being done. If this were Windows or Mac OS and you wanted to find a different application to open a file, you wouldn’t expect to have to wade through sub-directories of a file structure most sane users wouldn’t want to be familiar with.

Let me show you what I’m talking about.  This is what appears when you hit Browse (for applications) button in Firefox on a Windows PC:

You’re presented with a simple list of applications to scroll through and pick the one you want.  It works the same way with Internet Explorer, and I would suspect all browsers do this in Mac OS X as well.

Now, here’s what you get in Linux when you click on the “Other…” button (which is equivalent to Browse in this context):

Do I even have to ask you which of the two above examples looks more user-friendly?

Anyway, if you’re a member of Ubuntu Brainstorm, I encourage you to vote for my idea by clicking here. And if you’re not a member, sign up! It’s free and only takes a minute and you could post an idea that will forever change Ubuntu Linux for the better.

Now, I’m not the first person to submit a suggestion about this quirk. In fact someone submitted a bug report about 4 years ago suggesting the exact same thing.  You might ask yourself, “If they submitted a bug report that long ago, why hasn’t it been fixed by now?”  Because in the eyes of developers (who are obviously a strange, bizarre species of emotionally sensitive anti-social hermits), this isn’t a bug.  It’s a “feature request”, and is considered something of a lower priority as a result.

It’s damn frustrating, I know.  Just look at the responses I got when I tried to point out that Amarok was installing missing a certain mp3 decoder package in GNOME systems, and was told that in order to get it to work correctly out of the box, a “feature request” would have to be submitted and approved before the app would install with all the necessary packages.  So for things like this it seems the only thing that gets developers off their pias/lazy asses are statistics (votes, in this case) showing them that people (normal earth-dwelling humans) actually want a feature to be added to an app.  I would suspect they need this kind of persuading because they have a very difficult time understanding what non-technical people expect from their computers.  But seriously, what idiot out there thought it was smarter to force users to browse the root file system instead of present a simple list of installed applications to pick from?  So please go vote this idea up, because it seems that sometimes a “feature” is actually something that should have been there in the first place, but wasn’t implimented for very stupid reasons.

Ripping is a term used to describe the act of taking a video DVD and copying it to your hard drive, while additionally encoding the video into a smaller format like Divx/xvid/mpeg-4 and saving it as an AVI file. Not so long ago I wrote a blog that shows you how to take such an AVI file and convert it into a viewable, playable DVD. So I thought it would be best to show you how to move the video in the opposite direction. I consider this to be a legitimate format for people to back their DVD’s into for two reasons:

1. Many DVD players are now capable of playing Divx/Xvid formated videos all on their own.
2. It’s more compact (700 ~ 1400 MB per film, a blank DVD is capable of storing about 4300 MB). You could have multiple films stored on one disposable disc.

NOTE: Scroll down past this DVD to AVI ripping guide if you want to see how you can backup your entire DVD (menus and all) to a blank DVD.

Remember that you are supposed to be using this little guide for the purposes of backing up DVD’s that you actually paid for and own. So when your dog eats it or your hyperactive 4 year old exerts his primitive He-Man and snaps the disc in half with his own bare hands, you don’t have to worry about buying a replacement copy. What you don’t want to do with this information is… oh, I don’t know… rent movies by the truck load so you can copy them all off to your PC before you return them. You wouldn’t want to do that. Not only because doing such a thing is illegal, but also because you might make Jesus sad.

Jesus has feelings too! Not just lawyers.

Now that your conscience is stricken with guilt and fear, we can all be sure you’re not going to try anything illegal with this “forbidden knowledge.” So lets move along to the fun stuff!

First, we need to install libdvdcss2 for decoding DVDs!

Before we can even rip a commercial DVD we need a specific decoder (known as libdvdcss2) to be installed. The easiest way to get it is to add the Medibuntu repository to your software sources. To do this in Ubuntu:

1. Click Applications>Accessories>Terminal
2. Paste in the following text in the Terminal window:

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/`lsb_release -cs`.list --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list && sudo apt-get -q update && sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring && sudo apt-get -q update

3. Then paste in this text:

sudo apt-get install libdvdcss2

The line of text in the first box adds the Medibuntu repositories to your system and updates your package listings.  The second box installs the libdvdcss2 decoder.  Both commands will work with any version of Ubuntu.

Now that we have our decoder installed, lets rip!

Ripping/Backing Up a DVD with k9copy in Ubuntu Linux

There are several applications available that you can install and use with Ubuntu to rip DVDs. One of the most popular is called k9copy. This program can be used not only for backing DVDs up as AVI files on your hard drive, but it can also shrink DVD-9 discs down to DVD-5 so you can burn complete backups onto a blank DVD-R. I decided to try this app out to see if it would live up to all the hype. Here’s how you install it:

1. Click on the Applications Menu
2. Click “Add/Remove…” (or Ubuntu Software Center if you’re running 10.04)
3. Search for “k9copy”
4. Check k9copy
5. Click the apply button.

Now that we have k9copy installed we can fire it up by clicking Applications>Sound & Video>k9copy.

In my experience, this is what k9copy will look like when you first run it, even if there is a DVD in your DVD drive. So if you have a disc in the drive, eject it, then push it back in and k9copy will open it up.

Now being shown is the DVD content structure, made up of titles that contain content objects, such as video streams, audio streams, subtitle streams and menus. (By the way, Death At A Funeral is a f-ing hilarious film and I highly recommend you go buy it). For the purposes of backing up just the movie we’ll want to select one video stream and at least one audio stream (6-channel surround sound, 2 channel stereo, english, french, director commentary, etc). You’ll notice that each title here shows a total size in megabytes each takes up. The largest one in the picture above is Titleset 1, weighing in at a hefty size of 3733.10 MB. So we know THAT’s the movie because the size of it is so large, and everything else is just menus, perhaps a trailer for some other movie, etc., and they can all be ignored and excluded from our rip. Just remember that it’s not always “Titleset 1″ that contains the movie, so check the size of the title set before ripping to find the one with the largest size first. In this example it’s clearly Titleset 1. So we expand it open (with the little [+] boxes next to the name) to reveal its contents:

After expanding the Titleset 1 treebranch, I placed a check next to the “audio 1 English ac3 6ch 48kHz drc” option, which basicly means “Six Channel (surround sound) English audio.” Doing this automatically checks off the video stream associated with it. I could check off other audio streams if I wanted to, but that would take up extra space and possibly reduce the video quality of our output, depending upon how large we want the outputed AVI file to be.

If you look down a little, you’ll see the video and audio ripping settings (shown above). By default k9copy wants to resize the width of the video you’re ripping to 640, which is actually a little smaller than the default video stream size of 720. If I were you, I’d change the above to say 720. You’ll also see a target file size of 700 MB selected. Depending on the length of the movie and the amount of action in it, you might want to increase this size. 700 is good for films that are about an hour and a half long. Any longer than this and you might want to change the size to something larger. Best test this to feel out your own preferences before backing up several discs, but 700 has usually been good for me.

TIP: For the best video quality in your output AVI, check off the box that says 2-pass. What this does is a practice encode (to feel out the parts of the video that contain the most action) and then a true encode which will use the information gathered from the practice encoding to more dynamically adjust the bitrate.

By default, the codec selected says “Copy”. We want to change this to some other video codec. I have the best luck using Xvid.

Once you’ve set your video codec to Xvid, click on the Audio tab. This will show the above settings. Just like the video codec, you will probably want to change the audio codec as well, although this is not required. For instance, if you want to preserve the 6-channel surround sound audio from a movie you’re about to backup, it’s best to leave the above setting on Copy. However, if you’re ripping the 2-channel stereo audio, it’s better to change this to the MP3 LAME codec. And if you do put it to MP3, you should probably change your bitrate from 128 to 192 or better (no greater than 320). This will increase the sound quality. For this example, I’m going to leave it on copy.

Once you have your video and audio streams checked, your video and audio preferences configured, you can go up to the top of k9copy and click on the Create MPEG-4.

This will ask you where you would like to save the AVI file it’s about to create and that’s entirely up to you. I like to place these AVI files on the desktop and then decide whether or not I want to burn them to a blank Data DVD once I have a few other movies backed up and ready to be burnt. Once you click Save, k9copy will begin to combine your selected video and audio streams together into a single AVI file.

What if I want to backup the whole DVD? Menus and all?

This can also be done with k9copy and it’s very easy. In fact I wish I had just written a guide for how to do this because it wouldn’t have taken as long for me to make. The first thing you’ll want to do is check everything off:

If you click the top-most checkbox, all the other sub-boxes will check themselves off. Now all you have to do is click the Copy button at the top (shown above). This will ask you where you want to save an ISO file. After the ISO has been created, you just have to right-click on it (while a blank DVD is in the drive) and click “Open with CD/DVD Creator” or “Open with Brasero” or “Open with Gnomebaker”, depending on the burning software you have installed. This will burn the ISO image to the DVD, and once you insert it into a DVD player, it’ll play just like a regular DVD with menus and all. Just keep in mind that when you do it this way, you might see a little worse video quality because the menus, all the extra audio streams that you may not need or want, deleted scenes, etc., have been included. And because the average single layer blank DVD can only hold about half that of a regular DVD, everything has been re-encoded and shrunk.

More information can be found at:

• https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Medibuntu