Inspirated

I recall three distinct things about my visit to BBC’s Islamabad Studios today. Kamil’s very friendly support (he kept reassuring me that everyone gets nervous for their first live appearance on television), a minor car accident right beneath the balcony I was standing in and prevalent general confusion about what to do with my hands when I’m on air (I wasn’t sure if they were on screen so couldn’t decide whether to stuff them in my pockets or not). In any case, it was ultra fun:

The 100th post, and considering that the most popular ones on the blog so far have been screencasts, there wouldn’t have been a better way to commemorate the occasion than editing a short music-video which would demonstrate the prowess of Linux on desktop.

“Perhaps the world’s second worst crime is boredom. The first is being a bore.” — Jean Baudrillard

Uploaded on Facebook, here‘s the link. Only an account is required to watch the video, being in my friend list isn’t.

Edit: Facebook decided to take down my video because of the background track being copyrighted. I have also lost all the comments made on it. I guess I should have resorted to YouTube or MediaFire in the first place. Anyhow, here‘s the new link for download.

The very least I could do to express the euphoria.

While wandering around Compiz-Fusion forums, I just came across this really neat (and kickass) plugin which surprisingly hasn’t yet made it into the mainstream packages. Titled Freewins, it allows you amazing control over shape and positioning of individual windows. Don’t get what I’m saying? Check this out:

Link	Playable by	Resolution	Size
Freewins.mp4	iPod, QuickTime, MPlayer, VLC Media Player	320×240	468 KB

Each and every window can now easily be scaled as well as rotated around horizontal and vertical axes. You can now place your windows on top of each other like an actual physical stack when you don’t need them. You can transform your pictures and videos along an axis with the click of a button. Heck, you can even cure cancer with eye-candy like this — or so I’ve heard.

“We live only to discover beauty. All else is a form of waiting.” — Khalil Gibran

The idea of visualizing the history of Microsoft on four sides of a desktop cube does sound enthralling no matter how much you despise the company’s products. That’s precisely the reason why I spent a whole night trying to configure four different operating systems to run virtualized on QEMU/KVM with networking and multimedia capabilities. The results look good, especially when you have a compositing window manager to extrapolate their effects.

Download the podcast (MP4)

 
Video screenshots

Hardware Information

Software Information

Note: Windows 98 and 95 don’t like KVM at all, so I had to run their respective virtual machines with the -no-kvm switch.

Here’s my first attempt at podcasting a video of the kick-ass hardware accelerated window manager:

Download the podcast (MP4)

Beryl’s own capture plugin was painfully slow, so I had to capture the video with my Nokia N72. The clip lasts for about a minute, but shows plenty of effects to achieve the ‘wow’ factor (most notably, the toying with the x11 output of MPlayer video).

I had an MSI TV @nywhere Plus card, and although it worked perfectly under Windows, I never got its sound working on my Linux box. The main reason for it was that the TV-Tuner card outputted sound through a separate cable to ALSA-line in. One way of getting around the mess was to launch MPlayer for video, and then capture audio through this separate command:

arecord -D hw:0 -r 44100 -c 2 -f S16_LE | aplay -

The solution wasn’t only ugly per se, but was also quite annoying because of a second’s lag in audio. After some searching in the mailing list archives of MPlayer, I combined various tricks in the following command which did the magic (relevant switches are highlighted):

mplayer -tv driver=v4l2:width=640:height=480:outfmt=i420:alsa:adevice=hw.0:
amode=2:audiorate=44100:forceaudio:immediatemode=0:norm=PAL tv://

The adevice, amode and audiorate are dependent on your tuner card, whereas the alsa, forceaudio and immediatemode=0 are mandatory if you’re trying to capture sound from line-in.

That’s it. Now I don’t have to boot to Windows every time I want to do some video-recording. The profusion of capturing options in mencoder compared to MSI’s bundled software comes as an additional bonus for me.