Computing – Page 21

Creating DVD Videos with Ubuntu

There are many different ways to take some video on Ubuntu and convert it to a physical DVD that will play back on most DVD players and while the command line would be fine, it’s certainly nice to see there is at least one option that provides a reasonable GUI and supports the creation of menus.

I tried DeVeDe before coming across Bombono. I was trying to take a number of 15 and 30 minute recorded children’s shows stored as mp4’s and convert them into a playable DVD. For some reason DeVeDe aborted with little to no diagnostic information after a couple of videos, it was easier to move on than mess with it.

Bombono was able to convert all of my videos, but the version available in the Ubuntu repository was older and had some serious issues related to menu editing. It turns out there is a PPA that is current (1.2.1), instructions for installing via the PPA are hosted on the bombono wiki. I expect in future the Ubuntu repository version will catch up and be the easiest way to get this utility, but in the near future I recommend getting it from the PPA.

The PPA install places things in the /opt/bombono-dvd-testing hierarchy, which is fine but it doesn’t provide an easy way to run it. I added a link in /usr/local/bin so that I can launch it from the command line

$sudo ln -s /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/bin/bombono-dvd /usr/local/bin/bombono-dvd

It does appear that there is a .desktop file in /opt/bombono-dvd-testing/share/applications so a little creativity and I’m sure you could easily integrate it into the Ubuntu menu system.

The 1.2.1 version (via the PPA) has quite nice menu editing. I wouldn’t claim this is the same level you’d expect on a Mac, but it very easy to use. One of the more polished utilities I’ve seen on Linux. Menus support background images and buttons that can be stills or motion video clips. I did experience problems trying to use too many motion clips on a single menu (it rendered most of them as stills), it may be possible to work around this by generating the DVD folder then manually adding the appropriate video clips. The alignment and snap to grid tools are handy for making the menu line up.

You of course can choose to create a DVD without a menu. Simply omit any menu and the DVD will play the video when the disk is inserted.

Before you get going with Bombono, make sure you use the Project menu and select Preferences, you’ll want to choose NTSC or PAL as appropriate and choose how many cores for it to use.

The size estimation is terrible, a 4.4GB estimate (with warning it wouldn’t fit) resulted in 3.3GB iso. This is a bit frustrating if you’re trying to maximize the quality of a full length movie on a single layer DVD (then again, if you’re burning a 2hr movie to a single layer DVD you’ve already made a number of compromises). There is an option to create dual layer DVDs, but I didn’t try this out. It appears to create 16:9 animorphic DVDs just fine, but either mixed 4:3 content (or possibly 4:3 content in general) ends up stretched.

I’ll include a reference to the forum, but it does seem fairly quiet there.

Windows Vista Recovery

Like many geeks, I’m the family tech support. Somehow my nephew’s Windows Vista laptop had stopped booting. You’d get the blue screen of death (BSoD) on boot. Using F8 on boot also resulted in a BSoD. I even tried using a Vista recovery disk and it too crashed and burned in the same way.

My first thought was to check that the hardware was ok. Running some diagnostics from an Ubuntu live CD indicated that side of things looked fine.

So I tracked down the Vista Install disks, maybe I’d need to do a full re-install or at least it’d give me a way to move forward. What? Another BSoD?! This time instead of ignoring the data on the BSoD I wrote some of it down, it the main error code was: 0x0000C1F5. Searching for this turns up the specific problem, there is even a Microsoft knowledge base article. Of course the fix that is supplied by Microsoft won’t help you until you can actually boot Vista again.

I though I could solve the issue using Linux as was described in one of the forums. While I could easily boot Linux and poke around, there was no sign of a $TxfLog log file. I suspect in this particular case there was some other file that was corrupted, but which one? A bit more digging around and I found another Microsoft knowledge base article.

This ended up being the solution: Windows 7 knows how to recover from this type of filesystem corruption. The knowledge base article suggests that you use a Windows 7 Beta installation disk – I wasn’t able to find one of these. What I did find was some Windows 7 recovery images, these will work for what we need to do.

Burn the image to a CD or DVD. Boot the Windows 7 Recovery disk to the point where it’s going to try to recover, now shut down and cancel the recovery. The Windows 7 Recovery disk should have repaired the Vista filesystem so we can now boot from the hard drive into recovery mode and the system will perform it’s “self repair” fixing things up.

So while the BSoD screen can be intimidating, taking a bit of time to read the screen and take note of some of the magic numbers can help guide you to the right solution. Or just call up the geek in your family and get them to fix it.

A mini-roundup of webmail software

Pretty much since having high speed internet at home I’ve had a machine externally accessible, initially through dynamic DNS and later via a static IP. Even prior to running a full mail server, I had a mail server setup to pull email using fetchmail from the couple of email sources I was using. Being able to access my email over the web was pretty handy, and I trusted SquirrelMail to provide this function.

Setting up SquirrelMail under Ubuntu is fairly straight forward, the packages are in the repositories and setup is a snap following the instructions. The version I have installed is a little dated but it handles email when I’m not home just fine, I particularly like the ability to setup alternate identities making sending email from an alias easy (actually easier than messing with aliases in Evolution).

The version of SquirrelMail I have isn’t really that slick on a small (mobile) screen. I looked at just installing the right theme/skin to SquirrelMail to support mobile browsers and there doesn’t seem to be any (free) solutions. This got me looking around.

First stop was NaSMail, a fork of SquirrelMail but apparently better for mobile. Long story short – NaSMail looks a lot like SquirrelMail, even on a mobile device. There is a mobile browser plugin – but it didn’t change very much of the look and feel. The install process was easy and things went smoothly.

Since NaSMail didn’t address what I was looking for it was back to searching around. RoundCube seems to have a strong following and there is a version in the Ubuntu repositories. Sadly the repository version is quite old and didn’t appear to be compatible with the theme I was trying to use.

Installing RoundCube from “source” was also quite easy, there was a howtoforge article which was useful. I got a bit hung up with something that turned out to be my error in the end – I had mixed up ‘username_domain‘ and ‘mail_domain‘ in the configuration file causing my IMAP logins to fail. Turning on some additional dovecot debug helped.

If you find yourself debugging IMAP login issues, the Ubuntu guide for postfix is a good resource. Basically you want to edit the /etc/dovecot/dovecot.conf file and add:

auth_debug=yes auth_debug_passwords=yes

Then restart dovecot:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dovecot restart

Then monitor the /var/log/mail.log output to see what’s going on.

So RoundCube is very pretty, but it completely fails on a mobile device as the UI expects double-click actions. You can manage to navigate if you are persistent but it’s a bigger barrier than my existing SquirrelMail setup. There are commercial mobile browser skins, but the only free one I found (MobileCube) was mostly a cosmetic change of the default. I will mention that the commercial skin cost is only $32 – probably less costly than the time I sunk into poking around. The double-click UI for RoundCube turned me off, I much prefer a web like single-click UI even when using a full browser.

My last stop on the webmail search is HastyMail. There is no Ubuntu support of this one, but installing from source is fairly straight forward and well documented. I will note that there is a site_key in the configuration file you’ll want to change for security purposes, I generated a new key using a web based password generator and would recommend you do something similar. The config file is human readable and is processed into a machine readable format, I found the command line version more convenient than the web – but both work fine.

HastyMail looks prettier than my existing SquirrelMail, appears to format nicer on mobile browsers (but not perfectly). The image at the top of this post is from my Android phone in landscape mode, I’ve blurred some details but there should be enough to get a sense for how it appears. It also has a ‘simple mode’ which is great for low bandwidth or low capability screens, this is captured in the second picture on the right. I wish there was a theme somewhere in between the default and simple modes, maybe I’ll poke at that sometime.

There are many other webmail options out there: AtMail, Xuheki, Horde, … For the most part they seems to target niches. Most people are migrating to hosted webmail (Gmail, Yahoo, MSN) or simply using the mail client on their mobile device.