December 2012 - luv-talk

Demuxing an MPEG TS from a USB PVR where the TS is prefixed with invalid data
by Anthony Hogan 16 Jun '13

16 Jun '13

Hi all, I have a TV which has a built in USB record feature (which basically dumps DVB-T MPEG TS in 2GB chunks). I'd like to pull the audio track out of something I recorded. VLC happily plays the file and identifies the video, audio and EPG info in the transport stream, but if, for example, I run: avconv -i ... -acodec copy audio.mp3 ... I end up with about 2 seconds of silence. It seems there's a couple of dummy streams and also that the overall file is prefixed with what looks like null garbage. I know that if vlc can play it, there's gotta be a way of extracting it, but must admit that I haven't had any luck thus far. Any ideas on recommended tools for stubborn MPEG TS demuxing? Anthony

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headless PMP recommendations
by Trent W. Buck 27 Jan '13

27 Jan '13

The battery in my PMP is dying, and as it's not user-servicable, I'm looking to replace the whole PMP. It was an IBM freebie, so I can't just buy the same unit again (nor is its USB device ID informative). I'm after recommendations that will meet the following requirements -- they basically describe my old device. - can walk into a local store and buy it. IOW not a DIY project and not "order online from <some gizmo site>". - MUST play MP3s (yes, opus/speex/flac/tremor would be nice, but I doubt they're available in commodity hardware). - MUST have 3.5mm headphone audio out. - SHOULD charge over USB. - MUST last at least 2h playback between charges at time of purchase. SHOULD be a lot more, so that as the battery slowly dies, I don't care. Once it drops below about 40min playback between charges, it becomes useless to me. - SHOULD cost less than A$200. - SHOULD be small and light -- on the order of a couple of USB keys. - SHOULD be headless (no screen). All I need is play/pause/off, next-track, and vol-up/down buttons. If I want to know what I'm listening to, I'll bolt backannouncing into the audio stream. If I want to go to a specific track, I'll plug it into a "real" computer. SHOULD use mechanical (not touchscreen) buttons, so I can skip tracks by hitting next-track through my jacket, rather than having to open it and reach in. - MUST talk to a computer over USB mass storage (or, I guess, simply take an SD or microSD card). I should be able to plug it in, drop a bunch of MP3 files into a folder, and it should just play them. SHOULD play them in the order they hit the disk, so that - streamripper of a radio station into individual MP3s will play them back in the order recorded, so streamripper's unreliable track-edge detection becomes a non-issue; and - a simple cp -a of an album will play it back in track order (because cp will copy the tracks in lexicographic sort order). SHOULD NOT need a magical "index" file for the onboard OS to "see" tracks, as the old gen2 & 4 iPods did. (Anything that needs iTunes or similar is *right out*). MAY use a FAT filesystem. NTFS or HFS+ would actually be an inconvenience for me at present. - if onboard storage (cf. SD card), SHOULD be at least 2GB. The key words (in uppercase) are per RFC 2119. A glance at jbhifi.com turns up a A$52 Sony B-series Walkman which looks close to what I want. Does anyone have experience with it? PS: no, I don't have a cellphone, so I can't use that to play music.

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Retro.asn.au - a special interest group for people who enjoy collecting and playing retro video games
by David E Payne 01 Jan '13

01 Jan '13

If any of you might want to go this meeting if it was on another date I'd suggest you point that out ASAP. But as I can't see a link to email on the website http://retro.asn.au/ I'm Bcc: ing this to a co-convenor. Either he can tell me an email to post (won't be for some days) or he can check luv-talk(a)luv.asn.au for comments or I'll check for comments in a few days. I always recommend groups go for the last *day of the month because sometimes that's the 4th & sometimes the 5th which could mean some folk can get there who otherwise never could. But nearly everyone goes for the first 3 weeks of the month. Dav(e/id/o/y) Will Romney become god of his own universe? www.mormonthink.com

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Ingress Enlightenment team
by Russell Coker 29 Dec '12

29 Dec '12

Anyone interested in an Enlightenment team meet in the CBD? -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Re: [luv-talk] headless PMP recommendations
by Trent W. Buck 23 Dec '12

23 Dec '12

Somebody wrote: > How are you finding the PMP you got? Looking at one for a friend for > Christmas, so a quick reply would be good. I'm thinking that one > fits what he uses it for pretty well. Sure thing! I was wondering whether I should bother, since I doubted anyone would be interested - apparently someone is :-) I'm a grumpy curmudgeon, so feel free to infer glowing praise for any aspects I neglect to bitch about. Short version: not as good as my old PMP, but tolerable. Would buy again at A$25, but not worth A$60. Long version: Most annoying thing, hands down, is that in top-to-bottom menus, turning the dial clockwise (forward) means "up", and turning it widdershins (back) means "down". This is completely counterintuitive. FM radio reception is poo, presumably because it has no whacking great antenna. In Hawthorn, 3PBS and 3RRR have static drifting in and out over the signal, though it's still intelligible. I've gotten the hang of using back, forward and play/pause/off while it's in my pocket, but it's very hard to hit the other buttons accurately without looking. This is partly because there are buttons both sides of the device, so you can it the wrong side by accident when trying to get leverage to hit the other side. It's also easy to hit the "zappin" button instead of volup. It is not feasible to switch between mp3 and radio without looking, because it takes five key presses. When turning it off or switching to radio and back, it *is* smart enough to remember what radio station you're on and what track and folder/genre/whatever of MP3 you were listening to. Rather than getting data from a 4-pin 3.5mm to USB, it has a USB A male on the end of it. (And a cap, which I haven't lost yet.) The device is bulky enough that I can't e.g. plug it into the front of an x360, but I can plug it into the back port. When listening to an MP3 audo book, if I turned the device off and back on again, it resumes imperfectly -- it seems to be within ±10s of where I actually stopped listening. Simply hitting pause without it turning off, doesn't exhibit this issue. When I accidentally hit "forward" partway through a 100min book, it took me a long time to find my place again, because the fast forward and rewind don't increase speed logarithmically as you continue to hold them down. When playing music, you can play by folder, or by genre and some other stuff, but it's tedious to look through it. It doesn't appear to have a randomize order / shuffle function. If you say "play everything in this folder" or "play absolutely everything", it uses one line of the two-line display to tell you that's what you picked, so the other line has to marquee back and forth to show you the track name and artist and so forth. This was annoying when I was trying to find out the artist and the LCD backlight turned off before it marqueed past the track name. When you mount it, it's a FAT of some sort, and you can just drop MP3s into anywhere in the tree. When you next boot it, it'll spend a while crawling the directory tree and generating an index. This took a couple of deciseconds after I half-filled it. The default filesystem is full of FOO.EXE and FOO.IDX type files that I am, frankly, scared to delete in case it bricks it. One bug I found: turn it on, don't select a radio station, but choose "Delete Preset" and it'll say "CANNOT EXECUTE". The "zappin" button is purely annoying. AFAICT the idea is that you can easily find the song you want while not looking at the screen; it does this by playing the a ten-second sample of each song in order, and when you think "that's the song!" you hit "zappin" again and it starts playing that song from the beginning. Haven't investigated firmware upgrade yet. Oh, and the manual is online, but as an individual HTML file per page, rather than a single wgettable PDF. This is annoying. Whew, all done. HTH, HAND &c.

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LCA 2013 - transport to Canberra
by Daniel Jitnah 21 Dec '12

21 Dec '12

Hello All, I am considering driving to Canberra for LCA 2013, last week of January. The intention is to leave on Saturday 26 and be back the following weekend. I am offering to take 2 (or may be 3) passengers along for the trip and/or back, share fuel cost (and possibly driving). It is ok to take the offer one-way (either way), but preferably I would have passengers both ways. The reason I am considering driving is to have access to a car while in Canberra, as otherwise for one person, coaching or even flying is probably cheaper. Sharing cost for car ride is however cheaper per person. (@$1.50/ltr I estimate it will cost $120 each way for fuel. So with 2 passengers+driver = $40, each and 3 passengers+driver = $30) You will of course have to organise your own accommodation (I happen to have relatives there I can stay with) If anyone is interested please let me know offlist. While am here, Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to all!! Cheers, Daniel.

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Re: [luv-talk] Linux Australia Name Change?
by Rohan McLeod 20 Dec '12

20 Dec '12

Bianca Gibson wrote: > On 17 December 2012 14:28, Lev Lafayette <lev(a)levlafayette.com > <mailto:lev@levlafayette.com>> wrote: > > Although a name change does *imply* a change of focus of the > organisation, > that it will become "Free, Libre, Open Source" technology > organisation, > rather than a Linux organisation. > > > It does not imply a change of focus from what we are now (imo). It is > intended to bring our name in line with what we currently do. > More details: > http://lists.linux.org.au/pipermail/linux-aus/2012-April/019454.html /begin rant Personally I think changing names of organisations ( commercial and non-commercial); to better describe function or simple novelty as often seems the case; involves a miss-understanding of the function of names ! The function of the name is not essentially to describe the function of the organisation, but to uniquely represent the organisation. All that such badge-engineering does is obscure identification. Even advertisers recognise the commercial value of brand recognition ! /end rant regards Rohan McLeod

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Re: [luv-talk] Likelihood and consequence of MS distributing 'windblows' as a GUI built on Unix/ Linux ?
by Russell Coker 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

On Fri, 14 Dec 2012, Jeremy Visser <jeremy(a)visser.name> wrote: > Deployment is also modular -- "Dism" is a recent package management > system for adding/removing Windows components. [0][1] And of course, > Windows Installer can be fully automated/managed too. Used wisely, these > two tools can be just as powerful as any Linux package manager. Do they support dependencies and versioned dependencies? In past times when I've been forced to deal with Windows systems there were all sorts of nasty problems with ordering of installation. For example installing IE and installing MS-Office would both write some shared libraries so you had to make sure you installed them in the correct order. The correct solution to that problem is to have them both depend on a package that provides the library. Then there was the foolishness of shipping DLLs from MSVC with your application which needed to be renamed to avoid version conflicts with the same DLLs from a different version of MSVC installed by a different program. Having library version numbers in file names was too difficult for MS. Not that this has anything to do with the original issue of whether MS might use a Linux kernel. > Basically what I’m saying is that changing to a model with a minimal > Linux/Unix base wouldn’t gain anything, because they already have a > minimal modular system to that does everything that Microsoft needs it to. Developing and maintaining a kernel is still a major task. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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Re: [luv-talk] Likelihood and consequence of MS distributing 'windblows' as a GUI built on Unix/ Linux ?
by Rick Moen 14 Dec '12

14 Dec '12

Quoting Peter Ross (Peter.Ross(a)bogen.in-berlin.de) > AFAIK NetInfo has nothing to do with Sun. Heh, OK. It sure felt like a mutant Sun invention, right down to the RPC portmapper dependency. (I was a NeXTStep admirer back in the day, and ran the Intel port for a while, though I never splurged on any of the very pretty black-cube systems.) > I still consider a lot of NeXT stuff as very good - and NetInfo was > easier to handle as other /etc/files replacements (NIS, NIS+, LDAP) > and came with a good set of GUI tools to edit NetInfo too. Probably. It's been long enough since I had to administer NIS that the hate has faded. ;->

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Re: [luv-talk] Likelihood and consequence of MS distributing 'windblows' as a GUI built on Unix/ Linux ?
by Russell Coker 13 Dec '12

13 Dec '12

On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Allan Duncan <amd2345(a)fastmail.com.au> wrote: > Unlikely - GPL issues. BSD however... There is nothing preventing anyone from running proprietary code on a GPL kernel. If MS wanted to use the Linux kernel then they would probably add some features that they need to deal with case in filenames, different IPC mechanisms, which they would release under the GPL (this is OK even if Linus doesn't like the code). Then they would have proprietary libraries using those system calls to provide the interface to Windows applications - which is also OK. On Thu, 13 Dec 2012, Jason White <jason(a)jasonjgw.net> wrote: > I would expect it to be possible at the cost of backward compatibility. It > is extremely unlikely ever to happen: I agree that it's unlikely, but I don't think it would necessarily break backward compatibility for applications. > Microsoft have a modern kernel, the > design of which is said to derive from Vax VMS. LOL > Apparently some of the VMS > people went to Microsoft and developed what became the Windows NT kernel. > In any case, given that Microsoft already have one of their own, there is > absolutely no reason for them to change. Developing your own kernel nowadays is a fairly stupid thing to do when there's a range of decent ones available for free. MS gets no real competitive advantage by having their own kernel and haven't done so since the days of OS/2. If they are going to be developing system software in the long term it would make sense for them to use a free kernel and save some development money - and maybe assign the good programmers to debugging MS- Office. -- My Main Blog http://etbe.coker.com.au/ My Documents Blog http://doc.coker.com.au/

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