Club Linux Coffs Harbour

I didn't know it until about a month ago, but there's this thing called DVB-T, a standard for digital video broadcasts (the "DVB" bit) by terrestrial broadcasters (the "T" bit). You can get really cheap little USB devices to receive and decode these broadcasts, and Gary brought one of them in to the meeting before last.

Hi All,

Just thought I'd open a thread for us to provide suggestions, links and recomendations to open source video editing solutions. I'd prefer to stick to linux as this is the Club Linux website, but I know a few people are interested in making stuff work on their Microsoft machines.

I couldn't remember the name of the gnome video editing project today, so here it is:

http://www.diva-project.org/

I expect there are a fair few of you who have bought one of those cheap MP3 players from The Good Guys or WOW. I know I have one which cost me about 30 bucks and plays half an hour of audio which gets me to work and back on my bicycle.

I've just had a friend ask me about webcams, which I've never used before. This document claims "many cameras work out-of-the-box". Does anybody have any real world experience with this? Brands of hardware to recommend or avoid? I notice Ubuntu has Video4Linux installed by default, and a great big button marked "Detect devices" in the Ekiga video preferences dialog. Is it really that easy?

At Software Freedom Day, Hugh mentioned the burgeoning art form of machinima, and I played an example of a music mashup. Well, here's a machinima mashup (try saying that after a few shandies), combining Monty Python's "How Not to be Seen" sketch with the first-person shooter game, "Halo", to humorous effect.

Note that this is a YouTube video, which requires the proprietary Flash browser plugin. To view it in free software, follow the instructions here. 

Tom's Hardware has reviewed MythTV and concludes:

"Perhaps the most profound and telling advantage to MythTV [over Windows XP Media Centre Edition] is that its status as a community-based product means anyone can lend a hand in the development process. Possible contributions range from suggesting new and improved features, to creating and implementing new components. In fact, that is how many of the bundled plug-ins and add-ons found their way into the existing MythTV suite, and many more fol

YouTube is great. It provides an easy way for non-technical people to share video clips. The downside is that it does so by streaming the video in a proprietary format. That's bad news for people with low-bandwidth Internet connections, or who want to avoid using proprietary or (depending on local laws) legally grey media players. Wouldn't it be great if you could download videos from YouTube and watch them at your leisure in a friendly file format? Well, you can using a couple of simple command-line tools...

What is a File Format?

A file format is essentially the set of rules for turning information into zeroes and ones and vice versa.

See Wikipedia's article on file formats.

Proprietary Formats

A proprietary file  format is one where this set of rules is not freely useable by everybody, for one or more reasons such as:

• Trade Secrets
• Software Patents
• DRM/DMCA

Document FormatsRecommended

• ASCII/Unicode text. Most applications will have an option for saving files as "plain text"; some will allow you to specify the character encoding used. ASCII is the oldest, simplest, and most widely supported (which is why it is the standard used by Project Gutenberg), although it's support for languages other than English is minimal. Unicode is a set of different plaint text character encodings designed to address this issue. ISO 8859 is another often-used character encoding that is generally considered to have been superceded by Unicode. Document formats which are based on plain text, such as SGML and XML document types, by necessity use one of these character encodings. UTF-8 appears to be the Unicode variant recommended for most purposes (anybody disagree?).
• PDF. An open standard developed by Adobe Systems. It's often called "Adobe Acrobat format", which creates the misleading impression that proprietary software is required to use it, so please avoid that term. Where in the past it would have been possible to recommend the use of PDF without reservation, it appears that Adobe is up to something with regards to licensing either non-standard extensions to PDF, or ideas in the standard PDF specification which may or may not be covered by patents.