Sunday, July 24, 2005

converting raw Video CD dumps into AVIs

My KiSS DP-1500 is a nice piece of hardware (apart from occassional hiccups), but it cannot read & decode raw Video CD images. Because I really like films like Alien (Director's cut), I wanted to do something about it. As usual, MPlayer + mencoder duo come handy - I have even found nice GUI for mencoder called gmencoder which makes the whole process really easy (especially when you don't have half a day to get through zillions of mencoder options).

Right now I can report, that re-encoding is possible - I managed to get nice AVI encoded to MPEG4. The problem is still the scaling. gmencoder crashes when I turn on scaling to normal aspect ratio, which is 1.33333 with X and Y size (768 x 576); without scaling turned on, I'm getting X size 480 (I guess it's a default one).

Right now I'm not 100% sure what is the problem, I'm going to send the debug report to gmencoder developers (tried already to google for similar cases but could not find anything).

Update: I've mailed the author as seen on gmencoder's home page at sourceforge.net and got the reply that 'email is not valid'. Does it mean that the project is dead? I've forwarded the email to gmencoder's Debian maintainer, Ben Zores.

Tuesday, July 19, 2005

aquariusoft.org - Palm, Linux and Bluetooth

I've got my Sony Clie back and (of course) I've already forgot how to get this thing synchronize via bluetooth. So, it took me some time to figure it out but here it is: generally, there are lots of articles available on the net how to get both PC and handheld device (I've looked at that one:
aquariusoft.org - Palm, Linux and Bluetooth. Some things that were different from the setup on those links: in HotSync options, I had to use raw IP address as primary PC name (otherwise the handheld tried to find the PC's name using DNS).

The transfer is pretty slow but I don't need to carry more cables around!

Monday, July 11, 2005

sound is back!

I've spend last week trying to find out why the hell the sound was gone... the solution was so easy: line jack sense and headphone sense in alsamixer should be turned OFF (link). D'oh!