# Note: about 1.3GB of workspace was required to generate 170MB output, in this case a short slide show with sound track.
# 

yum install vobcopy mjpegtools dvdauthor
mkdir video_work
cd video_work
vobcopy -l
mkfifo stream.yuv
mplayer -ao null -noframedrop -vo yuv4mpeg VIDEONAME.vob &
cat stream.yuv|yuvfps -r25:1|yuvscaler -n p -O DVD |mpeg2enc -n p -f 8 -F 3 -o out.m2v
mplayer -ao pcm -vo null -vc dummy VIDEONAME.vob
# Note: 224000 bits per second (224kbits/sec)
ffmpeg -ab 224000 -ac 2 -ar 48000 -i audiodump.wav audiodump.ac3
mplex -f 8 -o ready-to-master.mpg out.m2v audiodump.ac3
mkdir dvdauthor_out
cat << EOF > dvdauthor.xml
<dvdauthor dest="/data_dir/video_work/dvdauthor_out">
<vmgm>
</vmgm>
<titleset>
<titles>
<video />
<pgc>
<vob file="ready-to-master.mpg" />
</pgc>
</titles>
</titleset>
</dvdauthor>
EOF
dvdauthor -x dvdauthor.xml
growisofs -Z /dev/dvd -dvd-video dvdauthor_out

1. Press and hold the DTV/CBL input button on the remote
2. While still holding that button press and hold the AV POWER button for about 3 seconds – long enough for the DTV/CBL message to go away and the sound setting to be displayed (e.g. Music Enh. 2ch). If you don’t hold it down long enough it will say “RemoteSetup NG”. In that case, try again. If you are successful it will just display the sound setting.
3. Enter the four-digit code using the green numeric buttons at the bottom of the remote. The code for the TV is found in the back of the AV receiver manual, which can be found online. After the fourth button is pressed the display should say “RemoteSetup OK”. The first number listed for Panasonic worked for me for an old CRT TV.
4. The TV POWER button on the Yamaha remote should now turn on/off the TV (provided the standby button on the TV is already depressed). Other buttons should also work, e.g. TV INPUT, TV MUTE, TV CH, TV VOL, etc.

Key points that are not made clear in the manual: you must use the DTV/CBL input when programming the remote to control a TV (you don’t need to have this input selected to control the TV once it is programmed though); the RemoteSetup NG/OK/display stuff as outlined above.

This took me a while to get right the first time, and I neglected to write it down. Hopefully this will help someone out.

I found some helpful maemoscrobbler tips in this #maemo IRC log.

After a quick look around it appears the only LightScribe labelling software available for Linux is proprietary. LaCie provide the software in RPM packages which is nice if you are a Fedora user like me. (Apparently they have tested it with the other major distros, which is nice to see.) It installed fine under Fedora 10 beta, which was a nice surprise given that it was apparently written for Fedora 5. It didn’t install a menu entry, but firing up the “LaCie Lightscribe Labeller”, ‘4L-gui’, provided a reasonably nice experience.

I grabbed some DVD media artwork from the Fedora art team. There were two labels in each image file, so I had to pick one and chop it in half with the GIMP. I then cropped it to remove the alignment patterns, and then did an autocrop to crop to the edge of the DVD label. Then it was a simple matter of importing it in the 4L-gui and selecting ‘fit image height to disc’.

Writing the disc label took a bewilderingly long 15 minutes. I suppose it is effectively doing the same thing as burning a CD, but it’s a big wait for little reward. The inscribed label is a hazy monochrome image that is below the surface of the disc.

In future I think I’ll just use a pen. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to the see the improvement in the quality of Linux software provided by a hardware vendor. It would be even better if they would free the code. This would enable distros to incorporate the software into the main repos, making the experience a bit more streamlined and integrated.

import re
import rpm

def get_package_version(name):
    """Return version string of installed package."""

    # note: ts can take an argument that is the root of the installation
    #       typically with a var/lib/rpm directory underneath it.
    transaction_set = rpm.ts()

    versions = [header['provideversion'][0]
                for header in transaction_set.dbMatch('name', name)]
    versions.sort(cmp_versions)
    return versions

def version2sortable(version):

    parts = re.split(r'(\d+)', version)
    fields = []
    for part in parts:
        try:
            part = int(part)
        except ValueError:
            pass
        fields.append(part)
    return tuple(fields)

def cmp_versions(a, b):

    return cmp(version2sortable(a), version2sortable(b))

if __name__ == '__main__':
    print get_package_version('kernel')

Output:

['2.6.23.8-63.fc8', '2.6.23.9-85.fc8', '2.6.23.14-107.fc8', '2.6.23.14-115.fc8', '2.6.23.15-137.fc8']


Note: Wordpress is screwing up the markup on the code blocks above. If you have any tips on how to fix this please drop me a line.
Update: Using pre/blockquote hack for now and will try out a code highlighter plug-in when I get the chance. Thanks Tim and Lindsay!

Get the updated .deb.

The problem was due to the volume range on the original Exaile going from 0-1. For some reason on maemo (OS2008) the volume range is 0-10. According to the gstreamer volume control docs the range should be 0-10, so I’m not sure why the original Exaile works properly on my desktop machine.

Anyway, I mainly use Kagu and Vagalume for music on my N800 these days. As a result I haven’t done anything on maemo Exaile for ages. I hope to one of these days, though.

• BoingBoing
• Slashdot
• Re dd it
• di gg
• ars technica
• Bl og s

You can participate too, with a related issue. Help convince Nokia to provide out-of-the-box support for Ogg Vorbis:

• Vote for bug 176
• PledgeBank (* I haven’t pledged – sticking with my N800)
• The organization responsible for the Ogg formats have provided a template for writing a letter to Nokia

According to Nokia’s Ari Jaaksi, some time ago, “There’s nothing technical that prevents it. However, the 770 is a consumer device. The challenge is that there is not much [Ogg Vorbis and Ogg Theora] content right now.“.
I hope Wikipedia qualifies as “content”, not to mention personal music collections.

Meanwhile, the intrepid Tuomas Kulve has released a new version of ogg-support for maemo that enables the built-in media player to play Ogg Vorbis files. He notes, “It’s untrivial to get everything working properly as the FileManager, the Metalayer Crawler, and the Media Player are all close source applications and their behaviour is not really documented anywhere.” Hopefully this situation will change.

See also:

• Nokia and Ogg: ambivalence or actively hostile? on Internet Tablet Talk.
• An email from Nokia to the W3C

1. Download the OS2008 firmware image.
2. Follow the instructions for flashing with new firmware image
3. Go to Settings->Application Manager and go to Tools->Application Catalog and enable the Maemo Extras repo
4. Click ‘Browse installable applications’ and inst the OpenSSH package
5. Repeat the flasher steps but replace the flash command line with flasher/flasher-3.0 --enable-rd-mode to enable R&D mode
6. Go to Utilities->X terminal and do sshroot@localhost
7. Change the default password: passwd
8. Repeat the flasher steps but replace the flash command line with flasher/flasher-3.0 --disable-rd-mode to put the tablet back into production mode
9. Install rsync from the .deb package
10. Take a snapshot of the root file system by using rsync to copy from the device to another machine: rsync -avzx root@:/ snapshot_dir
11. Follow the instructions for entering Red Pill Mode
12. Install apps such as less, screen, wget
13. Return to Blue Pill Mode

The tips needed to get ssh root access working again mainly came from here.

Most of my previously installed packages in OS2007 are already available for OS2008. The main ones that I am still missing are gtick (metronome) and a UPnP client. IIRC, I grabbed everything form the official maemo downloads page and this list of Working 2008 OS Software.

Impressions:

• This update increases the maximum CPU clock speed from 330MHz to 400MHz. The graphical interface feels snappier.
• The browser is now the mozilla-based microb browser which seems to use more memory and slightly slower than the previous Opera browser. However, it’s free software and supports newer web standards, so I’m happy with the change.
• The graphical interface is nicer. The designers appear to have responded to user feedback well in this area.
• There are more codecs , but still no Ogg Vorbis support, which is very disappointing. The third-party package works fine with third-party media players, but doesn’t work with the default media player.
• Media streaming on the ABC now works. Among other things, this means I can listen to the local radio station from anywhere, and not have to suffer crappy AM quality. Annoyingly, when playing Internet radio from the widget it keeps a message box open (”buffering”) for as long as I have it playing.
• I haven’t done any careful measurements of the battery life, but it seems to be about the same. This is a bonus given the increase in CPU speed.
• Newer kernel (2.6.21), Gtk (2.10) and DBUS (1.0) and gstreamer now supports the generic playbin,
• The built-in media player has been substantially improved, but without Vorbis support it’s of limited use to me. I prefer to use Kagu or Exaile.
• Why is there still no support for recording videos in the camera app?
• The problem where, if Bluetooth is disabled from the system tray, the Bluetooth icon disappears, so must be re-enabled from Control Panel, still persists. Annoying.
• Text prediction and automatic capitalization are off by default.
• The on-screen keyboard seems to be a bit over-sensitive and often registers a key twice when it was only tapped once.

With this update, it feels like the Internet tablet OS platform is maturing nicely.

Note that the previous release won’t work on OS2008 because the id3lib gstreamer element is called id3demux in OS2008.

If you are in need of a player that handles Ogg Vorbis, m4a and mp3 (among others) on OS2008 and has decent playlist management features and you are willing to put up with a slightly slow and fat app then Exaile for maemo may be for you.

This will probably be the last release for OS2007. I’ll make a release for OS2008 once I have that installed and working on my N800.