Ubuntu AMR playback fix

If you're running Ubuntu like me you may have found that videos you've taken on your mobile don't play with audio when you've copied them to your PC. This is because AMR audio codec support isn't included in Ubuntu, or part of their universe and multiverse extension repositories. However, AMR is in debian-multimedia.org, so follow the guide on adding it to your sources.lst, and then install "ffmpeg". you can then play your videos by:

ffplay video.3gp

It's not great, but it does work.

Installing libavcodec* from debian-multimedia doesn't get it working in VLC or the updated mplayer though (I presume mplayer wasn't compiled with external AMR codec support enabled).

It's common multimedia support which is really needed in Ubuntu, this is the sort of thing everyone wants working out of the box! The alteriative is to follow one of the compile guides.

GNU+Linux rtsp and mms support

There are a lot of rtsp:// and mms:// served streams online, and GNU+Linux distros like Ubuntu are not yet being released with native support for playing them or saving them to a file. Mplayer, Kaffine and Xine are all unable to play the stream URLs. Mplayer seems to be able to play the audio, but it is all crackly and breaks up.

If we use the workaround of converting the RealPlayer RPM, installing libstdc++5 and then pasting that into RealPlayer we can play rtsp:// streams ;) but we can't save them :(

It's a shame, as there are a lot of sites like youTube Mobile. Which don't rely on Adobe Flash, so we would have otherwise been able to watch the streams. mms:// is common as WMV and WMA files are served that way often. To be a multimedia distribution GNU+Linux needs to support these protocols out of the box from Firefox ideally. The current workaround is to install the DownloadHelper extension in Firefox (unfortunately Firefox still needs a restart.. reminds me of MS-Windows restart issues still!).

Ubuntu FLV video seeking not working

After the problems with Flash in Ubuntu I thought I would try play the Flash Video (FLV) file I downloaded.

Unfortunately, while VLC and Mplayer can play it.. they can't seek.. so we either have to watch the entire clip or not bother at all..

Xine at first appears like it is going to work, seeking at the beginning of the clip works, but go beyond half-way and it locks, and sometimes needs to be killed as it is unresponsive :( Other FLV clips have all the same problems with VLC, Mplayer and Xine.

GNU+Linux is going to find adoption hard going when it can't play "de facto format" Video files out of the box. FLV is only a custom H.263 format after all..

Jobs commented on Flash not being supported by the iPhone, which is a bit odd considering it can play H.264 and MPEG4. Not getting Adobe's Flash may be a blessing in disguise for the platform though! Also.. at least Apple have not made the mistake of adopting Silverlight yet (like Nokia appear to have, after their good decision of purchasing Qt!).

Ubuntu not ready masses?

When I plug in my USB WD "MyBook" it pops up in Kubuntu desktop automatically, and when I want to remove it, it sometimes doesn't have the "Safely Remove" option, so I have to go to root to unmount it (as users are bizarrely not allowed to unmount removable USB drives!?).. anyway, after it's unmounted by root the system locks up when I unplug it.. so much for USB being plug and play with the Linux kernel.

Of cause if it had downloaded the symbols, generated a back-trace from the core-file it could have automatically offered to submit that for further analysis and a fix.. sadly it doesn't support that still. Also it didn't seem to do a recover of the filesystem (i'm using ext3 with all its journalness), when I restarted the computer, so maybe it's just ext3 with its journal recovers automatically? I'd file a bug report, but without the QA staff to follow it up on Launchpad I can't see it being tackled.

I wish there was a pay model so we could contribute to cover QA staff salaries.

The final oldness is that as I don't want to keep my WD drive in Microsoft's FAT32 format I've got to go through quite a manual process to reformat it as Linux's ext3 format. (Why can't I just right click on the FAT32 icon on my desktop and select format and be prompted for the root password etc?)

I need to revert to the command line, repartition with fdisk, format with mke2fs (remembering to set a label with -L and -j for the journal). Then when it mounts I'm left with only a "lost+found" directory, and I can't create files in the root of the drive as a user... so go back to root, create a folder, change the permissions on the folder to 700, change owner and group to user. Rather a faff to use a removable drive in the standard partition format, eh!? I'm not sure how well my non-expert friends would have managed.

Dell Inspiron 1300 Ubuntu Mic not working

The latest Kubuntu is still shipping with no working Mic input, no problem though as the fix is simple, we just need to pass the right model code to snd-hda-intel kernel module. I'm using a Dell Inspiron 1300, but other laptops also use STAC9200, such as the Dell Inspiron 6400.

Normally we would cat cat /proc/asound/card0/codec#0 and use the SigmaTel chip id: "STAC9200", but in the case of my chip using a name is not supported, so we must use "ref". If you look at the alsa kernel code patch_sigmatel.c you can see it is "ref":

static const char *stac9200_models[STAC_9200_MODELS] =
{
[STAC_REF] = "ref",
};

We can specify the options in either /etc/modules or /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base

options snd-hda-intel model=ref

Alsa wiki page for more info. One thing I wonder is that why is it called "snd-hda-intel" in the kernel tree and options, but in the output of lsmod it shows up as "snd_hda_intel" why the underscore difference!?

vCard Firefox integration missing from Kubuntu

vCard (.vcf, text/x-vcard) has been around for a long time. However, Kubuntu isn't setup with Firefox to load the vCard from web pages. We need to set firefox to use /usr/bin/kaddressbook, or manually save the file and then open it. The browser needs tight integration with the rest of the GNU+Linux distro!

Flakey ubuntu second mouse support

Many of us now use laptop instead of desktops, like us using mobiles instead of land-line phones! So I use the latest Kubuntu on my Dell laptop, the problem is it doesn't' correctly configure my touch-pad and USB mouse that I use... it enables both! The workaround I use is to delve into /etc/X11/xorg.conf and comment out InputDevice "Synaptics Touchpad" while I am using the USB mouse... and then when I am on the move I have to go back in and uncomment that line.. ugly but Ubuntu doesn't support detection & configuration like MS-Windows and probably Apple's Mac OS does.

Although, even commenting out the Synaptics doesn't solve it all though, as /dev/input/mice actually is a mixed device node, including the data from all mice! cat /dev/input/mice and see! in my case /dev/input/mouse0 seems to be dead, mouse1 is my USB mouse, and mouse2 is the Synaptics pad. So I also needed to change the /dev/input/mice line to be /dev/input/mouse1 to get it to only respond to the external mouse.

When I'm on the move without an external mouse I'll just have to keep editing xorg.conf for the moment then.. :(

ubuntu should really detect an external mouse and disable the internal touchpad, as it stands I would be left accidentally touching the internal pad and all those touches keep highlighting my text etc while typing! Until it's fixed I'll have to stick to editing files as root then.. Shame the KDE System Settings Mouse section can't control this as a workaround for having to edit the xorg file!

Kubuntu 7.10 Japanese environment disappointment

Just installed Kubuntu 7.10 on a 16GB Corsair I bought. A few problems came up in the boot after install, notably although I'd got it to manually install GRUB on my /dev/sdb drive (which GRUB c confusingly calls hd1), when Kubuntu booted it could not find the partition mapped as the root (hd1,0).. this it turns out is because the numbering changes depending on what was booted.. and as I selected USB boot from BIOS menu.. my /dev/sdb translated into being hd0. I change the root line in GRUB's edit mode to be hd(0,1) and it successfully booted though!

When I logged in, I noticed that although I had done a Japanese install (completely translated as Japanese during the install etc too), KDE was still in US English, and Japanese input did not even work! (Shift+Space is the usual combo to change into Japanese input). Alas, I've not figured out what is wrong with the install, and when I tried to get help online with Konversation that actually crashed:

#6 0xb71f09a3 in QGArray::duplicate () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#7 0xb6e28a33 in QMemArray::duplicate () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#8 0xb6e28a70 in QCString::operator= () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#9 0xb72070ea in QLocalePrivate::systemLocaleName ()
from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3
#10 0xb72071a2 in QLocale::system () from /usr/lib/libqt-mt.so.3

the rest of the back-trace was missing.. as Ubuntu still doesn't ship or automatically download symbols when it gets crashes..

Performance is a bit sluggish off this USBstick unfortunately, so I'm going to give try a differnet approach of just having the /boot on the USB stick, and then use an external drive for /, /home and swap!!