Adding cue-points allows you to spice up your flash videos created with FFMpeg. Adding metadata to a FLV will allow you to introduce cue-points that have their own metadata that can be display when the cue-point is reached or let you jump to that cue-point. In the following tutorial you will learn how to add metadata to your FLV files using flvtool2 and how it is useful for adding cue-points.
(more…)

One of the hardest parts about doing video on the Internet in the past has been knowing what video format to use. With the rise of video sharing sites like youtube the answer these days seems to be Flash video. It is very easy to create Flash videos and display them using FFMpeg and a free player.

Here is a tutorial on how to create the Flash video files: One-stop Installation Guide for Create a Linux Server-side FLV conversion environment.

Here are a couple free Flash video players:

FlowPlayer
Flash Video Player

You can also create your own Flash player if you like either with the Flash studio tools or something like Ming. For simplicity I would recommend using FlowPlayer to start with since it works well, is completely free, and has a number of features that can integrate with meta data in the Flash video.

Now go make the next youtube.

Tags: flash, video

I finally kicked my 64 bit install to the curb and am now running my AMD 64 desktop box in 32 bit mode. I decided that I had had enough of random crashes and having to compile things special every time I wanted something new. Having just upgraded from FC5 to FC6 on a couple other boxes I decided it was worth installing fresh on this box. Once the new install was finished I started looking into the new desktop enhancements that come in FC6 and after a little digging I ended up at the Beryl project.

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet Beryl is a fork of Compiz that changes the way your normal X desktop works. It adds different types of OpenGL based effects and works with Xgl, AIGLX, and the latest NVidia binary drivers.

(more…)

So after doing my yum upgrade from FC5 to FC6 on a desktop I decided to see if it worked any better than FC5 on my old Dell Inspiron 600m laptop. FC5 wasn't bad on this laptop but two things always bugged me: 1) the ATI driver didn't work out of the box at anything above 800×600 so I had to wait for the binary ATI drivers to support chipset and then install that and 2) sleep in any form just didn't work correctly. I'm happy to say that both of these things are fixed in FC6.

(more…)

Now that Fedora Core 6 is available it is time to upgrade those old crusty FC5 installs. To upgrade from FC5 you can follow these steps:

1. You may be able to skip this step but I did a yum update on FC5 first to make sure everything there was up to date and worked before moving to FC6.
2. Do a "yum clean all" to remove all the old yum cruft.
3. Install the fedora-release for Fedora Core 6. Use the rpm command:
   rpm -Uhv http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-6-4.noarch.rpm http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/core/6/i386/os/Fedora/RPMS/fedora-release-notes-6-3.noarch.rpm
4. Run the yum update: yum -y update. At this point I had to remove a few packages to get past dependency issues they weren't important and I just added them back after the update.

If you are still on FC4 you can upgrade from FC4 to FC5 first.

Tags: fedora, upgrade, yum, linux

For the longest time having POP3 messages stored in one large file bothered me. I found out however that you can easily convert the single file storage into Maildir style storage with fetchmail and procmail. Here are the steps I used to fetch mail from a POP3 mailbox and store the messages in Maildir style folders.

(more…)

A few days ago I read this article on how to put Xen on a Mac mini and though of the Mac mini colo. Now you can get even more machines into the same small area. The article talks about using Xen to not only run Linux but windows as well. You could have a farm of Mac minis running Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Solaris, or Windows.

Tags: xen, linux, netbsd, freebsd, solaris

After my last post on limiting bandwidth usage on a Xen node I thought I would follow up with how to monitor the bandwidth usage of a Xen node.

(more…)

Xen seems to be gaining speed these days and has a lot of useful features for those who want to resale or otherwise split a single box. Now that you have your Xen system set up you may be interested in going farther with bandwidth limiting.

The hardest part of setting up bandwidth limiting is understanding the traffic control system under Linux. This mainly revolves around the tc command.

(more…)

After my post about capturing full page screenshots with firefox I started wondering if there was a way to do screencasts using Linux. It just so happens that you can. There are a couple different options if you want a pure movie of your desktop but I was more interested in a flash version. I found what I was looking for with this tutorial on how to record videos of your desktop that uses vnc2swf.

(more…)