Posts Tagged: media

Linux / Ubuntu — Comments Off
9
Jul 09

Install latest VLC 1.0 in Ubuntu using the Launchpad Repository

As some of you may have heard by now, VLC reached its version 1.0 milestone yesterday and is already available for download for use on your OS of preference bringing you plenty of new features.

New Features

  • Free, Open Source and cross-platform
  • Independant of systems codecs to support most video types
  • Live recording
  • Instant pausing and Frame-by-Frame support
  • Finer speed controls
  • New HD codecs (AES3, Dolby Digital Plus, TrueHD, Blu-Ray Linear PCM, Real Video 3.0 and 4.0, …)
  • New formats (Raw Dirac, M2TS, …) and major improvements in many formats…
  • New Dirac encoder and MP3 fixed-point encoder
  • Video scaling in fullscreen
  • RTSP Trickplay support
  • Zipped file playback
  • Customizable toolbars
  • Easier encoding GUI in Qt interface
  • Better integration in Gtk environments
  • MTP devices on linux
  • AirTunes streaming
  • New skin for the skins2 interface

Whilst it may take a while before packages start hitting the repositories for your favourite linux distributions, for those of you who are in a hurry to try out the latest version and happen to be running on Ubuntu, here is a quick method to download and install the latest version.

Launchpad Repository
Whilst older versions of VLC are already available in the repositories provided by Ubuntu, the newest version has not yet been rolled out. Don’t despair however… Videolan provide an alternative PPA repository hosted on Launchpad which has the latest edition of your favourite media player.

Installing VLC 1.0
To install VLC 1.0, fire up a terminal and follow the instructions below:

Add the repository:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/vlc.list

For Jaunty, paste in the lines below, save and exit:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/c-korn/vlc/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/c-korn/vlc/ubuntu jaunty main

Add the key for the Launchpad PPA:

sudo apt-key adv --recv-keys --keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 7613768D

Update your repositories:

sudo apt-get update

Install:

sudo apt-get install vlc vlc-plugin-esd mozilla-plugin-vlc

That should prompt apt to look for the latest version in the repositories and to download and install it for you. Next time you fire up VLC you should now see that the version number is 1.0!

vlc_1.png

Source: Install VLC on Ubuntu

Site News / Web Design / Wordpress — 7 Comments
6
Apr 08

New Host – Media Temple

Recently, I decided I was paying far too much for my web hosting package with Heart Internet UK, especially considering that they lacked support for some really important features such as Trackbacks and Pingbacks in Wordpress and did not support Subversion (useful for testing the latest development version of Wordpress). Despite having excellent customer support, the servers were often slow and the setup was a bit clunky – it was time to make a move!

Luckily, my friend Jacob over at jdpictures.co.uk was also a former Heart Internet customer itching to move to a better host. He had done some research and recommended Media Temple’s Grid Service hosting to me. Whilst I’m not going to go deep into the details of this new state of the art hosting technology, basically it means that if your site gets a spike in traffic, the server setup will immediately adapt to deal with it – meaning that your site should never slow down or be suspended. Media Temple also allows you to map multiple domain names to one hosting account for free (so sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk, jdpictures.co.uk etc. can all be hosted on one server). This basically means that me and Jacob are able to share a hosting package with Media Temple (and share the costs) without having to make any compromises whatsoever.

Jacob decided to sign up for the service and give it a test – since then we have both been progressively migrating our files and databases over to the new server and making changes to the DNS records. Finally sprayfly.com, inchina.co.uk and radotages.co.uk (i.e. all my sites) are now hosted on Media Temple and I will shortly be cancelling my Heart Internet account for good.

So far, I have encountered very few problems during the migration and am impressed with the speed of the new servers. The Media Temple control panel is very smooth and easy to use and some of the new features that weren’t provided by Heart Internet have already come in handy. I have been using an SSH shell to transfer my files between servers (using rsync) and also used the shell for database dumps and imports which has made the transfer a breeze. It is of course possible that there are a few hiccups that I’ve not spotted – so if you notice anything unusual then please let me know (leave a comment).

To think that I have been forking out so much cash to Heart Internet each month when all along I could have got more for less is quite frustrating – but at least I’ve made the move now…