Ubuntu Sharing » sound and video

Make sound quality better in ubuntu 9.10(karmic) with PulseAudio equalizer

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 12:54:29 +0000

Ubuntu karmic uses pulseaudio as its audio system and if you have a good quality audio card,you can enable surround sound and use equalizer to make sound quality better.
1.First,the installed pulseaudio version is 0.9.19 and need to update to 0.9.21.

Just add “ppa:ubuntu-audio-dev”(without quotes) as a software source in System -> Administration -> Software Sources->Other Software.Reload and it will automatically add the correct PPA and it’s GPG key.(Thanks ARSENDY for the comment)

update and install pulseaudio:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pulseaudio

you can use this command to check the pulseaudio version:

pulseaudio --version

Goto System->Preferences->Sound -> Hardware,select your audio card,config->choose Surround or digital output

3.Download the equalizer package from attachment and install it:

sudo dpkg -i pulseaudio-equalizer_2.4_all.deb

you may need to install some dependences which will be list in the output of above command,just use sudo apt-get install package_name to install them.
4.Open equalizer from Applications->Sound and Video->PulseAudio Equalizer,this is a
15-band equalizer.Enable equalizer and set on it.

Attachment:http://ubuntuguide.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/pulseaudio-equalizer_2.4_all.deb

Install Audacious lightweight music player for Ubuntu Linux

admin — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:13:14 +0000

Audacious is a very popular music player for Linux users.It supports a wide range of audio codecs and has many input,output,effect plugins.

Audacious is an advanced audio player. It is free, lightweight, based on GTK2, runs on Linux and many other *nix platforms and is focused on audio quality and supporting a wide range of audio codecs.
Its advanced audio playback engine is considerably more powerful than GStreamer. Audacious is a fork of Beep Media Player (BMP), which itself forked from XMMS.

Install Audacious in Ubuntu

Open up terminal from Applicatons->Accessories->Terminal,type:

sudo apt-get install audacious

Or,download the from:http://audacious-media-player.org/downloads
Launch audacious in Applications->Sound&Video menu.
Screenshot:

HomePage:http://audacious-media-player.org/

Manager music and video on an Apple iPod using gtkpod

admin — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 03:07:54 +0000

Gtkpod iPod manager is a platform independent GUI for Apple iPod which is equivalent to iTunes.It supports iPod, iPod nano, iPod shuffle, iPod photo, and iPod mini,allows you upload songs and playlists to your iPod and supports ID3 tag editing, multiple charsets for ID3 tags, detects duplicate songs, allows offline modification of the database with later synchronisation, and more.

Install gtkpod

Gtkpod is available from ubuntu repository.
For ubuntu karmic,just search ‘gtkpod’(without quotes) in Applications->Ubuntu Software Center and click to install.

For old versions,go to Applicatons->Add&Remove....In the “Show” drop-down menu,select “All available applications” and search gtkpod.

Screenshots
Launch gtkpod from Applications->Sound & Video->gtkpod iPod Manager

How to install Mplayer and Multimedia codecs in ubuntu 9.10(Karmic)

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 11:33:01 +0000

Mplayer is a popular movie player for Linux that supports reading from network and a wide range of codecs.
Install Mplayer:
Install mplayer in ubuntu karmic is very easy, just need one command in terminal(Applications/Accessories/Terminal):

sudo apt-get install mplayer

Then you can launch this from Applications—>Sound&Video—> Mplayer Movie Player.

Install libdvdcss2 and w32 video codecs:
You need to install w32codecs for playing WMV,RealMedia and other formats files and libdvdcss2 for playing encrypted DVDs.
Use following command to add Medibuntu’s repository.

sudo wget http://www.medibuntu.org/sources.list.d/karmic.list \
 --output-document=/etc/apt/sources.list.d/medibuntu.list

Add the keyring:

sudo apt-get update &&
sudo apt-get --yes -q --allow-unauthenticated install medibuntu-keyring &&
sudo apt-get update

Install codecs:
for i386 user:

sudo apt-get install w32codecs libdvdcss2

for amd64 user:

sudo apt-get install w64codecs libdvdcss2

Tips:
If encounter:“ Error opening/initializing the selected video_out(-vo) device.”
Try this:
Right click on mplayer window,select “Preferences”.In Video tab/Available drivers,choose “xv”(or try other drivers) and click OK.Log out and back in,and mplayer should work now.

Install Nvidia/ATI graphics card driver in Ubuntu 9.10(Karmic)

admin — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 10:14:00 +0000

First,install Envyng which is a simple GUI tool that can be used to install/uninstall Video driver for your ubuntu.
Just use one command in terminal(Applications/Accessories/Terminal):

sudo apt-get install envyng-core envyng-qt

This will properly installed envyng with both GUI mode and text mode.
Go to Applications->SystemTools->EnvyNG.

You can easily install the driver by select the recommended one and click on Apply

Alternatively,type this command in terminal:

envyng -t

and type a number in this screen:

Update:By now,envy isn’t available in Ubuntu 10.04(Lucid).You can read this howto about install nvidia driver in ubuntu 10.04

Download videos from YouTube.com using youtube-dl

admin — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 04:48:45 +0000

youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.x (x being at least 4), and it’s not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. The latest version is 2009.09.13. It’s released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like.

Using this command in terminal(Applications/Accessories/Terminal) to install youtube-dl in ubuntu:

sudo aptitude install youtube-dl

Or you can download and get more information from this page.
Now,use this command to learn about youtube-dl’s usage:

man youtube-dl

For example,we want to download video from this URL:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v,and name this video foobar.flv.We use:

youtube-dl -o foobar.flv http://www.youtube.com/watch?v

As YouTube.com videos are in Flash Video format, their extension should be flv. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of ffmpeg can play them.

Install AcetoneISO2 2.1.1 in Ubuntu Linux

admin — Sat, 17 Oct 2009 12:39:23 +0000

AcetoneISO2 is the CD/DVD image manipulator for Linux.
A complete software to manage CD/DVD images rich of features. For example it can Mount typical proprietary images formats of the windows world and do plenty of other things.
Requirements:

fuseiso
fuse-utils
libfuse2
mkisofs
libqt4-core
libqt4-gui
konsole
konqueror
kdebase-bin
kdelibs4c2a
libfuse-dev
build-essential
cdrdao
dvd+rw-tools
p7zip-full
gnupg2
gnupg-agent
libksba8
pinentry-gtk2
pinentry-qt4
coreutils
libglib2.0-dev

Before install this make sure you have installed the dependences.
Download deb package from this page and click to install,or use this command in terminal:

sudo dpkg -i acetoneiso_2.1.1-1~getdeb1_amd64.deb

Once properly installed this,launch from Applications->Sound&Video->AcetoneISO2

Convert your audio and video files into other formats with winff

admin — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 00:25:24 +0000

WinFF is a GUI for the command line video converter, FFMPEG. It will convert most any video file that FFmpeg will convert. WinFF does multiple files in multiple formats at one time. You can for example convert mpeg’s, flv’s, and mov’s, all into avi’s all at once. WinFF is available for Windows 95, 98 , ME, NT, XP, VISTA, and Debian, Ubuntu, Redhat based GNU/Linux distributions. WinFF is available in Brazillian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Chinese Tradditional, Danish, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish.
Features:
* Easy to use interface.
* Fast (Winff does not hinder FFmpeg in anyway).
* High quality output.
* Converts multiple different files all to the same format at once.
* Convert video to audio.
* Convert between audio formats.
* No external codecs needed.
* Includes a variety of preset conversion settings for common formats and devices.
* Preset conversions can be created to encode to any format FFmpeg supports.
* Easy access to common conversion options such as bitrate, frame size, frame rate.
* Specify additional command line parameters for advanced users (options button).
* Easily change FFmpeg versions.
* Supports FFmpeg’s multi threading for dual core processors
* Multilingual, available in over 10 languages
Install winff
Option 1:
First,add the GPG key by this command in terminal(Applications/Accessories/Terminal):

wget --quiet --output-document=- "http://winff.org/ubuntu/AAFE086A.gpg" | sudo apt-key add -

add the repository:

echo "deb http://winff.org/ubuntu jaunty universe" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/winff.list

Of course you need to change “jaunty” to “hardy” or “intrepid” if you have that.
Now, install WinFF directly by running:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install winff

interpid users also want to run:

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-51

jaunty users also want to run:

sudo apt-get install libavcodec-unstripped-52

Option 2:
Ubuntu packages are available at here provided by Launchpad.

Option 3:

For other OS,download winff from this page.

Using Winff
Launch winff from Applications->Sound&Video->WinFF.
And in this window,click on Add and navigate to select an audio or video file you want to convert to other format.

This file will list in the box,input output details and click on Convert.

Install Amarok 2.2(Sunjammer) in Ubuntu 9.04(Jaunty) and Ubuntu old versions

admin — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 12:42:10 +0000

Amarok 2.2 released on Oct 1,2009.In three and a half months,Amarok has made a huge leap forward, gaining many new features and a lot of old features from 1.4 have returned.

Amarok 2.2 brings back support for sorting and shuffling the playlist, for an external MySQL database as well as for playing audio CDs to name a few. It brings a new video and photo applet to show media related to the current song. The layout can be modified to suit your needs thanks to dock widgets and the sidebar has been changed to be easier to navigate with bread crumbs.

Install Amarok 2.2

Amarok 2.2 will be installed in Ubuntu 9.10 by default,so following is how to install this in old ubuntu versions.

First,go to this page and click download tarball to download the tar package.

Extract the downloaded tarball by this command(open terminal from Applications->Accessories->Terminal ):

 tar xjf amarok-2.2.0.tar.bz2

Change into the directory that was extracted from the tarball and create a build directory as to not pollute the sources:

cd amarok-2.2.0
mkdir amarok-2.2.0-build

Check you have the mandatory dependencies Amarok requires. If you aren’t sure if you have these dependencies installed, the cmake will tell you.

Change into the build directory:

cd amarok-2.2.0-build

and compile Amarok with the following commands:

cmake .. -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=`kde4-config --prefix`
make
sudo "make install"

You may first use this command to install “cmake”:

sudo apt-get install cmake

Done.Launch amarok from Applications/Sound&Video/Amarok.

How to install Xine Multimedia player in ubuntu

admin — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 03:44:11 +0000

Xine is a free multimedia player. It plays back CDs, DVDs, and VCDs.It also decodes multimedia files like AVI, MOV, WMV, and MP3 from local disk drives, and displays multimedia streamed over the Internet.It interprets many of the most common multimedia formats available – and some of the most uncommon formats, too.
Using this command in terminal(Applications->Accessories->Terminal) to install Xine:

sudo apt-get install xine-ui libxine1-ffmpeg

You can also goto its homepage to download xine,or get more information.

After installation,you can open up xine from Applications->Sound&Video->Xine.