bloggingIT

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron over the weekend. The process was relatively painless, and some of the upgrades made little, but nice, improvements.

Finally, the UPNP media rendering functionality in Rhythmbox is working!

To set this up, you need to access the command line, and install the pyhton-coherence package:

sudo apt-get install python-coherence

Once installed, fire up Rhythmbox, and click on Edit > Plugins.

Once there, tick the box for DLNA/UPnP to enable UPnP.

Click Close and you should see a new shared tab on the left, which will list your network UPnP servers.

It’s somewhat limited in that it doesn’t present you with the various folder views that other media renderers will - but at least you can pick out music from network devices.

Cool.

It seems that this is old news generally, but I found Mario Paint Composer on the Internet yesterday. It was actually due to a YouTube video (why the hell I ended up looking at a Rick Astley song I still don’t know).

Of course, there is not one but two composer programs emulating the features of Mario Paint. The other is Mario Sequencer, which was originally written in Japanese. Luckily the website hosts an English version.

I’ve found that sequencer seems to have better timing, but Composer has a slightly nicer interface.

I was musing on being able to use this in schools as a basic synthesizer for primary kids. It has everything they need, such as tempo and different sounds. Most importantly, the sounds are fun and absurd.

I’m currently working on my Mario Paint version of ‘Faithealer’…

I wanted to extract Marillion’s cover of Toxic today, which lives on the DVD release of Thankyou Whoever You Are / Most Toys.

I found a useful page over at Ubuntu Geek which covered the topic nicely using a tool called transcode, which I’ve used a little of in the past.

I was having some difficulties with this one though, as transcode only worked on a few titles on the DVD. After a bit of testing, I discovered that this wasn’t woking on titles that had no video.

Eventually I settled on this command line to extract the song:

transcode -i /dev/dvd -x null,dvd -T 4,1,1 -a 0 -y null,ogg -o MarillionToxic.ogg

Here’s the breakdown:
transcode - run transcode
-i /dev/dvd - set the input to the DVD drive
-x null,dvd - set the input modules. As I don’t want video, I’ve used null and then dvd for the audio channel
-T 4,1,1 - set the Title 4, Chapter 1, Angle 1, which is the Toxic track on the DVD
-a 0 - set the audio track (the first is 0 on DVDs)
-y null,ogg - sets the output to ogg. Once again, I’ve forced null for the video
-o MarillionToxic.ogg - finally, I’ve set the filename for extracting the audio.

The whole track was extracted from DVD in a matter of seconds. Brilliant.