Posted by BigWhale on August 29th, 2010 in
Software |
0 comments Encoding videos can be a real pain. While ffmpeg is an excellent utility for converting videos between various formats it is also a pain to use. If you put H.264 codec on top of this, you will get a real mess with command lines that are longer than 200 characters. H.264 is a great format and linux implementation is hiding in the libx264. It will come pre-installed with Ubuntu 10.04, but if you are more adventurous you should try and install the latest versions from SVN repositories as described on Ubuntu forums. The whole procedure is quite easy and very well documented so in this post I will assume that you have installed the latest versions.
The focus of this test and tutorial will be on video production, more specifically on an average YouTube Vlogger video. This means, one pass encoding, high compression and very uniform videos. For encoding movies and other videos with very dynamic content and big changes in the scenes you will have to look elsewhere of wait for another post. :)
Encoding . ffmpeg . H.264/MPEG-4 AVC . Multimedia . Test
Posted by BigWhale on August 28th, 2010 in
Software |
0 comments
Image via Wikipedia
Your Ubuntu Linux installation is getting bigger and bigger and you are running out of space on your hard disk. You got your new hard drive and now you need to clone your old drive to the new one. The dreaded cloning is actually quite easy and relatively simple to do. The only thing you will need is a little patience and some typing skills. No special software just your already installed Ubuntu Linux.
The regular obligatory disclaimer: This procedure worked for me several times, I use it almost on a daily basis and I had no problems with it. Your mileage my vary. Make sure you double check all the commands that you type and that you do not format your data drive. You will end up with two empty disks. If you have any questions feel free to ask.
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Booting . Disk cloning . Linux . Operating system . Ubuntu
Posted by BigWhale on May 15th, 2010 in
Software |
3 comments Menus are a new big thing in the upcoming release of WordPress 3.0 and most of the theme builders will have to add at least some minor support in their themes for menus to work. Not so long time ago we tested one of the WordPress nightly builds and we had some trouble with our theme. It was about time to address these issues and see how much work will be required to add support for menus to our theme. It turned out that the work was minimal and really simple. We did miss few things that would be nice to have. Read on to see what needs to be done in your theme to support menus.
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Templates . theme . WordPress . Wordpress 3.0
Posted by BigWhale on April 16th, 2010 in
Software |
2 comments The importance of backups? It actually differs from case to case, but it seems that in the end 95% of the people do not know how important backups are until their hard drive dies and their data is gone. In the past ten days I had three people complaining about losing their data. Two hard drive failures and one accidental Shift-Delete & Click Yes without reading the warning message. Backing up on Linux is a pain if you are not at least demigod of Linux administration. Linux really lacks a simple backup solution for regular users.
Read on if you want to know more on how to perform simple backup in Linux, what backups are and how to handle them.
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Backup . Cron . Linux . Shell script
Posted by BigWhale on April 9th, 2010 in
Software |
4 comments
Image by koka_sexton via Flickr
New major release of WordPress is coming our way. Current release is marked as WordPress 3.0 beta1. We will take a look at what is new and if the new is good or bad. And we will provide screen shots in our quick preview, we promise.
Upgrading WordPress is always something that we don’t take so lightly. A typical website based on WordPress, it could be a blog or not, will have a lot of plugins installed, some widgets and a more or less customized theme, sometimes perhaps even a custom made theme. Upgrading a minor version is a minor pain which means that upgrading a major version will be a major pain. That is why we did this just for you. So that our site will be broken first and you can see where we went wrong. Read on if you want to see how we handled the upgrade.
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Blogging . Preview . WordPress
