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Linux Multimedia Hacks
MikeD writes "I just got my copy of the latest release in the O'Reilly's 'Hacks' series, "Linux Multimedia Hacks" by Kyle Rankin. If you are familiar with the other books in the 'Hack' series, this one will seem familiar." Read the rest of Mike's review.
Linux Multimedia Hacks
author
Kyle Rankin
pages
330
publisher
O'Reilly
rating
8
reviewer
MikeD
ISBN
0-596-10076-0
summary
Tips & Tools for Taming Images, Audio, and Video
There are 5 'Chapters', each focusing on a specific multimedia topic starting from the most basic/common and moving up the multimedia food chain. The chapters cover (in order) Images, Audio, Video, Broadcast media, and the Web. The hacks in each section are similarly arranged, usually starting with the simplest and moving to more complex issues. They helpfully put a little rating symbol by each hack indicating if it is for beginners, intermediate or advanced users. While that is a little simplistic, it does give you some hint at the complexity of that particular 'hack'.
Because this is a 'hack' book, it is really designed so you can look up the topic you want. For example in Chapter 3: Video, there is a "hack" explaining how to convert from one video format to another. If that is what you need to do, turn to hack 63 and follow along and you are done.
But they put a little extra effort into the layout and topics covered here and you *could* use this as a great introduction to a particular multimedia area as well.
Lets look at Chapter2: Audio for example. The first 'hack', number 13, is titled "Mix Your Audio for Perfect Sound. This hack begins by exploring the audio systems in your system, the hardware, the sources and such then finishes by introducing a couple of common tools for controlling your audio, aumix and alsamixer. The next 'hack', "Surround Yourself with Sound" goes into details on how to get sound out of your system. It discusses speakers, 5.1 surround sound and how to use the tools alsmixer, aplay and others to set up, test and ultimately enjoy the cool audio available while watching movies.
Together those two 'hacks' make a pretty basic introduction to PC audio under Linux. From there the audio hacks include format changing, ripping, burning CDs music management and much more. You really could start at the 13 and work your way through to hack 46 and have a very good understanding of audio, PC audio and how to get the most out of it on your Linux PC.
So it really is more than just a collection of hacks. It can lead you from the basics of screen capture ('hack' number 1), to image manipulation, animation, then move on to audio and video. In Chapter 4 they get into TV tuner cards, Myth TV, streaming audio and video, ripping to broadcasting.
Chapter 5, Web hacks is sort of the odd man out in this book. In some ways it is separate from the other four in that it is directed more towards the web, which is something that would require several whole books in itself to cover well. But they included a few ideas, like "Star in Your Own Reality TV Show (hack #97), that do relate to some of the prior material.
Over all this will be a very useful book to anyone who is new to multimedia, but even some more advanced users will find some interesting and useful ideas, I think. Well worth checking out."
You can purchase Linux Multimedia Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
There are 5 'Chapters', each focusing on a specific multimedia topic starting from the most basic/common and moving up the multimedia food chain. The chapters cover (in order) Images, Audio, Video, Broadcast media, and the Web. The hacks in each section are similarly arranged, usually starting with the simplest and moving to more complex issues. They helpfully put a little rating symbol by each hack indicating if it is for beginners, intermediate or advanced users. While that is a little simplistic, it does give you some hint at the complexity of that particular 'hack'.
Because this is a 'hack' book, it is really designed so you can look up the topic you want. For example in Chapter 3: Video, there is a "hack" explaining how to convert from one video format to another. If that is what you need to do, turn to hack 63 and follow along and you are done.
But they put a little extra effort into the layout and topics covered here and you *could* use this as a great introduction to a particular multimedia area as well.
Lets look at Chapter2: Audio for example. The first 'hack', number 13, is titled "Mix Your Audio for Perfect Sound. This hack begins by exploring the audio systems in your system, the hardware, the sources and such then finishes by introducing a couple of common tools for controlling your audio, aumix and alsamixer. The next 'hack', "Surround Yourself with Sound" goes into details on how to get sound out of your system. It discusses speakers, 5.1 surround sound and how to use the tools alsmixer, aplay and others to set up, test and ultimately enjoy the cool audio available while watching movies.
Together those two 'hacks' make a pretty basic introduction to PC audio under Linux. From there the audio hacks include format changing, ripping, burning CDs music management and much more. You really could start at the 13 and work your way through to hack 46 and have a very good understanding of audio, PC audio and how to get the most out of it on your Linux PC.
So it really is more than just a collection of hacks. It can lead you from the basics of screen capture ('hack' number 1), to image manipulation, animation, then move on to audio and video. In Chapter 4 they get into TV tuner cards, Myth TV, streaming audio and video, ripping to broadcasting.
Chapter 5, Web hacks is sort of the odd man out in this book. In some ways it is separate from the other four in that it is directed more towards the web, which is something that would require several whole books in itself to cover well. But they included a few ideas, like "Star in Your Own Reality TV Show (hack #97), that do relate to some of the prior material.
Over all this will be a very useful book to anyone who is new to multimedia, but even some more advanced users will find some interesting and useful ideas, I think. Well worth checking out."
You can purchase Linux Multimedia Hacks from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
I'm excited about this one; I just ordered my copy on amazon.
Semantic Paranoia
"If you are familiar with...this will seem familiar"
Kind of self defining.
and a proper index of the book you can get a preview on the O'Reilly microsite for the book here
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
...is Linux Server Hacks. Just to "turbo mode ssh logins" hack (#67) is worth the price alone.
Oh, and, book plug!
The Army reading list
I know A'rpi from mplayer.
'Nuff said.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
That was a well written review!
The book sounds cool, I might go pick up a copy.
I am curious, as I rarely purchase linux related books, is there alot of distribution specific material? Or is it overly generic to avoid being tied to a certain setup?
For instance when dealing with the many tools i'm sure the book discusses, there could be KDE and GNOME specific implementations, as well as alot of differences on how you will find/install the tool depending on distribution. How is this sort of thing handled?
Big ones, small ones, some as big as yer 'ead!
Give 'em a twist, a flick o' the wrist...
There are 5 'Chapters',
Because this is a 'hack' book,
here is a "hack"
I bet the author of the post does the little bendy bunny ears gesture with his hands when he speaks...
Most of the "hacks" described in the review seem to amount to "how to use these standard tools, which came with your distro, to do the task for which they were designed." Not really worthy of the title "hack" IMO...
rooooar
It's 2006 and you still need a book to tell you how to "hack" the audio volume in Linux. The good news is you have eleven different mixers to change the volume in your eleven different (and colliding) sound servers. This will definitely be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop!
Let me think...yeah, I do know a couple of these guys. They're hacks, all right!
In some of the cases, a choice of different engines for use is provided. Sometimes, a change in an engine will crash the app! And there is no easy way to know this choice even exists.
I particularily appreciate the folks at http://www.mplayerhq.hu/ for a job well done.
But again, I fine Linux feels heavy, even on an AMD 2800+ Sempron processor with 512MB of RAM. On the other OS, it's all a snap.
Can someone tell me why http://www.vorbis.com/ is still not that popular?
you can write your own custom multimedia converters using their software and its all open source.
To me thats an excellent tool to use in this adventure.
now if you have some time and want to play with converting this video (its 20 mb in size) check out:
http://www.thunderbirdnest.com/pictures/thunderfev er/movies/incar.avi It's a Racetrack street legal cars movie. It's an avi so that might be fun to play with converting to other formats.
if nothing else you can use xine to play the movie on linux.
I just bought a Ford Thunderbird... Awesome car, awesome power. ford thunderbird bbs http://www.thunderbirdtalk.com
I thought you were writing a haiku.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
ConsultingFair.com
Linux Multimedia Hacks
Hopefully, no one else had the same initial reaction that I had, namely:
"Man, I hope the title doesn't perform double-duty as a description of the authors..."
All the multimedia hacks start with; "Download an unencumbered version of MPlayer and then Bogart yourself a copy of the Win32 codecs for WMA, Quicktime, Real and all the others. You can get them from the C:\Windows\System32 folder of your pirated copy of XP."
But will it get my USB emi2|6 working under ALSA?
(Nothing personal, it's just that if I'm going to play the part of a grammar nazi, I should be insulting.)
You could've hired me.
This sounds like an interesting book, and I'll probably buy it, but looking over the Table of Contents, this book is geared more toward Linux Multimedia Management (PVR, mp3s) than doing actual recording and capturing.
I'm a podcaster trying to figure out the best way to input mike/mixer into my linux laptop, and had the damnest time figuring out.
Mastering the software stuff is easy (relatively speaking). Much harder is figuring out how to get your hardware to work. About the best resource I've found for that is this usb device database . Under each multimedia device are user comments about how they made it work.
Also, a few months ago I reviewed a book, Digital Video Hacks. More about video production than linux, the book nonetheless a few things from a linux perspective. Highly recommended!
On another note, why hasn't anyone published a decent GIMP manual yet? The last book is a good three years old, and a lot has happened to gimp since then. I would love to see a Gimp Hacks book sometime. I could really use that!
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Amazon Has it cheaper than B & N. ($19.77 new, 13.12 used).
Expert Java EE Consulting
Wireless Hacks, that was a book largely composed of "hacks". Every other book I've seen has been a cookbook using tools as they are intended. The term "Cookbook" or "Tips" is much more accurate for these titles.
When Wireless Hacks came out, it was great, real hacks. When the next Hacks book came out, I rushed to the bookstore to take a look and find it was a lame and inaccurate title. When the third Hacks book came out, I didn't and still don't pay any attention.
The "Hacks" branding is effectively worthless, O'Reilly.
Save yourself some money by buying the book here: Linux Multimedia Hacks. And if you use the "secret" A9.com Instant Reward discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
I remember the first time the desktop welcome sound came from my speakers with a clean Linux install - I nearly crapped myself with fear! After 4 years of no sound on my Linux partition - it came as a bit of a shock.
I'm looking over the wall; and the're looking at me!
... things like building a pre-emptible kernel (multimedia performance is like night and day with it)? ... the various sound daemons (and how to make sure they don't step on each other)? ... comparisons between vendor supplied drivers and open source ones?
Those would be helpful.
ED2k Hash: F6FC779EA4FCD0FD85D44BB368BB4C0E
Ignorant hack!
Looks like a linux developer will be coming out with a gimp manual soon. I think she based it on a gimp course she taught online .
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
Xawtv? TV Time is infinitely better for watching TV on Linux.
http://tvtime.sourceforge.net/
I also fondly remember that day. The voice that emerged from my speakers said:
"My name is Linux Torvalds and I pronounce Linux Lee-nooks"
And I'm like WTF? I thought Lin-ukks was a friggin atrocity to call my new Lie-nux installation. Now it's got nooks? This is just lue-duk-cruss.
-- I have fans? Wow.
Why must they call them "hacks" when it is really just a collection of "how-to"s. I suppose some people would be more likely to buy the book if they do that, but surely there must be people like me who see it as a gimmick?
Year 2006 Vaporware 1#
Linux on Desktop
I'll feed your troll...
Thinking that Linux doesn't or can't make a viable desktop due to the sheer volume of opensource solutions to a variety of past problems is missing the point -- the problems have been solved in many ways and distributions have made choices, standardized and made things work so that users don't need to care or worry.
A non-Linux user who thinks Linux on the desktop isn't usable is about as misinformed as a Linux users who complains about the frequency of Windows bluescreens but hasn't used Windows since Windows ME.
Alsa is pretty much the standard, but I do want to see JACK become a standard that alsa plugs into - Linux really should have low latency audio and the ability to play multiple concurrent sounds - the lack of that is kind of embarrassing.
My point still stands, though - This and other issues will get resolved and sorted out by distro builders.
I would have written at-least an online minibook for The GIMP
( How To, for photographers who care just to get good-enough-for-results results... ), except that:
a) The GIMP ( or its development ) won't ever be end-user or end-power-user responsive, and
b) The GIMP won't ever support efficient workflow, and
c) The GIMP won't ever support efficient & effective colour-calibration
( at-least not until EVERYone else has done it for sooo long that it finally becomes acceptable for it to do so )
d) The GIMP won't ever support all the plugins for photoshop, even though it HAS to be possible to code an app for that sort of compatibility
( since Jasc's program did. . . )
e) The GIMP won't EVER have a wonderful-to-work-with UI ( or even a usable one )
etc.
It's a variation of The Debian Syndrome: .
User-centrism, and USE-centrism
. . oppose .
institutional-mentality or institutional-modality,
& mutex is mutex ( mutually-exclusive ).
KOffice's Krita is designed to displace The GIMP, and it's going v1.5 rc1 at the end of February 2006, .. KOffice's spreadsheet is unfortunately insane, so function can't possibly be the centre of that,
so simply ditch The GIMP and have-at something designed with function as a centre of it
( not necessarily THE centre of it, mind
& that mind-set may be contaminating the rest of KOffice. . . )
The sanest thing to do, it seems, it to let The GIMP be authoritative(tm), and institutional(tm), and to Let It Die(tm)
while replacing it with something that is usable & works.
The market moves-on, right?
( just as Linux is displacing other OSs from many markets, and most/all servers )
PS this isn't an attack against The GIMP, or The GIMP's developers, it's simply a user-perspective, developed over YEARS of attempting to find OPEN-evolution in The GIMP, and the final & certain recognition/identification of What Happened. .
And, having seen equivalent happen in countless different ways, throughout our world, from the Kremlin to Washington+NSA+HomelandSec++ to RIAA to Hospitals to every kind of institution/entity:
it's the basic perception that Agile is opposite to the RELIGION of establishment,
& establishment is an unconscious religion, is all. .
Fighting the undertow of the river we all splash-around on requires coherent determination, and how many "groups" or "teams" have coherent-determination that is contradictory of the undertow owning them? Eh?
Percentage-wise, it's 0.00% or something?
'The 30 MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES of the US Marines' ( Freedman ) is a book that showed how to attack, at an organizational level, that same institutional-inertia-mode,
but Who Honestly Cares either about their life-quality, their work, their family/workgroup/community, or anything, ENOUGH to commit different-mode, coherently, consistently, ongoingly?
Anyone?
PPS: the "registry" link of this post has a link to the Freedman book, and some other good ones, and you can read others comments of the books on the amazon.com pages for each of 'em, so you don't have to trust my opinion of 'em at all, and no there isn't any address attached to that "registry" so its a For YOUR Information, only, registry, see. . .
IPTables enhancement Fail2Ban bans cracker-login's
O'Reilly: If you are familiar with other books in the O'Reilly series, this one will seem familiar.
For Dummies: If you are familiar with other books in the 'for dummies' series, this one will seem familiar.
in 21 days: If you are familiar with other books in the 'in 21 days' series, this one will seem familiar.
New James Bond movie: If you are familiar with other movies in the James Bond series, this one will seem familiar.
you get the picture.
yea really mr. troll (lol) you can go out and buy a linux compatable sound card.. just like windoze people do.
So you'd have sound AND you'd be supporting companies that are bucking 'The Man' and 'The System' at the same time..
Sooo shaddup and do something.. we have the tools :)
-- My favorite thing about OSS *IS* its Militancy!!
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Hello, this is Linus Torvalds, and I pronounce Linux as lnks
(if you can't read the strange symbols, either i've fucked up, or your default font doesn't support them)
I hope the book specifically addresses playing streaming video from the CNN website. How many cries from the wilderness have we heard regarding that issue?
If enjoying CNN in Linux is no longer an exercise in futility, then I'll personally buy a copy.
SEO Copywriter. Just Say ON
Yep, it's a gimmick that sells books. O'Reilly is good at that. Hack has a sufficiently generic meaning that it will mean basically whatever they want it to mean. I'm sure once the open source community has figure out that "hack" is O'Reilly code for "book that you'll soon be buying" they'll have moved on to other words like "Make". Oh wait...
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
Lunix 2006 is more powerful than Windows 1995, moreover it wasn't the 1st advanced technology, but yes today.
Yes. I am indeed a moron. My apologies Mr. Torrent. Er, Torvalds. Dammit.
-- I have fans? Wow.