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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.
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
Well, vorbis, vorbis.
The problem with vorbis is that bad marketing meets to late to market.
EVERYBODY has mp3. My discman can read them on cd, my car stereo does, everything. The "free" aspect doesnt matter to the end user, and the bitrate benefits got totally drowned in the storage size inflation... 8 years ago, on a 32Mbyte Rio500, every kb/s counted. By today even flash players have GBs...
And the vidfeo container format suffered from horrible implementations, bugs, the inability to even remotely efficiently _seek_ inside the file and , of course, bad marketing.
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
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.
It might be a good book but I was disappointed to learn that the hack you mentioned wasn't even SSH-specific, just involving creating shell scripts / aliases to avoid typing.
If you want to really "turbo-charge" your SSH logins you might want to look at one of the newer features of OpenSSH v4 reusing existing connections.
The answer to your question is not piracy, nor quality or commercial reasons. Yes, there are hundreds of terrabytes in .mp3 format available on P2P networks, but let's not assume everyone is out trying to steal something. The mpeg format doesn't offer any kind of copy protection, vorbis doesn't either. I strongly believe .mp3 is the most popular simply because .mp3s to 64kbit .oggs, but for a single reason: portable music players have limited disk space. By portable I mean cell phones and PDAs. This is a huge user base, and if I was the developer who conceived the .ogg compression algorithm I would try my best to deliver contents to those "niche" markets. Of course, I am not that developer and all I can do is envy him/her for a job well done.
#1 it is good enough
#2 it is free (or at least this is what the entire planet thinks, although 2-3 lawyers might disagree)
#3 it was there first
This eliminates any chance of growth to another "good enough" and "free" codec.
Still: A lot of my friends are converting right now the 192kbit