Category Archives: Applications

Tutorial: Stop-Motion in Linux

Posted by Haz on 3 May, 2011 None comments

EDIT: Just been told there’s another way to do this using ffmpeg, I might add this in once I’ve had a play with it. Show ▼

Command I shall have to test: ffmpeg -f image2 -i foo-%d.jpg -r FRAMERATE -s XxY -vcodec libx264 -vpre slow -b BIT_RATE -threads 0 foo.mp4

This is just a quick post. It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, but never got round to it and minecraft was the best excuse to do it with. Video I made is embedded at the very end (or you can click here to watch it now: http://youtu.be/JdQxXj5czrU).

How I Made The “Frames”

Basically I took many screenshots in minecraft, roughly about 3-6 screenshots per section I wanted to show in the video, using the F2 key. I did this on my laptop using the “Play Offline” feature, and setting my server to allow anyone. So I showed up in game as “Player” and set him where I wanted the “camera”. I then logged into Minecraft on my workstation using my normal account. Then I began building, every so often taking 3-6 screenshots with the laptop.

How I Rendered The Images

Now obviously I’m going to assume before you started taking screenshots that you cleared out your previous minecraft screenshots folder (or webcam stills, whatever), and that your folder is full of images that you want to make into a video only. The screenshots folder is found at “/home/your_user/.minecraft/screenshots/” without quotes. Since these are terminal commands, you’ll need to “cd” to that folder when you want to render.

Step 1: Installing “mencoder”.

First you’ll need to install “mencoder” since this is what makes the initial video. This is found in most distros repos. I’m using Ubuntu 10.10, but should work for all. Do this with the following (you should be able to find it in the software centre too):

sudo apt-get install mencoder

Step 2: Creating a file with list of images.

Now we’re going to cd to the screenshots folder, and we’re going to make a file with a list of all the images in the correct order as stated by modified date/time. This is going to be used by mencoder so that it creates the stop-motion video. To make this file we’re going to do this:

ls -1tr > files.txt

You can name the file anything you want, in this example I’m using “files.txt”, however make sure you remember what file name you give it, and please note that’s a one (1) not a lower-case L. The -1 is so that each file is on its own line, t is to list by the modified time/date, and r is for reversing the order. Please check the man pages (command: man ls) if you want to use other options. I find this the best way to do it however.

Step 3: Render the video! \o/

Now that we have our file full of all the images we’re going to be using on each line (and in the correct order), we now need to finally render it into a video. Now I’m not going to go into details about the options I have picked, but it basically outputs into a raw video file (~200MB for a 1 minute long video) and is great for editing should you wish to do so. Anyways, on with the command line stuff!

mencoder -nosound -ovc copy -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4 -mf fps=6 mf://@files.txt -o video.avi

The important thing to note by the way, is the -o option – this is to set the filename of the output. You can call this whatever you like, I just chose “video.avi”. Also note that vcodec is which codec we’re going to be using (in this case mpeg4), the -ovc copy is how I’m making this video output as raw video (basically a direct copy of the images), and one last thing I should mention is you’ll notice fps=6 – This basically defines what the framerate is, I set this to 6 because I was using ~6 images each time. However have a play with that number until you get the right results your after. Doing it this way takes less time, since it doesn’t have to process very much. Plus you get quality as good as the images your working with, which is perfect.

Step 4 (optional): Edit video, add sound.

You don’t have to do this, but well ~200MB is a bit much to upload to things like YouTube (plus it has no sound!). So I used PiTiVi Video Editing software that comes with ubuntu to import the video and song of my choice. And then rendered it how I liked it. I use MP4 Muxer with default options, because the size is decent at the end, and looks reasonable for the end quality (and works in YouTube).

That’s everything! We’ve just made a stop-motion video file! With that, I shall now present my first ever stop-motion video, using the medium of Minecraft! The song used is released under the Creative Commons licence (info in the video description), the pictures were designed by me (using popular ideas as a base), and the game used is Minecraft which is owned by Mojang. Enjoy!

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Video Tutorial: How to login/use IRC with empathy.

Posted by Haz on 17 April, 2011 None comments

Now this is a quick video I made in one take on how to login to freenode IRC network using empathy. The video will be embedded at the bottom of this post. The video is found here, if your using a Feed Reader that doesn’t support embedded videos: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_yvPl152L0

I’m using Empathy inside of Ubuntu 10.10 Meerkat Maverick, but should work on any distro that has Empathy.

If you need to add freenode to the list the details are:
address: irc.freenode.net
port: 6667

Alis is a channel list search bot. For a list of commands she accepts, type in “HELP” without quotes and she’ll tell you the commands she accepts. The example I used in the video are:
LIST *ubuntu*
LIST *programming*

Hope this helps some people out, if needs be I will quite happy redo the video if people think it is really bad. Any comments on something I may have missed feel free to post them here or on the YouTube video. Thanks.

Next blog post should hopefully have some irssi stuff, and how to split up conversations. Still need to do more fiddling with it before I do actually do a write-up about it though.

Rating: 0 (from 2 votes)

Tutorial: IPv6 Under Ubuntu 10.10

Posted by Haz on 31 March, 2011 None comments

As some of you may know, I’m planning on updating my home server to an ubuntu-based one at some point, and I have been busy trying to get to grips with Linux and all its many different ways about how it works. Some of you may also know that IPv4 is slowly coming to an end; last I checked they’ve exhausted the pool of allocation for IPv4 (possibly bad choice of words? Please correct me if I’m wrong). I don’t mean that every possible combination of IP’s have been used up… they’ve just all been allocated off to individuals/ISP’s/corporations/etc. and its only a matter of time when they will no longer be able to provide people with an IP address (not without creating subnets, and NAT’s on top of each other to allow for more).

So in light of this, the lovely people at #ubuntu-uk have suggested I try and setup IPv6 tunnelled over IPv4 via one of many different IPv6 brokers… and I can honestly say I have successfully managed to do so! Not just for one machine, but for any machine that gets connected to my network! Score! \o/

Credits

Before I go on, as usual, I like to take this opportunity to thank the #ubuntu-uk community (mainly through IRC) for all their help and support. The main man himself that helped me through it is MartijnVdS, without his patience and help I think I would probably still be sat trying out millions of different combinations trying to get it to work. I can’t forget shauno, since me and him were talking about IPv6 (along with MartijnVdS and possibly a few others). Shauno has also helped when I was struggling by linking me to some useful places (when most people would normally be asleep). Thank you all :). If I’ve missed anyone out, please let me know.

I’m going to essentially walk through the settings and configuration as best as I possibly can (the way I understood it as people were trying to help me), and hopefully the information here will help others get started and setup too :).

Some info on World IPv6 Day is in the spoiler.
Show Spoiler ▼

Let’s begin…

Now there are two (2) ways you can get an IPv6. You can either set each machine individually, or you can setup a machine as an IPv6 router (or IPv6 announcer) to dish out IPv6 to all machines that are capable of doing so on your network. The second method is the way I have things setup at home, however as I was learning I did do the first method first. It is entirely up to you which one you want to do, and I will be listing them both. Just click on the section you’d like to follow.

Note: Both have similar steps. Also note, using a broker you’ll essentially be assigned 2^64 address (which is a HUGE number of IPv6′s that you can have for your devices!)

Show How To Setup Individually ▼

Step 1: Selecting a broker

- Now although I just picked a broker for the simple fact that I’d heard it before (and visited their site before), I recommend that if your serious about doing this that you look into why your doing it and which one may suit your needs more. I picked HE (Hurricane Electrics – http://www.he.net/), simply because I knew the name, plus I’d noticed some people on #ubuntu-uk use them too, so this made it helpful because I was able to get help from people who had experienced setting-up before with them before. Anyway, moving on…
- Register for an account for your chosen broker (HE’s tunnel broker site is here: http://www.tunnelbroker.net/).

Step 2: Create a tunnel

- Now this may be different for each broker, but the steps should be similar for all of them. After you’ve logged in to HE, you should see on the left hand side navigation a “Create regular tunnel” link – click it.
- It will ask for an IPv4 endpoint, this is basically your internet facing IP address. It will show you your IP on the page in the section “You are viewing from IP:”, unless your using proxies or other fancy methods of hiding your IP I recommend you put that IP address shown there. If your using fancy methods, then I suggest you connect to your router and find your internet IP address that way.
- Select a server that’s closest to you, this is just to reduce lag/latency/etc… however you can pick any you prefer.
- Click Submit. You’ll now be allocated an IPv6 range. You should see this in your “Main Page” section.
- Click the link for the new tunnel you’ve created, and keep it open in a new tab/window since you will be referring to this page a bit.
- Common errors will be placed in the box below when doing this section (based on comments and from experience when I was doing this).

You may need to set your router to allow pings, otherwise you cannot create a tunnel.

Step 3: Configure /etc/network/interfaces

- We’re going to configure a virtual network interface (or endpoint) for your tunnel. We’ll be calling this “he-ipv6″.
- There are a few ways you can configure this file, I prefer using a text editor called nano… however you can use gedit instead if you wish for a GUI version. Just replace the commands nano with gedit. Type in the following into a terminal:

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

- Then add the following lines at the end of your file. Don’t forget to change these to your own values. The # represent comments, and you don’t need to include these.

# This is for IPv6 tunnelbroker.net (HE)
auto he-ipv6
iface he-ipv6 inet6 v4tunnel
        endpoint 216.45.64.21
        address 2001:470:beef:a3d::2
        netmask 64
        up ip -6 route add default dev he-ipv6
        down ip -6 route del default dev he-ipv6

- Here are the changes you need to make

216.45.64.21 = Server IPv4 address
2001:470:beef:a3d::2 = Client IPv6 address (notice that the /64 is taken out, this is used in the netmask section).

- Now if your using nano, just save the file with CTRL+O then hit enter. Then close with CTRL+X. If your using gedit, just click save and then close the document.
- Lets now activate the he-ipv6 we just configured above with the following command:

sudo ifup he-ipv6

-You should now be able to run the following and get some replies:

ping6 ipv6.google.com -c 5

-If your able to do the command above, try visiting this website for another test: ipv6.google.com. If you can see that page, everything was configured perfectly! Congrats!! \o/
-If not, try restarting the machine and see if you can then.
-If your still having trouble, it could be possible that you haven’t got IPv6 enabled. To fix that you’ll need to open up network manger by doing either:

System -> Preferences ->Network Connections

Address =Routed /64 (minus off the /64 part, and replace with 1)
Prefix = 64
Gateway = Client IPv6 address (minus the /64 part).

- That’s it! Click apply, and once you’ve done that you may want to reconnect to that network (or restart your computer). You should now be able to do the ping6 command from earlier :). Also try visiting this website: ipv6.google.com. If you can see that page, you’ve successfully got an IPv6 address! Hurray! \o/

Show How To Setup as a Router ▼

Step 1: Selecting a broker

Step 2: Create a tunnel

You may need to set your router to allow pings, otherwise you cannot create a tunnel.

Step 3: Create a /48 subnet

- Since we’ll be creating a router to dish out IP address, we’ll need to create a subnet. Don’t worry, its almost physically impossible for you to run out of IP’s they’ve assigned you unless your a really huge company.
-On the page where you have all your details. Click the link to allocate a “Routed /48″ range.
-That’s it :). Done!

Step 4: Configure /etc/network/interfaces

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

- Then add the following lines at the end of your file. Don’t forget to change these to your own values. The # represent comments, and you don’t need to include these.

# This is for IPv6 tunnelbroker.net (HE)
auto he-ipv6
iface he-ipv6 inet6 v4tunnel
        endpoint 216.45.64.21
        address 2001:470:beef:a3d::2
        netmask 64
        up ip -6 route add default dev he-ipv6
        down ip -6 route del default dev he-ipv6

- Here are the changes you need to make

216.45.64.21 = Server IPv4 address
2001:470:beef:a3d::2 = Client IPv6 address (notice that the /64 is taken out, this is used in the netmask section).

sudo ifup he-ipv6

-You should now be able to run the following and get some replies:

ping6 ipv6.google.com -c 5

-If not, try restarting the machine and see if you can then.

Step 5: Configure /etc/sysctl.conf to allow IPv6 forwarding

- This step is important, because without IPv6 forwarding… you won’t be able to pass out IPv6 to other machines.
- First lets open that file, type in the following command:

sudo nano /etc/sysctl.conf

- Now this document has a lot of things commented out, however all we’re going to be looking for is something that says “#net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1″. You may find yours only has “#net.ipv6.conf.default.forwarding=1″ depending on your setup. However, either way you want to remove the hash (#) out. So you should have something that looks like this (after you take the # out):

# Uncomment the next line to enable packet forwarding for IPv6
#  Enabling this option disables Stateless Address Autoconfiguration
#  based on Router Advertisements for this host
net.ipv6.conf.all.forwarding=1

- If it doesn’t exist, thats fine too. Just add those lines in at the end of the file.
- Now save with CTRL+O, hit enter, then close with CTRL+X.
- At this point, it might be a good idea to restart to make sure all the settings take place for the next lot of sections.

Step 6: Install radvd (Router ADVertisement Daemon)

- Now we need to install a tool to be able to send out IPv6 to other machines. This tool is called radvd (Router Advertisement Daemon). If your using Ubuntu (or Debian), you should be able to grab this via:

sudo apt-get install radvd

Step 7: Configure /etc/radvd.conf

- Now we shall configure radvd to dish out some IPv6 addresses to your machines.
- Run the following command (don’t worry if its blank, we are creating a new file).

sudo nano /etc/radvd.conf

- We need to put in the following:

interface eth0
{
        AdvSendAdvert on;
        prefix 2001:470:cafe::/64
        {
                AdvOnLink on;
                AdvAutonomous on;
        };
};

- Make sure you change out the prefix from the one supplied by your broker. As shown below:

2001:470:cafe::/64 = Routed /48 address
IMPORTANT: Please note, that the number they give you ends in /48 however we need to set in the config this as /64.
So instead of putting 2001:470:cafe::/48, we're putting 2001:470:cafe::/64.

- Now that we’ve done those changes save with CTRL+O, then enter, then exit with CTRL+X.
- Now lets start up the radvd daemon :). Put in the following command (don’t worry, this won’t restart the system… it is only restarting the radvd tool):

sudo /etc/init.d/radvd restart

That’s all folks!
We have now fully configured the system to be a router for IPv6. Every system now able to receive an IPv6 on your network should now have one, you can test this by typing in:

ping6 ipv6.google.com -c 5

- If however that doesn’t work, it could be that your system hasn’t been enabled to automatically be assigned an IPv6 address. You can check this with:

ip -6 addr

- You should see an address that starts with “2001:470:cafe” (this is the starting IPv6 address that HE gave you, as used earlier in this example) and an address that starts with “fe80″. If you only see an address that starts with “fe80″ then you’ll need to enable IPv6 on your machine. To do this continue onto the section “Automatically Assign IPv6″ below.

Show Automatically Assign IPv6 ▼

- If your using ubuntu, this is easily achieved by using the network manager. To access this you do either:

System -> Preferences ->Network Connections

- …or right-click the network icon on your toolbar and pick “Edit Connections”.
- Once you’ve done that, pick the connection you’d like to gain an IPv6 (for example “Auto eth0″) and click “edit”.
- Go to the IPv6 Settings tab, and where it says “Method” pick “Automatic”. Make sure the “Require IPv6 addressing for this connection to complete” is NOT ticked.
- That’s it! Click apply, and once you’ve done that you may want to reconnect to that network (or restart your computer). You should now be able to do the ping6 command from earlier :). Also try visiting this website: ipv6.google.com. If you can see that page, you’ve successfully got an IPv6 address! Hurray! \o/

Hope this guide helps you, and was informative at the same time. Please feel free to post any problems you may have in the comments, and I’ll try my best to answer them for you :).

Rating: +2 (from 2 votes)

Songbird?

Posted by Haz on 28 March, 2009 None comments

Has anyone tried any of the other software developments based on Mozilla technologies? I’ve just resently tested Songbird, and I must say it’s pretty awesome! It’s like having the best qualities of iTunes (which I hate with a passion, but it does have some great feats.) and WinAMP, mixed in with some of Mozilla’s great initiative. Also, there’s Mozilla Ubiquity – the addon that should rock the world of browsing, but I’ll get onto that later.

Songbird, is a media player – with addons! Bold statement Haz, I hear you say, but don’t we already have that? Do plugins mean nothing to you? Well yes, I know that, but still… power to the open-source! Besides, you forget I’ve converted to the dark side! Linux!

As standard on ubuntu, it has 2 media players (Movie Player, and Rhythmbox Music Player). Neither apeal to me much. I had to apt-get install VLC straight away for watching movies, and I’ve stuck with Rhythmbox Music Player for music – it lets me play music from Last.fm, and manages music with a library. Songbird seems to be a treat to the eyes (and the ears), it also brings something I thought was not possible… Firefox (or at least the gecko engine) browser integeration, and all things music all in one app.

I’ll put it into context, I didn’t think Ronald Jenkees would be a highly know artist. I mean he’s a YouTube guy who made his own album and distributes it himself via his site (and now amazon.com as MP3 downloads). But sure enough, his album was regnoised in the mashTape addon section at the bottom:

Now before you say hey that’s cheating, that isn’t in-built into the software!, technically it isn’t. I left everything as default during the install (not really an install on linux, but I digress), so unless you unticked it… you’ll have it as standard.

Anywho! As I was saying, mashTape! At first glance, it seems to pull information from the internet based on the currently playing artist/song. It shows information about the artist from [Last.fm | MusicBrainz | Freebase], Lists reviews from [Amazon], News from [Digg | Google News | Hype Machine | MTV Music News], Photos from [Flickr] and Videos from [MTV Music Videos | Yahoo Music | YouTube]. Those are default values obviously, configuratable in the Preferances. Also, bare in mind that I assume it pulls information from sources that has data which is why I’ve used | character, in programming you might know this as being the OR operator and this is why I’ve used it.

I’m currently looking into addons, because at the end of the day thats why you get an application with addon (or plugin) support. To customise it to your liking. Ones that have caught my attension so far are: Now Playing List (for the right panel) and FireTray (a system tray extension for linux). Themes? Oh yes please! I wish Foxkeh was ported to Songbird, but alas it isn’t yet (or maybe I haven’t looked hard enough yet). Either way, much everyone’s favourite browser, there’ll be something to tickle everyone’s fancy. Below is a picture of the addon manager in preferences:

One cool addon that also comes with Songbird by default is called “Concert”, and guess what that might do? Yep, it lists upcoming concerts based on artists in your library. Brilliant! Even more exciting is the fact that if you leave it to just show concerts based on your library, it shows the number of upcoming concerts in brackets, so you’ll always know if something new is happening! Sadly, I have only one artist in my library so it showed me this message:

BUT on the upside, you can set it to show all concerts coming soon in your area:

Okay, onto the next topic: Ubiquity for Firefox (addon).

If you haven’t heard about it already, well then you should click the link and watch the videos. It’s basically trying to make browsing more intuitive, more language based, and being able to display/use/manipulate data the way you want it. Rather then me rant on, watch the videos and you’ll see for yourself. :)

I’ve known about Ubiquity for about a year, but they’ve finally made a prototype of it! If your interested, give it a try. Head on down to the Mozilla Addon page for Ubiquity. I’ve currently installed it myself, and need to restart my browser to try it. So this is me signing off, and I hope you enjoy my findings/review. :)

Songbird Images:

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Haz's Blog

More then just an average WordPress blog!

Category Archives: Applications

Tutorial: Stop-Motion in Linux

How I Made The “Frames”

How I Rendered The Images

Step 1: Installing “mencoder”.

Step 2: Creating a file with list of images.

Step 3: Render the video! \o/

Step 4 (optional): Edit video, add sound.

Video Tutorial: How to login/use IRC with empathy.

Tutorial: IPv6 Under Ubuntu 10.10

Credits

Spoiler

Let’s begin…

Step 1: Selecting a broker

Step 2: Create a tunnel

Step 3: Configure /etc/network/interfaces

Step 1: Selecting a broker

Step 2: Create a tunnel

Step 3: Create a /48 subnet

Step 4: Configure /etc/network/interfaces

Step 5: Configure /etc/sysctl.conf to allow IPv6 forwarding

Step 6: Install radvd (Router ADVertisement Daemon)

Step 7: Configure /etc/radvd.conf

Songbird?

Categories

Archives

Links

Meta

Haz's Blog

More then just an average WordPress blog!

Category Archives: Applications

Tutorial: Stop-Motion in Linux

How I Made The “Frames”

How I Rendered The Images

Step 1: Installing “mencoder”.

Step 2: Creating a file with list of images.

Step 3: Render the video! \o/

Step 4 (optional): Edit video, add sound.

Video Tutorial: How to login/use IRC with empathy.

Tutorial: IPv6 Under Ubuntu 10.10

Credits

Spoiler

Let’s begin…

Step 1: Selecting a broker

Step 2: Create a tunnel

Step 3: Configure /etc/network/interfaces

Step 1: Selecting a broker

Step 2: Create a tunnel

Step 3: Create a /48 subnet

Step 4: Configure /etc/network/interfaces

Step 5: Configure /etc/sysctl.conf to allow IPv6 forwarding

Step 6: Install radvd (Router ADVertisement Daemon)

Step 7: Configure /etc/radvd.conf

Songbird?

Categories

Tags

Archives

Links

Meta