Core i7 encoding performance

I got a new core i7 820 the other day.  After reading up on all the differences between the old core i7 920 and the new 820 sporting the new LGA1156 socket architecture, getting thoroughly confused then realising no single CPU today stands out above the rest for all functions only specific functions, I was quite relieved to find out that the 820 (or more specifically any i7 sporting LGA1156) turned out to be the best option for encoding.

I added a Gigabyte GA-P55-UD5 board (only because ASUS are way behind with this socket at the moment – 1 motherboard compared to 9 Gigabyte boards) and some Kingston HyperX 1600MHz Ram.  Also after the first encode tipping the temp over 60 degrees C with the standard Intel Heatsink, went and got a Prolimatech Megahalem cooler with Fan which now brings down the encoding temp to an impressive 34 degrees C with all cores/threads running at 100% CPU.  (Apparently you can overclock this board to 4GHz quite comfortably with this cooler).  I’ve also heard from someone who builds overclocked machines to order that if you want a conservative overclock to go to 3.6GHz and you could render 24×7 on all cores without any CPU life expectency issues or otherwise negative impact.

It’s also interesting how Intel now incorporates overclocking right into the CPU from the factory (oddly named after something out of an 80’s TV show – Turbo Boost) and it’s turned on by default.

So how has it effected my encoding?

Well, I am getting quite a few more frames per second on the first pass, something like moving from 20-25 to about 45 which is quite impressive.  However since the first pass doesn’t maximise the CPU cores and threads the second pass is even more interesting.  I’m actually seeing the second pass running at the same number of frames per second as the first pass.  Clearly the new i7 architecture and hyperthreading performs an awful lot better than the old Q9300 chip I had.

While not normally an overclocker, now that I have some awesome cooling attached, I am interested to see how many more fps I get if I take it up to 3.6Ghz.   Might make encoding a 1080p file quite a bit more attractive

Will keep you posted.

How to add a new disk to an array under Sabayon Linux 5.0

Forgive the lack of formatiing with this, but I figure I’ll post it before it get’s lost and format it later

After the hardware is installed do the following:

fdisk /dev/yourdisk

press n for new partition

Accept defaults for largest size disk if that’s what you want to do (most likely)

Press ? To change the partition type to Raid Autodetect

press w to exit fdisk

Ensure your existing array is built and running

# mdadm –assemble /dev/md0 /dev/sdb1 /dev/sdc1 /dev/sdd1 /dev/sde1

# mount /dev/md0 /mnt/data1

# mdadm /dev/yourexisting array –add /dev/yournewdisk

mdadm: added /dev/sdf1

# mdadm –detail /dev/md0

You should see a list similar to this showing your new drive currently added as a hot spare

Number Major Minor RaidDevice State

0 8 17 0 active sync /dev/sdb1

1 8 33 1 active sync /dev/sdc1

2 8 49 2 active sync /dev/sdd1

3 8 65 3 active sync /dev/sde1

4 8 81 – spare /dev/sdf1

Now you’re ready to roll…..

# mdadm –grow –raid-devices=5 /dev/md0

Donald Scripts # mdadm –grow –raid-devices=5 /dev/md0

mdadm: Need to backup 768K of critical section..

mdadm: … critical section passed.

Every 2.0s: cat /proc/mdstat Wed Sep 16 18:18:20 2009

Personalities : [linear] [raid0] [raid1] [raid10] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [multipath] [faulty]

md0 : active raid5 sdf1[4] sdb1[0] sde1[3] sdd1[2] sdc1[1]

2930279808 blocks super 0.91 level 5, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [5/5] [UUUUU]

[>....................] reshape = 0.1% (1176912/976759936) finish=816.4min speed=19915K/sec

unused devices: <none>

Check the filesystem e2fsck!

Donald Scripts # e2fsck -pv /dev/md0

/dev/md0: clean, 87382/183148544 files, 634355575/732569952 blocks (check in 5 mounts)

Donald Scripts # resize2fs -p /dev/md0

resize2fs 1.41.9 (22-Aug-2009)

Resizing the filesystem on /dev/md0 to 976759936 (4k) blocks.

Begin pass 1 (max = 7452)

Extending the inode table XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

The filesystem on /dev/md0 is now 976759936 blocks long.

How to export/import your XBMC Library so you never have to download it again!

Yep, you read that right!  Actually, this guide does away with exporting and importing mostly.  I got tired of waiting for my large collection to download every time I did an upgrade or removed an XBMC source/share.  And it wasn’t too hard to figure out a way around it.

A nice side effect of this guide is that you will easily be able to tell which content is not being detected by XBMC.  You may not realise it, but if you have a large collection, often XBMC doesn’t detect things and there doesn’t seem to be any reason to which it will or won’t detect during the library scan, but it can miss quite  a few things off from time to time.  Another nice side effect of this method is that you won’t have issues with path incompatibilities (causing your library import to fail)  if you’ve changed your sharename, have multiple XBMC clients etc.

OK, you’re not going to believe how easy this is.

First off, you’re going to need to do a library scan from the internet, once, as per normal.

Add items to your library

From the main screen go to video.  Click or press Enter on the Add source item and add a media source if you don’t already have one.

Ensure you go into “Set Content” and change the item, “This directory contains” to Movies or whatever content you have in your source.  If you already had a source set up, you will need to edit it by selecting it, pressing C (or right clicking the mouse) and choosing edit source.

Also make sure you select, “Run Automated scan” and “Scan Recursively”, under Settings to ensure you have “enable fanart” enabled. Click OK twice to get out.

If you were creating a new source it should now scan it automatically.  If you had an existing source you may need to select it, press C (or right click) and choose, “Scan for new Content” as sometimes they don’t accept the automated scan request.  Note:  It is not until you do this scan that the Library Mode will become active.

Depending on the size of your library and speed of your internet connection, you may need to wait a while, maybe even an hour .  When it’s completed, select and make active the Library Mode item under Video.  At this point you should be seeing a screen with Movies, Recently added movies and Playlists on it.  Click on Movies, then Title and you should be looking at the the glorious XBMC Library goodness!

Exporting your library

OK so you’ve spent an hour waiting for your library to download and you know you don’t ever want to do that again!  The fix is quite easy.

Ensure you have write access from XBMC to where your library is stored.  If you are running from a Samba share you will need to ensure the user you are connecting to the share as, has read, write and execute access, otherwise this will not work.

In the library, press C or right click and select settings.

Scroll down and select the Library Menu Item, then choose Export Video Libary.

Choose to export your library to Seperate files per entry (this bit is the magic)

Choose yes to export thumbs and fanart

Choose yes to overwrite old files.

The export now begins.  Once the export has completed, you’re actually done and you never ever need to go into, “Import Video Library” again!

How does this work?  It works because beside every file in your network share or disc folder/directory, the export put’s some matching files beside your movie files indicating to XBMC that this is the fanart, cover image, actors, directors, IMDB rating etc etc that belongs to this movie.  When XBMC is newly set up, all you need to do is go through the add items to your library section above and XBMC automatically pulls in the local versions of the files you previously exported.  You won’t need to go off to the internet for those files again!

Caveats, Gotcha’s and a bit of tweaking

OK, so the library isn’t always perfect, the automatic download feature sometimes skips stuff (as I mentioned before).  For these ones, XBMC may still go off to the internet at some stage, or they may be missed off altogether.  That’s OK, we can fix that!

Movies that aren’t detected

You can easily see which files were not detected, because when you open your movies folder in your favourite file manager you will see which ones do not have  any .nfo .tbn files etc beside them.  (To do this make sure you’re viewing your files sorted by name).  It’s these one’s that you need to do a bit of manual tweaking, but once you’ve done it, you shouldn’t need to go back to them, and they should stay there accross new versions of XBMC.

The way XBMC uses it’s scrapers is based on a file filter using something called regex.  Don’t worry about that too much, but just understand that the name of each of your files is quite important so that XBMC knows what movie to look up.  As an example, if you have a movie with a ‘ in it’s name, it needs to go into the file.  For example, if you had the Movie, “My Moms New Boyfriend”, it needs to read, “My Mom’s New Boyfriend”.  This is because if you look it up on the internet (the same thing the XBMC scraper does) it is actually written on the internet this way and the apostrophe is counted as a character it needs to match.  After you’ve changed the name of your movie, right click or press C on any movie in the library and choose, “Update Library”.  It’ll most likely turn up.

If a movie is still not being detected, plug it into google and see what comes up.  If you can find it in imdb.com and it has the same name, there’s another trick you can do.

Copy the url from imdb.com (or another supported scraper site (which you can get a list of from that same settings screen we went to above) and paste it as the only line in a text file.  Put the text file beside the movie in question and call it EXACTLY the same name but with .nfo on the end (so it should look like shrek.nfo for example).  Then choose update libarary again.  XBMC should say, “Oh, for this movie I need to go and look at this web address”.  If it does find something and it works well, you should re-export your library exactly the same as we did before (above) and choose yes to overwrite your files.  Then you will never have to go back to this particular one again.

If it doesn’t work, keep looking for web sites.  If you still can’t get the scraper to work you can put it in manually.  Most of the time these ones will not have fanart, but you should still be able to get a DVD cover and info on the movie.

The first step is to download a DVD cover off the internet.  Just google for it, get the enlarged version if available and right click, save as and put it somewhere on your computer.  You then need to convert the file to a .tbn file.  To do this in linux you need imagemagick installed (also available for windows I believe).  Once installed, type, “convert yourcovername.jpg yourcovername.tbn.  Then copy that file beside the movie file in question and give it the same name but keeping the .tbn extension.  If you update your library you should see the dvd cover display appear.  Occasionally, I’ve had to remove and re-add the Video source to get this to work, but it’s no big deal since it doesn’t have to go off to the internet any more. 

For the information that goes with the movie, copy one of the other movies .nfo files and edit it.  It’s pretty obvious what you need to change, just make sure it’s named yourmove.nfo, not the old movie name as you’ll stuff things up and need to remove and re-add your library again.

Welcome to your new XBMC library that installs in minutes instead of hours!   Have fun!

Good luck!

How to move Groupwise

Further to my step by step, it’s worth a mention that Caledonia have released a guide all about this just today.  It’s about time someone did this, I know it’s needed, I can see by the hits I get   Such a simple thing…..

Have a look at http://www.caledonia.net/gwmove.html

New VDPAU Features

Direct from xbmc.org

Today Nvidia announced a new set of beta drivers that add several new features to VDPAU in linux. For those somehow still in the dark about VDPAU read about it from here and here. Yes, it’s linux only.

New features include improved video upscaling and hardware acceleration for MPEG-4 Part 2, DivX 4, and DivX 5 video. The obvious pitfall in the announcement is the new hardware requirement, as most of our users already taking advantage of VDPAU (and devs as well) are undoubtedly using 8xxx or 9xxx series chipsets. The new features will require hardware with ‘Feature Set C’. The current list includes: GeForce GT 230M, GeForce GT 240M, GeForce G210M, GeForce GTS 260M, GeForce GTS 250M.

As always, the XBMC team is working hard to support the latest and greatest features available. In fact, motd2k has been working with Nvidia since before the drivers were publicly released, so support should be forthcoming. He says that the upscaling changes should be minimal, though the new codec support will depend on ffmpeg developers, who are known to be very strict when it comes to adding new code. Though without the necessary hardware for development it’s understandably tough for him, so remember to donate if you’d like to help out.

How to make a decent video encode from DVD to .mkv with chapters, subtitles, multi channel audio etc with Sabayon Linux

We’re all recording our TV shows etc onto computer files nowadays, thanks to XBMC, Windows Media Center, Media Portal, Apple TV and even Sony Playstaion, many of us are enjoying a rich online library of content to show off to our friends.  For me, the first thing I do when I buy a DVD is rip it to an mkv and store the DVD away in the cupboard.  I just wish you could take a USB stick down to the video store and have this done already.  But no go, so I do it myself.

This is something I’ve been doing for years.  There’s just no excuse for bad quality huge file size divx files anymore.  While I might have been fortunate enough in the past to have always had a dual-core while some people haven’t had that fortune, many years have passed and this type of hardware is extremely common these days.  The number one reason why using the 264 codec wasn’t popular for most was simply encoding time, if you didn’t have a dual core you would have most likely been looking at about 3-7 days to encode a single file.  But don’t fret, this is no longer the case.

This method, (although not rocket science at all) is often overlooked in favour of other, more historical methods out of sheer laziness.  With this method it is common to produce a file between only 700MB and 1.1GB that includes a full resolution video track with NO loss in quality that I’ve ever been able to see, a full uncompressed copy of the original AC3 and/or DTS soundtrack, full chapter support, multiple subtitles and even a copy of the cover art.  When I say no loss in quality, I really do mean it.  I’ve looked at these things so hard, found the smallest little error and then ended up realising it was actually a problem on the original DVD.  It’s important to note actually, that if you’re fussy, the kinds of issues you’re likely to be looking at will actually NOT be with the encoded file, but in the original source.

Why would I do it on linux?  Well, for starters, when it comes to encoding, linux is faster and not just a little bit either, quite a lot actually.  I can’t comment on Windows 7 at this point, but certainly on prior versions, Linux has had a considerable lead on encoding time.  I suspect former versions of Windows did not support the new processors properly.  This goes double when you have a quad core machine or higher.  Plus, if you’re feeling particularly greedy, you can install the 64bit version of linux and compile your own copies of the encoder in sabayon for your specific CPU and hardware using the emerge command.  If you’re going to do a lot of encoding, the 64 bit / manually compiled encoders add quite a bit of extra speed.  If you’re lucky enough to own a core i7 you would get even more advantage out of the maths capabilities of that architecture.  A typical scenario on my Intel Quad Q9300 takes about 2 hours to complete the mkv file above without manual compiling and running 32 bit Sabayon KDE.

**Before you start, please be aware that I in no way wish to support the pirating of DVD’s for spreading across the internet.  This guide is for personal use only and is intended to be used only for the transcoding of your already owned media to your own personal system.**

Righto, now that that’s over, we can begin.

Make the ISO

This script (h264enc) will actually encode/transcode from just about any format to any other format.  In fact it has presets for everything from blackberry’s, psp’s and ps3’s to generic hardware based DVD players.  For the sake of this guide however, we will concentrate on encoding an MPEG-2 ISO file made from DVD to an MPEG-4 mkv file playable on any good media centre such as XBMC or media portal.

While you can use this method to encode from other DVD structures, ISO’s are the easiest method, so we will focus on that here.  I’m not going to go into how to make an ISO from a DVD disc, however I can point you to k9copy for linux and DVD Fab HD Decrypter for windows.  Sometimes the windows method is preferred as Linux often is not up with the latest methods of extracting this information from a DVD.  The only comment I will make, is don’t bother to ‘Shrink’ the DVD to a 4.3GB ISO.  Since we won’t be trying to put it on a single layer disk (in fact we can fit four mkv files on a single layer DVD (therefore four movies)) having the original 9GB file will actually help your final encode to be higher quality since the source will have more colour bits in it to read from.

Get the software

In Sabayon you will need to install the following software:

mplayer, ogmtools (for chapter support), gpac (if you want to convert for PSP etc),

mkvtoolnix (for mkv support), h264enc, smplayer (just because it’s the best media player for linux and windows)

There are other packages that would be useful depending on what you want to do with h264enc, but for the sake of this example I’m leaving them out for now.

# equo install mplayer smplayer gpac mkvtoolnix ogmtools

Then you need to download h264enc from the website since it’s not currently included in Sabayon and this way you don’t have to wait for an ebuild to be made.

Browse to http://sourceforge.net/projects/h264enc/files/ and get the latest version.

Extract the version you downloaded using tar -zxvf fileyoudownloaded

go into the directory that was just extracted, probably h264enc9.0.1 or something like that.

become root

su <yourpassword>

type ./install and follow the simple questions.

Checking your config

You should now have all the relevant files installed.  To check, as your NORMAL user enter the following:

$ h264enc -sc

You should get output similar to the following:

someone@somemachine ~ $ h264enc -sc

-> Checking for ‘MPlayer’………………… OK
-> Checking for ‘MEncoder’……………….. OK
-> H.264 video support in MEncoder………… YES
-> AAC (FAAC) audio support in MEncoder……. YES
-> MP3 (LAME) audio support in MEncoder……. YES
-> AC3 (lavc) audio support in MEncoder……. YES
-> PCM audio support in MEncoder………….. YES

-> Checking for ‘bc’…………………….. OK
-> Checking for ‘pv’…………………….. FAILED! [no support for DVD ISO dumps]
-> Checking for ‘dd’…………………….. OK
-> Checking for ‘neroAacEnc’……………… FAILED! [no support for AAC+ audio]
-> Checking for ‘aacplusenc’……………… FAILED! [no support for AAC+ audio]
-> Checking for ‘oggenc’…………………. OK
-> Checking for ‘flac’…………………… OK
-> Checking for ‘less’…………………… OK
-> Checking for ‘lsdvd’………………….. OK
-> Checking for ‘dvdxchap’ (from ogmtools)…. OK
-> Checking for ‘mkvmerge’ (from mkvtoolnix).. OK
-> Checking for ‘ogmmerge’ (from ogmtools)…. OK
-> Checking for ‘MP4Box’ (from gpac)………. OK
-> Checking for ‘tsMuxeR’………………… FAILED! [no support for the TS container]

If you have installed a required program but the script
can’t find it, run ‘h264enc -r’ to reset the config file.

Don’t worry about the missing aac etc, you don’t need that.  In fact you’re all done!  All that remains is to run the script.

Before we run the script I need to point out some more things.  I’m not going to step by step you through the script, there are just too many options.  However there are some things that I can give you pointers on.

1. Always know if your source file is interlaced or not.  If you don’t know how to tell, just play your DVD in a computer (must be a computer) and you will see if there are jagged lines in the image or not.  If you can’t see any or aren’t sure, you will have progressive.
2. If you do have interlaced, you need to say that you DON”T want to preserve interlacing as nothing can play it otherwise.  Use the Yadif and MCDEINT deinterlacer for best quality.
3. Always use 2 pass, don’t bother with 1 pass or 3 pass
4. Always always choose to crop, it’ll save encoding time and it’ll look cleaner when you play it later
5. Always export chapters (especially with a music DVD as you will be able to skip songs)
6. If you have a slower processor, you can use vhq instead of ehq, you probably won’t notice the difference.
7. If you change the name of the output file, you must put .avi on the end
8. When you get to the audio section choose COPY.  Don’t bother with the others, they’re a waste of time unless you’re encoding for a PSP or something.

To execute the script to start your encode:

$ h264enc -2p -p ehq

Have a play, and feel free to post comments / questions.  Did I mention that these can be hardware accelerated by NVIDIA GPU’s using CUDA / VDPAU?  My CPU only uses about 1% playing 24GB 1080p files on an 8600GT card.   It’s sweet!

How to install SVN installer on XBMC live to enable automatic skin and plugin upgrades/installs

For ages I’ve wanted to know how to put the plugins back into xbmc.  When you do a fixed disk install from the XBMC live iso, they’re just not included.  Why?  It’s probably that the XBMC team don’t consider the live disc to be important, yet it is the best out of the box media centre around simply because it’s light, has no extra applications you don’t need, uses it’s own window manager, free and works out of the box!

So here’s how I did it.

ssh into your xbmc media centre

$ ssh <youripaddress>

Become root

su <password>

ensure unzip is installed

# apt-get install unzip

Become normal user

# exit

Enter plugins directory

cd /home/xbmc/.xbmc/plugins/programs

Download installer

$ wget http://xbmc-addons.googlecode.com/svn/packages/plugins/programs/SVN_Repo_Installer.zip

unzip SVN Installer

$ unzip SVN_Repo_installer.zip

Delete the original zip file

$ rm SVN_Repo_installer.zip

Configure XBMC

Go to settings, skin settings, (left hand menu), home window and turn on the show programs option in the main menu.

Go to main menu and choose Programs

There will be program plugins and under that your new installer.

You’re done!  Using the installer is fairly self explanatory, check out the skins, you’ll be really impressed.

How to upgrade XBMC Live to latest stable and enable smoothvideo playback

So you’ve no doubt ended up here because you’re absolutely sick of trying to eliminate video jutter when watching your much loved content.  While this is most obvious in panning scenes, it’s also obvious in many other motion scenes.  Caused by a fairly complicated case of mismatching refresh rates between your video card and screen along with the frame drops caused by the average system trying to compensate for it, this is really quite a pain.  In absolutely typical fashion, it’s the XBMC folk that have been first to fix this.  No idea why others are so much less attentive to the real issues!

I posted that this was available a while back, but only got round to installing and testing it this morning.  Let me tell you, I’m impressed!  All the content that I tried played remarkably smooth, like I’ve not seen in an extremely long time.  So if you want nice panning scenes that are smooth as butter and in the process eliminate video jutter forever, read on.

**Update** At the moment (26 November 09) you’d probably be better off going and downloading the latest beta of XBMC than following this guide.  It will have all the features mentioned here, but further along the development cycle.  In fact for the moment, this guide may not even work.  Also the latest beta now has a new default look which is pretty awesome.  For more information on that, take a look here and for the latest live beta download, have a look here.

Install XBMC Live 9.04.1

** If you’re going to completely wipe and reinstall an existing installation, don’t forget to export your video library and re-import it later, might save you quite a bit of bandwidth and time!

Install XBMC Live in hard disk mode (not removable disk mode
Choose your password and don’t forget it

Login and begin preparation

Once booted, press CTRL-ALT-F2 to get a console screen (Alternatively you could ssh into the box via linux or via PuTTy on Windows so you can just copy and paste out of this guide)
type $  sudo passwd root to set the root password
type $ su and your new root password

Add upgrade repositories to configuration file

Add the SVN repository (or the stable ones if you wish) from wattazoum at http://www.xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?t=33327
Note for svn on XBMC Live 9.04.1 you will use Ubuntu Jaunty packages.

as root:
(You have to use pico in Ubuntu (what XBMC live is based on) because they’ve  screwed up their implementation of vi so bad you’ll tear your hair out trying to use it).
# pico /etc/apt/sources.list.d/xbmc.org.list
(You will probably have a few lines in there already with a # in front of them).  Two of them are the same as you want to add, but you may as well just copy and paste the below over the top of the whole lot:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-svn/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/team-xbmc-svn/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/thefirstm/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/thefirstm/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/xbmc-addons/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/xbmc-addons/ppa/ubuntu jaunty main

(The last two items allow you to download all the additional content such as skins, scripts and plugins).  The 4th and 5th items are to get the NVIDIA driver with the latest version of libvdpau.

Press Ctrl X, press Y, then press Enter to save your changes.

Add repository GPA keys

Import the GPA keys (don’t copy the # when you’re pasting into your terminal window!)

*Update* – No matter what I do, wordpress converts two – - into one – so when you copy the below three lines make sure there is two dashes before recv-keys and keyserver not one

# apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 64234534
# apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 318C7509
# apt-key adv –recv-keys –keyserver keyserver.ubuntu.com 40618B66

Download list of latest repository updates
# apt-get update

Upgrade and install to the latest repository updates
#apt-get upgrade

Upgrade XBMC Live 9.04.1 to latest stable (Currently 9.04.2)

**Important Update** Currently as at 2 November 2009 there are some huge issues with the SVN version of XBMC for 1080p content and it seems VDPAU.  If you want to know when they’re fixed, follow the thread here: http://xbmc.org/forum/showthread.php?p=428503&posted=1#post428503

So until that is fixed I don’t recommend doing apt-get install xbmc as per the instructions below.  However we can still upgrade to a specific version.  To do this read on.

Create a directory somewhere on your xbmc live system

$ mkdir mytempdir

Get a specific SVN version (copy the entire line below and press enter)

$ wget https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn…epid2_i386.deb https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn…epid2_i386.deb https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn…epid2_i386.deb https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn…epid2_i386.deb https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn…epid2_i386.deb https://launchpad.net/~team-xbmc-svn…epid2_i386.deb

Install any dependencies eg

# apt-get install libvorbisenc2.

Then in that same directory enter

# dpkg -i xbmc*.deb (as root)

This should get you a recent version that actually works until it’s fixed.  Or if it’s broken any time in the future you can use this method.  You may have to do this from a clean install for it to work.

**End of update**

# apt-get install xbmc (you will get an error about X11 and two more, just ignore them, they’re OK)
# reboot
You’re ready to go!

How to set the smoothvideo options in XBMC and eliminate video Jutter forever!

• Go to Settings Menu and scroll down to Player Menu.  Change Render Method to VDPAU if you have a supported NVIDIA card (trust me this is worth it, 24GB 1080p video uses only 5% CPU on a 8600GT!)  Yes you read right, that’s an 8 in 8600.
• You may as well set High quality software upscaling to Enabled for SD content, but this is optional
• Click the Radio Button next to Sync playback to display.
• Go to Settings, Settings, Screen and set the vertical blank sync to Always Enabled

There are three options for syncing the playback.  I suggest you find a scene you know causes jitter and try each one.  You’ll be impressed with all of them, but some are more perfect than others.  Personally, I’ve found the Video Clock (Resample Audio) with resample quality set to high to give the best results.  To check what it’s doing with a particular setup, press the letter ‘o’ on the keyboard during playback.  You’ll see information regarding skipped frames, speedups etc.  For the official blurb see below:

The official Blurb:

How does it work?
Usually video is referenced to the system clock, but with a little magic a clock can be made with information from the videocard, this makes sure every frame is presented right after a vblank. Also because the clock can now be controlled, the speed can be changed a little so the fps of the video playing matches the refreshrate.

What about audio?
Audio has to stay in sync, this can either be done by resampling, skipping/duplicating packets, or adjusting the clock if it gets out of sync too far.

Resampling has the advantage that the speed of the video can be changed considerably, so 24 fps can be sped up to 25 fps to play at PAL speed.
The disadvantage of resampling is that it doesn’t work with passthrough, and there is a slight loss of audio quality.

Skipping/duplicating audiopackets has no loss of audio quality, but the speed of the video can only be changed a little to avoid doing a skip/duplication too often, most of the time it’s inaudible, but it can produce a very audible click.

Adjusting the clock has the best audioquality, but some extra video jitter can occur, also the speed of the video can’t change much, as the audio will sync the clock more often the more the speed of the video is changed.

Maintenance

To check for future updates just repeat the last three steps, ie, apt-get update, apt-get upgrade and if there was anything there reboot to be safe

Nice side effects of following this guide

• You will now have little icons at the bottom of the library view showing you what kind of content each file is (ie 1080p, SD, h264, DTS etc etc).  Really nice so you know what is high def and what is not.
• Your library will work better and detect more content correctly
• Your menus will activate more quickly and seem more responsive
• You have an option in Settings/General to extract the metadata information from files
• You have a new option under Settings/Settings/Screensave to enable and set powersaving to a timeframe
• You have some nice new options under Settings/Skin Settings (Present in left hand menu bar)

Bugs and annoyances

The only bug I’ve found so far is one that causes any  content with DTS audio tracks to not play the audio when downsampling to analog.  This was working before upgrading XBMC so I’m sure that it can be made to work again.  This may not affect those with HDMI digital out, but I don’t yet use that.

Screenshots of some of the new settings you get

Thanks for reading, hope it helped someone somewhere!

There’s a thread here if you’re interested in more information or have a problem.

Sabayon 5 / KDE 4.3 – First Looks

I’ve recently had the pleasure of becoming a Sabayon Tester and as such have access to the branch 5 code of Sabayon – (KDE).  With the inclusion of KDE 4.3 I already knew there would be some GUI goodness in this release.  Don’t forget to check out the screenshots below.

KDE

It’s pleasing to note that after a bumpy start with the KDE 4 branch, the KDE team really are living up to their previous reputation of bringing out quality releases packed full of stable features, now with an element of beauty.  I’ve been fairly pro Windows 7 lately, but honestly this KDE 4 branch is really becoming something special on the linux desktop.  You’ve probably read elsewhere that in in this release of KDE, over 10,000 bugs have be squashed, 63,000 changes have been made for improvement and over 2,000 new features added.  That’s no small feat and you can bet the KDE team will just keep on doing just that, just as they always have.  Regardless of the conjecture that was floating around regarding KDE in the beginning, to get to a desktop that is as polished as it is now, in the timeframe given with that few part time developers is astonishing.  I look forward to what KDE 4.4 and 4.5 will bring that’s for sure.

In the new features I’ve noticed but slipped under the radar department, the desktop wallpaper now has 4 additional options over the normal colour, image, and slideshow – that is, Virus, Mandelbrot, Weather and Pattern.  Add to that a stunning array of new included wallpapers with the 3d desktop effects working out of the box and we’re really getting some eye candy.  Although I didn’t get the weather background to work the desktop slideshow has added a nice fade effect when swapping images which was a welcomed addition as it really does look much more polished.

Polished seemingly being the name of the game with this release, a new theme is included as part of KDE 4.3 called Air.  It feels a lot lighter than the former (but still included) Oxygen theme, I presume this will help those of you with older graphics cards but still wanting to use the desktop effects.  Another nice bit of polish added is now hovering over folder images in dolphin shows a preview of the images in the folder (see screenshot).

In the security department, there’s a new feature whereby any files that are newly placed on your desktop get an ! icon appended to them, and if you double click them a plasma workstation widget questions if you trust the program or not.

Sabayon

The initial stages of Sabayon 5 are where you would expect.  A few random things happening with the packages (mostly around the kernel and X window system) but nothing unusual for alpha software.  Over 1,000 package updates and counting.  Current versions of software incldue KDE 4.3, Amarok 2.1.1, Evolution 2.26.3, k3b 1.66.0, Gimp 2.6.6, digikam 0.10.0, nvidia-drivers 185.18.31, ati-drivers-9.7, xbmc 9.04. smplayer 6.8 and vdpau works out of the box.

The artwork is coming along nicely, yet not complete as a few discuss where this should be heading.  Recent talks suggest the artwork may be converted to jpeg to speed uploading and to save on diskspace.

The Sabayon look and feel is slowly being added to the KDE experience.

The new entropy front end looks similar yet a lot different than the old spritz one did.  Much simpler and more features.

Evolution’s update included the groupwise cache fix that everyone’s been waiting for, now deleted files ARE actually deleted

So looking pretty good so far, plenty of polish in KDE but no doubt there’s a fair amount of work still to do by everyone concerned.  If the beginnings are anything to go by, we’re in for a hot release.

How to install Java into Fedora 11

Yes, so facebook photo upload doesn’t work, and you’ve just got to get that picture of your grandma’s new poodle up for the world to see.  Here’s how to do it, real simple like.

Open a console window and become root, ie type su then Enter

Type yum install java-*-openjdk java-*-openjdk-plugin

Let the goodness install, restart your browser and you’re away.  Simple eh?

If it doesn’t work, go and take a look at this page, you might just need Sun’s java rather than the new open source one.