Sony LocationFree is a network media streamer that lets you watch your favorite TV shows from your cable box to anywhere in the world as long as you have internet connection. With the portability of Netbooks combined with the LocationFree player, it’s entertainment anywhere, and yes you can also watch your TV through the PSP (Playstation Portable).
Too bad that as of now there is no news from Sony about future plans for the LocationFree, it’s a very brilliant concept and is almost idiot proof to configure. It runs on Windows, Mac, and PSP. If only they could make it run natively in Linux, then I would make my way to recommend the product to anyone who uses Linux.
But since computers right now are fast and RAM is cheap, I was able to make it run smoothly in my Ubuntu 64 bit machine using VirtualBox.
Windows Vista is a resource hog, yes it consumes a lot of memory to run and occupies a lot of disk space to install. By default Vista allocates 15% of your total disk space for System Restore. Sounds like very small, but if you have let us say 1TB of disk space, that is a total of additional 150GB that the system uses!
To reclaim this wasted disk space, we need to get our hands a little dirty and will use the command prompt.
> Click on the Windows Start Button
> Click on All programs then Accessories
> On the Accessories menu Right Click on the Command Prompt option
> From the drop Down menu that appears, choose Run as Administrator
> When the Command Prompt window opens type: “vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=X: /For=X: /Maxsize=XX.XGB” – without the quotes and Press Enter
NOTE: X: = Drive Letter of Target Drive, e.g.; C:
NOTE: XX.X = the maximum size in GB’s or MB’s
> If all is done correctly you should see a message saying “Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association”
This is how it should look for drive C:, remember there are Spaces between each command group:
“vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB”
> You can restart your computer and rest assured that Vista will only use the disk space that you have allocated for System Restore.
Today, I will discuss and teach you on how to join files in ubuntu. To do that, we are going to use both commands, Concatenate and Mencoder in the terminal. Don’t worry, I will guide you and It’s not that hard to learn. You don’t need to memorize all these commands just some few basic key elements and you’re all set to start your everyday life in Ubuntu. I’m still a novice in Linux and quite a beginner using the terminal, but as you practice you learn more things about this interesting Operating System.
Just like in Windows Command Prompt you’ll see the familiar symbol C://> but in linux you’ll see this $ prompt instead. More look like a dollar string sign. To start the terminal; Goto – Applications/Accessories/Terminal and it will open into something like this.username@computer-name:~$ — normally, this is your home folder.For today’s session, I will use this symbol “$” prompt in all of my example. Now, let’s begin….type the following at the terminal and be sure you are connected online.
$ sudo apt-get install mencoder
— This will give you a temporary admin rights to install software packages into your Ubuntu box. It will prompt you to enter your password.
— It will give you an output like this, but yours might display different.
Reading package lists… Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information… Done
The following extra packages will be installed:
libtwolame0
Suggested packages:
libdvdcss mplayer-doc w32codecs
The following NEW packages will be installed:
libtwolame0 mencoder
0 upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 3748kB of archives.
After this operation, 8745kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?
— then press “Y” and ENTER to continue…. it will download the package from it’s repositories….
Concatenate – Let’s you join/combine two or more files in one. You can even use this command with your documents. The command syntax for concatenate is “cat” then your file (infile1.avi) then followed by the file (infile2.avi) you want to join and “>” the output you want to save as your new joined files.
Now, we are going to use the Mencoder, but before we do that. We just need to familiarize with the basic commands first.
mencoder – (MPlayer’s Movie Encoder) is a simple movie encoder, designed to encode MPlayer-playable movies. It encodes to MPEG-4 (DivX/Xvid), one of the libavcodec codecs and PCM/MP3/VBRMP3 audio in 1, 2 or 3 passes. Furthermore it has stream copying abilities, a powerful filter system (crop, expand, flip, postprocess, rotate, scale, noise, RGB/YUV conversion) and more.
-o (Output File) more likely the save as new-filename
-ovc (Output Video Codec) Encode with the given video codec
-oac (Output Audio Codec) Encode with the given audio codec
Example:
-ovc (codec name) your encoding choice
-ovc copy
no encoding, just streamcopy
-ovc lavc
Encode with a libavcodec codec.
-oac (codec name) your encoding choice
-oac copy
no encoding, just streamcopy
-oac mp3lame
Encode to MP3 (using LAME).
NOTE: to get a list of available video and audio codecs.
type the following at the terminal:
$ mencoder -ovc help
-forceidx – Force index rebuilding. Useful for files with broken index (A/V desync, etc). This will enable seeking in files where seeking was not possible. You can fix the index permanently with MEncoder.
