Raspberry Pi: Getting Started with OSMC

After getting the Raspberry Pi 2 (RPI), NOOB SDcard from Element14 started up without a network cable. Only 3 option for the OS is shown as it boot from the NOOB SDcard (yes, it has to be plugged in)

Plugged in the networking cable and restarted RPI. This time, it loaded the remaider of the OS like OSMC and OpenElect.

OSMC (Open source Media Center), is a Debian based Linux operating system. Fomerly known as Raspbmc.  OSMC features an application store for TV use. Kodi is an application included for handling multimedia locally or online on OSMC.

Kodi or formerly known as XBMC, is an open source software (GPL) for handling of videos, music and pictures. Live TV can be viewed via Kodi and its add-ons expand its use. The support of UPnP allows streaming of Kodi to any other Kodi instances. Its like multi screen mirror display.

Here are steps to start off with the OSMC operating system.

Step 1: Boot to OSMC

Boot up the RPI. It goes into the RPI boot screen, press the "SHIFT" key to bring up the editing screen. Click on OSMC for PI2 and press "Enter" and an "x" will appear for the OSMC.

Press "Esc" and it should start downloading OSMC and install. Once done, it reboots to OSMC.

Troubleshooting
After OSMC splash screen appeared, the Samsung TV displayed
"Mode not supported".

What does this mean? OSMC got the wrong resolution or the TV did not support multiple modes automatically.

Troubleshooting Step 1: 

In the same network, open the SSH client (Putty) and connect to the RPI via IP address.
username: osmc
password: osmc

At the command line type:

Identify which mode is being used that is causing the problem.
tvservice -s

Identify which modes are available in OSMC monitor service
tvservice -m DMT

Output that I got:

osmc@osmc:~$ tvservice -s
state 0x12001a [HDMI DMT (39) RGB full 16:9], 1360x768 @ 60.00Hz, progressive
osmc@osmc:~$ tvservice -m DMT
Group DMT has 4 modes:
           mode 4: 640x480 @ 60Hz 4:3, clock:25MHz progressive
           mode 9: 800x600 @ 60Hz 4:3, clock:40MHz progressive
           mode 16: 1024x768 @ 60Hz 4:3, clock:65MHz progressive
  (prefer) mode 39: 1360x768 @ 60Hz 16:9, clock:85MHz progressive

Troubleshooting Step 2:  

Reboot RPI, and as it loads press "SHIFT" until the edit boot screen appears. Click on OSMC and choose "Edit config".

Changed the value to match below. E.g. to use alternative mode, change hdmi_mode from 16 to 4.

Click"OK", and press "Esc". Reboot as normal.

Keep changing the value of the mode until it works and display Kodi with default OSMC skin/template.

Resize video with Avidemux

Avidemux, a video editing tool is an open source software or GPL v2 licensed, and can be downloaded from http://www.avidemux.org for Linux, Mac OS and MS Windows. Currently I am using version is 2.6.8 on MS Windows 8.






Found a good reference Compressing with Avidemux by Bo be.


Need to try this out soon to prepare videos to be shared online (outside of youtube).

Points to note
General file size = bitrate * running time

Convert AVHCD to AVI and burn as VCD

Getting AVHCD from a video camera into a PC a making it into a VCD. This is a weekend project.
Next, AVIs are great for the PC, however, to distribute to people who do not use PCs to watch movies or just to have a larger screen, it is better to convert the AVI into a VCD.

Step 1: Copy the files from the AVHCD camera
CAMERA: /media/disk-1/PRIVATE/AVCHD/BDMV/STREAM
PC: ~/Documents

Step 2: Convert to AVI.
Future action can consider direct preparation for MPG. Here it is in AVI because there was a need for me to prepare in various format apart from MPG or VCD.

Start KDENLive
- File -> Save As ->
- Project -> Add clip
- In the Project Tree window, drag the clips into the timeslots (bottow window)
- Click Render button ->AVI DV

Step 3: Get the converter programme called vcdimager
$ sudo apt-get install vcdimager

Step 4: Convert to mpg and the cue / bin
ffmpeg -i inputfile.avi -target pal-vcd outfilename.mpg
# create the cue and bin files. The label did not allow for spaces.
vcdimager -t vcd2 -l"Martha-Swimming-May-2010" -c vcd2.cue -b vcd2.bin outfilename.mpg

Step 5: Using K3B, choose project for Burn Image
Insert a blank CDROM
Image to burn ->Select the .cue file.
Image type ->Cue/bin

Click "Start"


===========
Using:
K3B version 1.68.0
KDE 4.3.2
CDRDAO 1.2.2
VCDimager 0.7.23
Kubuntu 9.10
===========

Impressive Impress and Converting Slides to AVI

Just completed an Impress slide and converted into AVI and MPEG. Final presentation was in AVI, the MPEG can be used for the web as its only half the AVI size.


Tools useds;

1. Slides - OpenOffice.org 3.1 Impress
2. Recording slides - recordmydesktop
   
3. Video editing - Avidemux
4. Graphics - GIMP
5. Audio - Audacity
6. OGV to AVI converter - mencoder
7. AVI to MPEG converter - Download helper (extension for firefox) + mencoder
8. Operating System - Ubuntu & Kubuntu (2 PCs)

Side note:
The Impress extensions installed to improve the presentation was "Presentation Minimiser" to reduce the slide file size and "openoffice.org-ogltrans" to add slide transitions. Here are examples of how the additional slide transitions looked like.

[Jaunty] Managing sound device

The recent Kubuntu 9.04 Linux uses the Pulseaudio to manage its sounds device selection. To enable all sound devices to use the Pulseaudio sound server, open a terminal and type

asoundconf set-pulseaudio

Any application that need to access the audio, including the ALSA will be sent to the Pulseaudio server. The settings can be configured at

/usr/share/alsa/pulse-alsa.conf

Open or play a movie or sound and test if it works. If this does not work, reset back to use the default ALSA system with the command;

asoundconf reset-default-card

I am still trying to figure out the significant benefit of using Pulseaudio.

[Jaunty]Adding the VLC video player

Kubuntu Linux 9.04 supports the VLC video player very well. In a fresh install, open the terminal and type

$ sudo apt-get install vlc videolan-doc mozilla-plugin-vlc vlc-plugin-sdl libvcdinfo0

Playing movies on CentOS 5

One of the attractions in a presentation is having interesting movies being played. On CentOS 5.2, you can install VLC from the Dag repository.

Step 1: Add the Dag repository.
$ vi /etc/yum.repos.d/dag.repo

[dag]
name=Dag RPM Repository for Red Hat Enterprise Linux
baseurl=http://apt.sw.be/redhat/el$releasever/en/$basearch/dag
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=http://dag.wieers.com/packages/RPM-GPG-KEY.dag.txt
enabled=1

Step 2: Install VideoLan
$ yum install vlc

Installing for dependencies:
SDL_image i386 1.2.5-1.el5.rf dag 84 k
a52dec i386 0.7.4-8.el5.rf dag 78 k
aalib i386 1.4.0-5.el5.rf dag 167 k
arts i386 8:1.5.4-1 base 1.1 M
cppunit i386 1.12.0-3.el5.rf dag 811 k
dirac i386 1.0.2-1.el5.rf dag 2.9 M
faac i386 1.26-1.el5.rf dag 151 k
faad2 i386 2.6.1-1.el5.rf dag 329 k
ffmpeg i386 0.4.9-0.9.20070530.el5.rf dag 5.3 M
ffmpeg-libpostproc i386 0.4.9-0.9.20070530.el5.rf dag 42 k
freeglut i386 2.4.0-7.1.el5 base 142 k
fribidi i386 0.10.7-5.1 base 52 k
giflib i386 4.1.3-7.1.el5.1 base 39 k
gsm i386 1.0.12-1.el5.rf dag 63 k
imlib2 i386 1.4.0-1.el5.rf dag 947 k
lame i386 3.98.2-1.el5.rf dag 569 k
libXvMC i386 1.0.2-2.1 base 18 k
libcaca i386 0.99-0.1.beta11.el5.rf dag 236 k
libcddb i386 1.3.0-1.el5.rf dag 112 k
libcdio i386 0.77-1.el5.rf dag 514 k
libdca i386 0.0.5-1.el5.rf dag 136 k
libdvbpsi i386 0.1.5-2.el5.rf dag 66 k
libdvdcss i386 1.2.10-1.el5.rf dag 64 k
libdvdnav i386 0.1.10-3.el5.rf dag 212 k
libdvdread i386 0.9.7-1.el5.rf dag 126 k
libebml i386 0.7.8-1.el5.rf dag 297 k
libid3tag i386 0.15.1b-3.el5.rf dag 75 k
libmad i386 0.15.1b-4.el5.rf dag 82 k
libmatroska i386 0.8.1-1.el5.rf dag 701 k
libmodplug i386 0.7-1.2.el5.rf dag 299 k
libmpcdec i386 1.2.6-1.el5.rf dag 52 k
libshout i386 2.2.2-1.el5.rf dag 115 k
libsndfile i386 1.0.17-1.el5.rf dag 476 k
libupnp i386 1.6.6-1.el5.rf dag 297 k
lirc i386 0.6.6-4.el5.rf dag 241 k
mpeg2dec i386 0.4.1-2.el5.rf dag 190 k
opencv i386 1.0.0-1.el5.rf dag 4.3 M
qt4 i386 4.2.1-1 base 7.2 M
svgalib i386 1.9.25-1.el5.rf dag 809 k
taglib i386 1.5-1.el5.rf dag 978 k
twolame i386 0.3.12-1.el5.rf dag 131 k
x264 i386 0.0.0-0.4.20070529.el5.rf dag 789 k
xosd i386 2.2.14-1.el5.rf dag 60 k
xvidcore i386 1.1.3-1.el5.rf dag 531 k
zvbi i386 0.2.33-1.el5.rf dag 925 k

Step 3: Start VLC
In the Desktop Panel, choose the menu Applications ->Sound and Video ->VLC Media Player



Wow ! a total of 46 packages needed to be installed on my fresh CentOS 5.2 installation. Only problem was the package zvbi that failed to be downloaded. So, I manually installed that and restarted the vlc installation.

If this don't work, then the VLC can be manually downloaded and installed from http://download.videolan.org/pub/videolan/vlc

Caveat, you need to install all dependencies manually.

How to convert AVI to VCD

The VCD format allows most video players to playback movies. My portable camera can only save files to AVI format. Using the ffmpeg and K3B, the AVI can be burned to a VCD format. I am doing this on Ubuntu 7.10 and a CDROM burner that comes with the Lenovo R60.

This how to converted a 32Mb AVI to 286Mb VCD under 5 mins.

Step 1. Translate to MPG, which is a format K3B recognises. I am using the PAL TV system, if it is NTCS, replave with the value ntsc-vcd.

ffmpeg -i jacq_grad20080824.03.avi -target pal-vcd /tmp/jacq20080824.mpg

This gave me resolution of 352x228 and the following output:
FFmpeg version SVN-rUNKNOWN, Copyright (c) 2000-2007 Fabrice Bellard, et al.
configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-pp --enable-swscaler --enable-pthreads --enable-libvorbis --enable-libtheora --enable-libogg --enable-libgsm --enable-dc1394 --disable-debug --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libfaadbin --enable-libfaad --enable-libfaac --enable-xvid --enable-x264 --enable-liba52 --enable-amr_nb --enable-amr_wb --enable-shared --prefix=/usr
libavutil version: 1d.49.3.0
libavcodec version: 1d.51.38.0
libavformat version: 1d.51.10.0
built on Aug 10 2008 11:11:16, gcc: 4.1.3 20070929 (prerelease) (Ubuntu 4.1.2-16ubuntu2)
Input #0, avi, from 'jacq_grad20080824.03.avi':
Duration: 00:03:48.1, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 10031 kb/s
Stream #0.0: Video: mjpeg, yuvj422p, 640x480, 20.00 fps(r)
Stream #0.1: Audio: pcm_u8, 11024 Hz, mono, 88 kb/s
PIX_FMT_YUV420P will be used as an intermediate format for rescaling
Output #0, vcd, to '/tmp/jacq20080824.mpg':
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg1video, yuv420p, 352x288, q=2-31, 1150 kb/s, 25.00 fps(c)
Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 44100 Hz, stereo, 224 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.0 -> #0.0
Stream #0.1 -> #0.1
--- end of output---

Step 2. Use K3B 1.0.4 to burn to the VCD format.

In K3B choose File ->New Project ->New Video CD Project.

Drag the MPG file to the VideoCD0, window.
Click on the Burn button.
Select the Volume Descriptor tab, edit the Volume name.
Click Start button.