xmms error: alsa_setup_mixer(): Failed to find mixer element: PCM

So here's a way to not spend an hour troubleshooting a problem:
LOOK AT THE F'ING PREFERENCES MENU!!

Sorry to be yelling, but man, do I hate my own stupidity. I had installed the xmms-wma plugin and wanted to test the playability of WMA files in Linux. Since this is my new Dell server with a new Creative Labs AudigyLS card and a fresh build of FC6, x86-64, I hadn't used the xmms install on the system yet. So when I started xmms, I noticed that I got the following error:
alsa_setup_mixer(): Failed to find mixer element: PCM

Oooh. That's not nice. So, it my typical fashion, I googled the error:

And found that a lot of people had a similar issue. And the more I looked at the entries, the more the people seemed to be having pretty cryptic difficulties. Oh, this might be a bad one. I assumed the worst.

So back and forth I went. Looking at the google results, trying to find the correct ALSA device name and hand entering it into xmms's config file. I got confused at the lsmod and modprobe.conf output and entered the wrong sound device name. I repeated this process multiple times.

Finally, after the end of an hour, I remembered that there was a Preferences menu within xmms! So I started up xmms and saw the original error, but xmms still allowed me to go into the menus. In Preferences, I found the following "Audio I/O Plugins" menu:


Under the "Audio I/O Plugins" menu, I found a Configure button specifically related to the ALSA sound output on my box. I clicked it:


Therein, I saw that the "Mixer Device" was indeed set to PCM. Well, look at that neat little arrow thingy next to PCM. Why, it's a pull-down menu showing me more choices! And look at that! There is a choice for the Audigy's "Analog Front" slider! Gee! Can I really select that? Why, of course! >:[

You'd never know that I've spent the last twenty years working with computers. And the final kick in the nuts was that even though I have the xmms-wma plugin installed, the WMAs didn't even play after I got xmms working properly! I received this error:
[root@localhost dell]# xmms ../beck1.wma
*** stack smashing detected ***: /usr/libexec/xmms terminated
Aborted

I'm too tired to resolve this issue tonight. But in sum, outside of my own stupidity..if you have a Creative Labs Audigy installed in your Fedora box and see the above error, do yourself a favor and use the Preferences->Audio I/O Plugins->Configure->Mixer Device to change PCM to Analog Front.

Good Night!
the stupid mule

ps - this is what I get for staying up until 3:30am the previous evening

first impressions: Cinelerra on dual, quad core Dell SC1430

I'm on my dual, new quad-core, 64-bit FC6 box (woah!) and I'm happy to say that I've got Cinelerra running, with some minor speed bumps along the way (read /2007/09/building-cinelerra-on-fc6-64-bit.html and
http://www.techanswerguy.com/2007/09/setting-up-dell-sc1430.html

Update 2008/02/03
Here are some related articles:
/2007/10/multithreading-in-ffmpeg-and-mpstat.html
/2007/10/rendering-on-dual-quad-core.html
*** end update ***

Eight Core Power!
I see from the output of /proc/cpuinfo, that I've got eight processors (first and last listed below):

[root@localhost ~]# cat /proc/cpuinfo
processor : 0
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5310 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 1595.929
cache size : 4096 KB
physical id : 0
siblings : 4
core id : 0
cpu cores : 4
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3195.17
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:
...
processor : 7
vendor_id : GenuineIntel
cpu family : 6
model : 15
model name : Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5310 @ 1.60GHz
stepping : 7
cpu MHz : 1595.929
cache size : 4096 KB
physical id : 1
siblings : 4
core id : 3
cpu cores : 4
fpu : yes
fpu_exception : yes
cpuid level : 10
wp : yes
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm syscall nx lm constant_tsc pni monitor ds_cpl vmx tm2 cx16 xtpr lahf_lm
bogomips : 3191.96
clflush size : 64
cache_alignment : 64
address sizes : 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
power management:


HDV Render Test: Project with no effect
Now that I've got her up, I'm testing a render of 40 minutes of MPEG-TS HDV content. While rendering, it seems that my CPUs are sloughin about..only about 30% busy. What is going on here? Shouldn't all the CPUs be working at 100%?


Here is the output of iostat, showing 70% idle CPUs:
Time: 12:14:23 AM
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
27.75 0.00 0.60 1.00 0.00 70.65

Time: 12:14:28 AM
avg-cpu: %user %nice %system %iowait %steal %idle
27.35 0.00 0.37 0.95 0.00 71.33

Top seems a little funny too, whereby the third line down shows 27.4%, near what iostat reports, but then the listed CPU utilization for Cinelerra is about 220 in the process list below:

top - 00:15:42 up 46 min, 4 users, load average: 2.83, 2.35, 1.82
Tasks: 186 total, 2 running, 184 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 27.4%us, 0.4%sy, 0.0%ni, 70.9%id, 1.2%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 2055048k total, 2038468k used, 16580k free, 736k buffers
Swap: 4562440k total, 632k used, 4561808k free, 514344k cached

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
5640 root 17 0 3170m 1.0g 45m S 220 53.2 41:39.23 cinelerra
3540 root 15 0 183m 89m 34m S 1 4.4 6:43.95 Xorg

I will investigate that inconsistency later.

The render finished in about 50 minutes, so that's a little bit longer than Heroine Warrior's assertion that encoding HD content with a 64-bit system should be in realtime:
http://www.heroinewarrior.com/cinelerra7.php3

HDV Render Test 2: Project with Oil Painting effect
So then I ran a Cinelerra project with a more computationally intense render (one with an Oil Painting effect applied to an HDV track), CPU utilization is now up to 80-90% per cpu (attached graphic):


Here's the test video:


Analysis
There are many cores and they are relatively low speed (1.6Ghz). As Cinelerra takes advantage of all the processors, each CPU is working on a task (the render) and those tasks process at the speed of each corresponding CPU. In other words, as fast as each individual processor can handle. So simple tasks, like rendering raw HDV video with no effects, don't take up much individual CPU. However, more computationally intense tasks, like adding the oil painting effect to a video, utilize more of each CPU. Thus, the video rendered with the oil paint effect takes more CPU horsepower than the simple, no effect render.

This server is kind of like having a big dump truck. The thing has a powerful engine and can haul a ton of stuff, but can't go very fast. Unlike a Ferrari that can't handle much luggage, but can go super fast. I think we might see that a box with faster CPUs would get simple renders done quicker than what my Dell can do, but it might choke on renders with lots of complex effects.

Now if I could only harness these CPUs for speed! I'd be interested in getting people's opinions on 64-bit and multicore operation, as this is my first multicore/64 system.

Other Observations on 64-bit Fedora Core 6
1) I see that command-line ffmpeg is not multithreaded for multi processing machines. I will have see if I can use the external ffmpeg compile option in Cinelerra.
2) I can't get an NVidia card to work in this box. Much pain listed here:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=31&threadid=2080542
3) The Adobe Flash plugin only works in 32-bit mode Firefox

more to come,
the crazed mule

building Cinelerra on FC6 64-bit

Update 10/26/2007:
These instructions work well for F7 (Fedora 7), 64-bit, too!

Update 10/29/2008:
These instructions still kick ass..a year later when I blew up my system!

Update 11/20/2008:
I've rebuilt my Fedora 7 system as Fedora 9. The Cinelerra build instructions are different than the Fedora 7 instructions in that they use ATrpms repository. But all-in-all, the install went well!

I just purchased a Dell SC1430 dual Xeon, quad-core server to replace my aging Dell SC400 tower. I will give a full review of that server in a later post. More immediately however, I thought I'd give the 64-bit Fedora Core 6 installation a whirl, as these Xeons support 64-bit. I figured that Cinelerra should fly with 64-bit install! Also, to ease my pain, I figured I'd stay with FC6, as I'm well familiar with this distribution. Eventually, I'll build out a 64-bit Debian Lenny distro to see how that performs (thanks for the suggestion, Graham)!

Here's How Things Went
The Fedora install is the same installer you get with the 32-bit version and went very smoothly.

I then proceeded to install the dependencies for building Cinelerra from source. In a nutshell, the yum installation was very similar to my 32-bit FC6 install which I described here, with some minor differences:
/2007/03/fedora-core-6-cinelerra-dependencies.html

The quick steps are:
1) have the proper yum repositories online (all Fedora, Livna and Dries)
2) make sure you have your GPG-KEYs loaded from Livna and Dries
3) remove the dries repositories (with the --disablerepo=dries switch shown) and install using the script below with only Fedora and Livna online:
4) remove the Livna repositories, enable FreshRPMs and install mjpegtools using the command:
yum --disablerepo=livna install mjpegtools*
5) get Cinelerra source code (refer to previous post on those details)
6) build from source (refer to previous post on those details)
7) install your favorite multimedia applications

The only differences between the 32-bit install and the 64-bit install that I noticed were that I had to specify the install of fftw specifically on 64-bit:
1) fftw (instead of fftw3)
2) fftw-devel

I've amended the script below to reflect those differences. Another interesting note is that with FC6 and above, no SMP-specific kernel is necessary. This is good! Finally, I installed my favorite multimedia apps:
yum install avidemux mencoder mplayer transcode vlc* xmms

However, to avoid this error, you should install xine separately without Livna repos online:
yum --disablerepo=livna install xine

I haven't gotten to really test out Cinelerra's capabilities on 64-bit, but I did render out a 40 minute Cinelerra project with full 720P HDV in a little over an hour. I rendered using QT container, MPEG-4 video compression with a constant bit rate of 10,000,000 and twos complement audio. This *almost* achieves what Heroine Warrior states about being able to achieve real-time rendering with HDV. Obviously, I believe some performance tweaks are in order and will need to work through these issues.

Here is that yum script which should get you going on 64-bit Fedora Core 6:

The Cinelerra FC6 64-bit Source Dependencies Install Script
yum install --disablerepo=dries \
libquicktime \
ffmpeg \
gsm-devel \
xvidcore* \
lame \
lame-devel \
libvorbis* \
libogg* \
libtool* \
a52* \
libtheora* \
libpng* \
libjpeg* \
libtiff* \
esound* \
audiofile* \
libraw1394* \
libavc1394* \
freetype* \
fontconfig* \
nasm \
e2fsprogs* \
faad2-dev* \
OpenEXR* \
fftw \
fftw-devel \
libsndfile* \
libiec61883* \
x264 \
x264-d* \
faac* \
libdv*

Don't forget to chmod a+x the file!

cheers,
the mule

migrated my FC6 system to faster disk

When I was on Fedora Core 4, I had been using a fast, 250GB Western Digital SATA drive as my main root partition. Since I live in both XP and Fedora worlds, I divided up the drive into the following partitions:
/dev/sda1: XP boot (40GB)
/dev/sda2: Fedora Core 4 /boot (128MB)
/dev/sda3: Fedora Core 4 / (root) (120GB)
/dev/sda4: unused
/dev/sda5: swap (6GB)
/dev/sda6: FAT32 (to transfer files in between Linux and XP) (60GB)

This configuration allows me to dual boot XP and FC easily, as well as transfer files in between the two OSs. Speaking of NTFS-ext2/3 transfers, I'm slowing phasing out the FAT32 partition for transfers because I have had success using ntfs-3g (http://www.ntfs-3g.org) to write to and read from my NTFS partitions. NTFS-3g has been very solid for reading and writing from Linux to NTFS.

Earlier this year, I installed Fedora Core 6 as a development/test system on a separate 40GB drive. Doing the install this way instead of an upgrade of FC4 meant that I didn't have to cripple the FC4 system in case anything went wrong with FC6. As it happens, Cinelerra on FC6 happens to be the most stable Cinelerra I've used these past two years, apart from an audio sync issue on rendered videos. I correct the sync problem using the Nudge feature on each audio track, detailed here:
/2007/05/nudge-avidemux2-and-reminder-about.html

Lo these past six months, I have been editing on FC6, albeit on a slower IDE drive, a 7200RPM Barracuda. The 250GB SATA with 16MB memory cache is quite a bit faster. So the goal was to move the boot/root of the FC6 system to the boot/root of the faster SATA drive.

LVM versus ext3
The first issue I encountered was that the default installation of FC6 automatically creates a Volume Group and Logical Volumes instead of plain old ext2/ext3 filesystems. My FC4 system used ext3 for boot/root, so my original plan was to do a simple partimage backup of the two FC6 filesystems. That idea would not work, as FC6 was on LVM and partimage doesn't recognize LVM partitions.

As an experiment (and because I wanted to get up and running quickly), I simplified the plan to install the new drive in the machine, mount the FC4 filesystems on the fast drive, delete the content on them and replace the content with the FC6 system files. I'd have to then tweak fstab and grub.conf appropriately on the updated drive to make the whole thing work.

The Plan
1) install both drives in the same machine with FC6 as the primary system,
2) mount the FC4 partitions of the fast drive in FC6 (/mnt/fc4boot & /mnt/fc4root),
3) remove all the files off of the FC4 boot/root filesystems,
4) copy the files from the FC6 boot/root parts to the FC4 partitions,
5) carefully tweak grub.conf and fstab to reference the new partition scheme
6) hope for the best on reboot

Here is where we had "a few issues" as an old boss of mine would say.

Problems!
I guess it is my cursory knowledge of the boot process that got me into trouble. The first issue after performing these four steps was the following error:
mount: could not find filesystem '/dev/root'
setuproot: moving /dev failed: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /proc: No such file or directory
setuproot: error mounting /sys: No such file or directory
switchroot: mount failed: No such file or directory
Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Ouch! That doesn't look good. Following the advice of this thread:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?t=497332

First, using SysRescCD, I verified my partition labels on the fast drive using e2label:
e2label /dev/hdN
where N is the Fedora partition

I double-checked my grub.conf and fstab:

/boot/grub/grub.conf
Here's the old entry:
title Fedora Core (2.6.19-1.2911.fc6)
root (hd0,0)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 ro root=/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00
initrd /initrd-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.img

Here's the new entry:
title Fedora Core (2.6.19-1.2911.fc6)
root (hd0,1)
kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 ro root=LABEL=/
initrd /initrd-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.img

Note the changes in bold that I needed to enter in order to move the root from the first partition on the older, slow drive to the second partition on the faster drive. Also, LVM goes away to be replaced by the simpler naming scheme of the ext3 formatted partition.

/etc/fstab
Secondly, the fstab changes as well, from:
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol00 / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01 swap swap defaults 0 0

To:
LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 1 1
/dev/sda5 swap swap defaults 0 0

The /boot entry stays the same:
LABEL=/boot /boot ext3 defaults 1 2

The output of e2label showed that my fast drive partition labels matched those in grub.conf and fstab. So no smoking gun there.

The next thing suggested in the thread was to create mkinitrd, the initial ram disk the Linux kernel uses for system files. Oh boy. I've forgotten about this one. I knew I had the correct partition labels, but I needed a little more background on mkinitrd and these articles helped:
http://www.faqs.org/docs/Linux-mini/Loopback-Root-FS.html
http://www.opennet.ru/docs/HOWTO/Kernel-HOWTO-11.html+creating+initrd
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-initrd.html

Redhat/Fedora has a nice utility called mkinitrd that simplifies many of the steps mentioned in the IBM and HOWTO articles above. I regenerated the initial ramdisk image on the new boot partition using the following command:
mkinitrd ./initrd-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.img 2.6.19-1.2911.fc6

OK. There were no errors on creation and the file is there and has data:
-rw------- 1 root root 2398566 Sep 9 11:52 /boot/initrd-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.img

Cool. Now for the moment of truth. The reboot! I powered down and waited for the system to come back up. Thankfully, the kernel got beyond the panic and booted properly! Hooray! However, I did see some errors still:
No volume groups found
Volume group "VolGroup00" not found
Unable to access resume device (/dev/VolGroup00/LogVol01)

But, the system loads fine and Cinelerra and all my apps seem to work. So I will have to research this error further.

Also, I saw when I started Evolution, I got the following error:
Error while storing folder 'Inbox'

Researching this, I saw that there were inconsistencies in the index files that Evolution creates. The workaround is simple: delete any mail folders in ~./evolution/mail/local with an extension of ev.~summary. These are indexing files only and you can safely remove them. Reference:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/27014

For the past couple of days, I have been editing and Cinelerra is performing well. I'm glad I went through this exercise. Though, I really need to learn more about how to backup and restore LVM partitions. I might have saved myself some pain.

cheers!
The Mule

xine: no demuxer plugin available to handle file

I recently installed xine on my Fedora Core 6 virtual machine. Trying to view a file, I get this error:
There is no demuxer plugin available to handle "file xxx"
Usually this means that the file format was not recognized.


After a bit of googling, I found that this error can be caused by a couple things:
1) a corrupted .xine/catalog.cache file
2) a bad xine-libs install

I also learned that you can run "xine-check" to check out your xine installation. Here's the result of my xine-check before fixing things:
[root@localhost ~]# xine-check
Please be patient, this script may take a while to run...
[ good ] you're using Linux, doing specific tests
[ good ] looks like you have a /proc filesystem mounted.
[ good ] You seem to have a reasonable kernel version (2.6.18-1.2798.fc6)
[ good ] intel compatible processor, checking MTRR support
[ good ] you have MTRR support and there are some ranges set.
[ good ] found the player at /usr/bin/xine
[ good ] /usr/bin/xine is in your PATH
[ hint ] No xine-config found. Assuming xine from RPMs
The xine-config script can be used to determine some file locations
used by xine-lib, but you don't have such a script on your system.
However, it looks like you installed xine from the RedHat packages.
So I'll just guess that you are using the standard locations.
If you want me to be sure about those file locations, you can install
the 'xine-lib-devel' package (or 'xine-devel', depend on what packages
you're using, which contains xine-config. However, this package is
not really needed to run xine...
press to continue...

[ good ] plugin directory /usr/lib/xine/plugins exists.
[ good ] found unknown plugin: *.so
[OUCH!!] There are no input plugins.
xine needs at least one input plugin, but none is installed.
You should probably reinstall xine-lib...
press to continue...

[OUCH!!] There are no demux plugins.
xine needs at least one demux plugin, but none is installed.
You should probably reinstall xine-lib...
press to continue...

[OUCH!!] There are no decoder plugins.
xine needs at least one decoder plugin, but none is installed.
You should probably reinstall xine-lib...
press to continue...

[OUCH!!] There are no video_out plugins.
xine needs at least one video_out plugin, but none is installed.
You should probably reinstall xine-lib...
press to continue...

[OUCH!!] There are no audio_out plugins.
xine needs at least one audio_out plugin, but none is installed.
You should probably reinstall xine-lib...
press to continue...

OK! So it looks like I have a few problems. But now, at least, I had two avenues to pursue:
1) delete .xine/catalog.cache
2) reinstall xine and xine-libs

I tried the first option, but to no avail. I got the same error.

Secondly, I reinstalled xine-libs, but still received the same error. Since I've had some yum repository conflicts this weekend, I started thinking that Livna or Dries might be at fault here, as they are my main repositories.

So then, I decided to:
1) remove xine and xine-libs
2) try to install xine without the Livna repos online.

Doing this, I got this error with only the Fedora and Dries repos online:
Error: Missing Dependency: xine-lib = 1.1.4 is needed by package xine-lib-moles

Hmmm. OK, so that didn't work. Let me try the next option:
1) remove xine and xine libs
2) install the Freshrpms repositories
3) rerun the install without Livna, but with Dries and Freshrpms

I installed the Freshrpms repos by using the below URL to start the yum graphical installer widget on the Core 6 desktop:
http://ftp.freshrpms.net/pub/freshrpms/fedora/linux/6/freshrpms-release/freshrpms-release-1.1-1.fc.noarch.rpm

After Freshrpms repos were online, I disabled Livna in my yum install request:
[root@localhost ~]# yum install --disablerepo=livna xine
Loading "installonlyn" plugin
Setting up Install Process
Setting up repositories
freshrpms 100% ========================= 2.1 kB 00:00
Reading repository metadata in from local files
primary.xml.gz 100% ========================= 62 kB 00:00
################################################## 168/168
Parsing package install arguments
...
Dependencies Resolved

=======================================
Package Arch Version Repository Size
=======================================
Installing:
xine i386 0.99.5-1.fc6 freshrpms 2.2 M
Installing for dependencies:
libfame i386 0.9.1-12.fc6.rf dries 227 k
xine-lib-moles i386 1.1.6-1.fc6 freshrpms 1.8 M

Transaction Summary
=======================================
Install 3 Package(s)
Update 0 Package(s)
Remove 0 Package(s)

Total download size: 4.3 M
Is this ok [y/N]: y
Downloading Packages:
(1/3): xine-0.99.5-1.fc6. 100% ========================= 2.2 MB 00:21
(2/3): libfame-0.9.1-12.f 100% ========================= 227 kB 00:01
(3/3): xine-lib-moles-1.1 100% ========================= 1.8 MB 00:17
Running Transaction Test
Finished Transaction Test
Transaction Test Succeeded
Running Transaction
Installing: libfame ######################### [1/3]
Installing: xine-lib-moles ######################### [2/3]
Installing: xine ######################### [3/3]

Installed: xine.i386 0:0.99.5-1.fc6
Dependency Installed: libfame.i386 0:0.9.1-12.fc6.rf xine-lib-moles.i386 0:1.1.6-1.fc6
Complete!

This time, no missing dependency! Looks like Freshrpms had the necessary files! Sweet! Now for the final test, to play a video. Sure enough, my videos played and xine-check found my plugins. Hooray. But yeesh..what a headache!

So, the lesson here is that Fedora dependency resolution can be a tricky thing and that you should keep as few repos in your yum repository list as possible. This will minimize your pain. Though I must admit that, on the whole, the repos are doing a better job than they used to.

Finally, if the options above don't work, try compiling from source:
http://www.xinehq.de/index.php/download

May you all be blessed to work with just one repository. Ha!

Update 2/25/2008
This latest post provides further troubleshooting steps. It lists specific information regarding Xine installs on Fedora 7, x86-64:
/2008/02/xine-install-on-fedora-7-x86-64.html

Fedora Core 6 virtual Cinelerra machine for VMware

I got a wild hair yesterday and decided to create a Fedora Core 6 VMware virtual machine for VMware Player. This virtual machine (vm) has the latest Cinelerra CVS version 1009 compiled and installed on it, of course, along with a bunch of supporting applications:
avidemux2 flash mplayer vlc xine

I'm thinking the main use for this vm is for render farms. So that someone who has access to a large number of PCs can setup VMware Player or Server.

Here are some instructions on how to install VMware Player on Linux:
http://www.techanswerguy.com/2007/06/vmware-player-install-on-linux-fedora.html

By the way, I believe audio only works using VMware Player, rather than VMware Server. Also, if you try this vm for actual editing, you'll probably get a lot of audio drops unless the machine hosting the virtual guest is very, very powerful (greater than 3.0Ghz single core).

In case you try this vm and get no audio, here's a solution:
http://www.techanswerguy.com/2007/06/vmware-player-no-sound-bad-directsound.html

Also, I've left the default display at 1024x768.

The virtual machine is gzipped and is about a gigabyte in size (1,151,131,294 bytes). Have fun downloading it!
http://www.stormpigs.com/vm/fc6cinelerra.tar.gz

Root password is crazedmule
The nonroot user is "cinelerra" with the password cinelerra

Update 2009/04/03
Update:
I've superceded this VM with a 64-bit version. This vm uses Fedora 10, x86-64 and will only play on Intel machines that support 64-bit OSs:
http://www.stormpigs.com/fedora10Vm.html
*** end update *** ~3GB

Hopefully, someone will find this useful. Please drop me a line..love to hear from you.
The Mule!

Cinelerra on FC6 working well and more YouTube-ness

I spent all day yesterday editing and rendering video using the Cinelerra install on my Fedora Core 6 box. I am happy to report that after about 10 hours, 15 projects and two or three times as many renders, Cinelerra did not crash once! Now, the types of activities I performed did not vary that much:
- open hour long DVD resolution video
- select five or ten minute long sections of video
- compensate for audio sync problems using nudge
- render out to YouTube compatible format (ala my previous post)

My previous Cinelerra install on Core 4 had crash problems as well as strange audio synchronization problems. One major difference between the systems is that my FC4 Cinelerra system had OpenGL enabled. My new FC6 system does not have OpenGL enabled. On FC4, I noticed that enabling OpenGL seemed to cause the instabilities mentioned above, though I was never able to prove it. Also, the more unstable projects tended to be projects that I had previously created. So as a test, I am recompiling Cinelerra on FC6 using OpenGL and will perform some edits on both old and newly created projects to see if the OpenGL version of Cinelerra is as stable as the non-OpenGL, X11 XV version on FC6. I am hoping that the latest NVidia drivers for my 7600GS 512MB card in combination with various bug fixes in FC6 will allow me to run Cinelerra on FC6 without crashes.

I have uploaded the results of yesterday's rendering session to my new YouTube account here:
http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=snufflerstormpig

I'm learning more about YouTube. It is a really rich environment for social interaction. Everybody has seen a YouTube video and peoples comments beneath it. But depending on how the content producer has configured the video, people can comment upon it by using a video response. Pretty cool. Also, most people know that you can embed a YouTube video into any web page simply by selecting the Embed code that appears on every page that displays a YouTube video and integrate that code into your web site. It looks like this:
<object width="425" height="350"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/cW8EL2RgAEg"></param><param name="wmode" value="transparent"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/cW8EL2RgAEg" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="transparent" width="425" height="350"></embed></object>

Some of the more interesting stuff is not as evident. For example, if you are a content producer, you can create a "Channel", basically a home page of your profile like in the above link so that people can see your accumulated work. As a member (content producer or regular viewer), you can create playlists of your favorite videos and share them with your friends. When someone gets one of your playlists, they can play all the videos in that playlist simply by clicking once. Here is a playlist I created from the videos I rendered yesterday:
http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=021BB1E61A3BFD19

Also, people can subscribe to your Channel (Subscribers) or you can make Friends who also like your videos. The difference between the two seems to be that Subscribers are more passive viewers of your content and Friends are content producers themselves, or at least have a more well defined profile created on YouTube. YouTube can automatically alert both of these two different types of people when you've uploaded new videos.

Anyway, granted I am a little late to the YouTube game, but I think a lot of other content producers are too. They should take advantage of this great experiment in social networking and get their hard work up on YouTube to show the rest of the world.

convert: linux command line image conversion and processing utility

I needed a quick and dirty command line tool to convert a jpg to a png. Lo and behold, I found the image conversion utility called "convert" on my Fedora Core 6 system from the ImageMagick open source tools, http://www.imagemagick.org/. ImageMagick is now part of the graphics programs packaged with the Core 6 distribution.

Anytime I have a simple task that I can automate or just speedily get done, it usually involves a command line tool. I love command line tools for this reason. I won't belabor describing the software because Linux Journal has already done it for me here:
http://www.linux-mag.com/id/2561/

You can do basic things like resize, crop and convert to different formats. Your command can be as simple as this:
convert [sourceImage] [destinationImage]

example:
convert image.jpg image.png

It is that easy. No opening GIMP just to convert. The program can also do sophisticated image processing using effects. Typing "convert" with no arguments after the command name will give you a full list of the capabilities of the software.

To scale an image, try this command:
convert [sourceImage] -scale [WidthxHeight] [destinationImage]

example:
convert image.jpg -scale 1024x768 newimage.jpg

This is a great utility folks.

Good man page here:
http://linux.about.com/od/commands/l/blcmdl1_convert.htm

Enjoy!

audio sync, nudge, avidemux2 and a reminder about archiving

I spent most of the night trying to debug an audio synchronization problem in Cinelerra. The video was trailing the audio by a little bit. So I used the Nudge feature to slide the audio .5 seconds behind to the right.

A word about nudge:
If the audio is running behind the video, use POSITIVE values for nudge.
If the video is running behind the audio, use NEGATIVE values for nudge.

Another way to put it:
If your audio is lagging and is behind the video (more to the RIGHT on the timeline than the video), push it FORWARD using positive values.
If your audio is running too fast and is ahead of the video (more to the LEFT on the timeline than the video), push it BACKWARD using negative values.

2/17/2008
Since nudge is good for fixing an entire track, one way to fix synchronization problems that occur on only part of a track is to use the Delay Video video effect or the Delay Audio audio effect:

• The Delay Video track works when audio lags behind the video.
• The Delay Audio track works when the video lags behind the audio.

The two effects take positive values for the delay in seconds. So they only work "one way", so to speak.
:)

This syncronization problem was after another discovery that Cinelerra on the Fedora Core 6 box I just built is not letting me drag and drop video. So I couldn't manually slide my video around. I'm not sure why this is not working for this particular project, as the Record button is enabled and my editing Preferences seem correct. The funny thing is that it does not happen when I create a new project. My gut feeling is that this version of Cinelerra I am using is SLIGHTLY newer than the one on my main box. So the XML is probably screwed up in some way. Ugh. Tiring.

But not tired enough to write a reminder to everybody that if they want the MOST PORTABLE video files, keep them below 4GB. That way they will fit on a DVD for archiving or transferring, fit on a FAT32 file system and be welcomed on any modern file system. Any larger, and it becomes a nightmare to transfer or archive. As I edit in HDV, file sizes get huge pretty quickly. But keep 'em below 4GB kids! It'll save you much pain in the long run.

Your friend in the battle to trim files down to size is AVIDEMUX2, a wonderful little program I've mentioned before that chops up large video files in no time flat. On my system, a Dell 400SC, 3.2Ghz, 2GB RAM, multiple drives, it took about four minutes total to chop up a 5GB HDV file into two 2.5 chunks. Not bad! One thing I do is to make sure that when you are saving out your file, use Copy for both the Audio and Video tracks and then save to your final format. The Copy feature will save out a new file to the exact same specs as your source file. Very nice feature!

Fedora Core 6 on x86 Cinelerra dependencies

I'm preparing to upgrade my Fedora Core 4 system to Fedora Core 6 and have figured out how to install the source dependencies for Cinelerra in Core 6 relatively painlessly in an instance of a VMware virtual machine.

I use yum to install the dependent packages.

I needed to do the installation in a number of separate steps, due to some repository conflicts for ffmpeg-devel sources between the fedora base and livna repos, as well as some trickiness with mjpegtools.

Here are the steps:
1) make sure you have the correct repositories in yum.
2) install the dependencies using the shell script below
- this script includes everything except mjpegtools
3) remove the livna repositories from yum and install mjpegtools (ffmpeg-devel, optional)
4) get the source code
5) compile Cinelerra from source

Step 1: Make sure yum repositories are available
In order to install Cinelerra from source, you will need to have the following repositories in yum:
1) fedora core, extras and updates
2) dries
3) livna

3/31/07 Note: do NOT have the freshrpms repository listed in yum when you do the install.

The Cinelerra CVS source code will not compile against the ffmpeg in Freshrpms. Reference: https://init.linpro.no/pipermail/skolelinux.no/cinelerra/2007-March/010361.html

Here's a nice rpm that installs the livna repositories into yum for you: rpm -ivh http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-6.rpm

And don't forget the RPM key imports for each repository, such as the dries key: rpm -ivh http://dries.ulyssis.org/rpm/RPM-GPG-KEY.dries.txt

Step 2: Install dependent files
Here is the list of dependencies needed, already in the form of a shell script ready for you to cut-and-paste into your favorite text editor:
yum install \
libquicktime \
gsm-devel \
xvidcore* \
lame \
lame-devel \
libvorbis* \
libogg* \
libtool* \
a52* \
libtheora* \
libpng* \
libjpeg* \
libtiff* \
esound* \
audiofile* \
libraw1394* \
libavc1394* \
freetype* \
fontconfig* \
nasm \
e2fsprogs* \
faad2-dev* \
OpenEXR* \
fftw3* \
libsndfile* \
libiec61883* \
x264 \
x264-d* \
faac* \
libdv*

Don't forget to chmod a+x the file!

Steps 3: Install mjpegtools
Remove the livna repositories from yum and install ffmpeg-devel and mjpegtools:
4/3/07 addition (thanks Roland!)
yum --disablerepo=livna install mjpegtools*

If you wish, you may install ffmpeg-devel. But it is not essential for Cinelerra compilation.

Step 4: Get Cinelerra source code
Getting the source files assumes that you have subversion installed:
yum install subversion

Then checkout the Cinelerra CVS trunk:
svn checkout svn://svn.skolelinux.org/cinelerra/trunk/hvirtual

Step 5: Build from source
Build the source from the hvirtual directory:
./autogen.sh
./configure
make
make install

Here are some scripts that show the different portions of the installation process. You'll see the ffmpeg-libs and -devel conflicts at the bottom of script 1. In script 2, I've removed ffmpeg-devel from the initial install. Script 3 shows the successful install of ffmpeg-devel from the dries and fedora extras repositories. Script 4 shows the successful install of mjpegtools. Script 5/6 show the configure and make/make install processes.

typescript.1
typescript.2no_ffmpeg
typescript.3ffmpeg-devel
typescript.4mjpeg
typescript.5configure
typescript.6makeinstall

enjoy!

ALERT!
ALERT!
Just in case you follow these steps and get the dreaded x264 compile error: 'struct ' has no member named 'b_cbr' error, here are the steps to fix it:
http://crazedmuleproductions.blogspot.com/2007/06/dreaded-compilation-error-x264c139.html