Doing a basic screencast in Linux is pretty easy. The package recordMyDesktop can be found easily on the repository of many Linux distros (including Ubuntu 9.04 that I use).
With this package you’re actually getting the backend recordMyDesktop which is written in C and the frontend developed in Python (gtk-recordMyDesktop or qt-recordMyDesktop).
The feature list is simple [...]

Posted in Audio and Video, Imaging, Utilities No Comments »

If you’re using Linux with Gnome, do a mouseover the music file and you’ll start hearing the song immediately.

You don’t even need to double-click to open the file in a media player, not even a mouse click is needed. Nice little hidden secrets of an awesome desktop file manager.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure [...]

Posted in Audio and Video, CD and DVD, Tips No Comments »

I’m a big Last.fm enthusiast (although it isn’t open source) so I try to install a scrobbler on every single media player I use. It took a bit of time for me to find a Symbian Last.fm client and mobbler it was.
Mobbler works like a charm! It recognizes and scrobbles songs being played by the [...]

Posted in Audio and Video, Mobile 2 Comments »

Over these past 2 days I recorded some videos on my Symbian cell phone that I wanted to share with my family back home. Problem is that the videos are saved in .mp4 format, which gave me some problems when trying to edit them (video editors I tried to use didn’t support mp4).
So, as we [...]

Posted in Audio and Video 2 Comments »

As an open source fan, I make my audio CDs portable in .ogg (.oga) format. Problem is that unfortunately .ogg isn’t as popular as it should be right now so sometimes it can be difficult to find a decent player, which is exactly what happened with my new Symbian cell phone.
Symbian OggPlay to the rescue, [...]

Posted in Audio and Video, Mobile No Comments »

My favorite cross-platform music manager Songbird is now on its 1.0 release!! I’ve written about Songbird before and it is fantastic to report that finally the first full release is available.
Why do I like Songbird so much?

it is open source;
cross-platform (Linux, Windows, MacOS X)
built on top of the same framework as Firefox, it allows me [...]

Posted in Audio and Video No Comments »

Today I had to add subtitles to a short movie. Problem is, I had never done that before, I’ve seen subtitle files but never actually done any changes to them. Let alone create subtitles!
So, I go to my Ubuntu’s Add/Remove Programs app to look for what is available for me. I found and installed Gnome [...]

Posted in Audio and Video No Comments »

One of the reasons why I don’t like iPods is the entire philosophy of having everything closed and according to the likes of Apple. But, fortunately the open source community is too awesome and have developed a firmware that we can install on several different audio devices.
Rockbox is a bit like an operating system for [...]

Posted in Audio and Video, OS No Comments »

The Mozilla team has announced that Fiirefox 3.1 will come with native support for Theora and Vorbis media. So, this means that:

open source media can become a bit more mainstream (finally moving away the proprietary mp3 monopoly);
no longer will we have to install Firefox plugins to see embedded audio and video files (as long as [...]

Posted in Audio and Video, Industry News, Office No Comments »

Songbird, our favorite open source music manager has just released their 0.6 version. According to the website, the new release is “harder, better, faster, stronger”.
Looking at the release notes, it shows that the team has been placing quite a bit of work to improve its performance and usability. This project created by Mozilla promises to [...]

Posted in Audio and Video 1 Comment »