Displaying articles with tag howto
Posted by hank,
Thu Aug 07 02:49:00 UTC 2008
So, you have your Jailbroken iPod Touch or iPhone with 2.0 firmware running OpenSSH, and you have MxTube 1.5 or better, of course. What if you want one of those pesky videos that YouTube deletes all the time, like Paris Hilton For President? Or maybe you want a full movie on your iPod without having to sync to iTunes since you’re stuck in Linux Land. Well, here’s how:
Download the video
This can be done lots of ways, but somehow obtain a version of the video that ffmpeg can read. It can be just about any format. Let’s assume that we get a file called paris.flv.
Convert the video
ffmpeg -i paris.flv -b 500000 -s 176x144 -ac 1 -ab 64000 paris-high.mp4
This will make a nice movie for us to play. Let’s put it on the iPod:
scp paris-high.mp4 root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/
Make the Thumbnail
We need to grab a frame from the middle of the movie. Let’s use mplayer for that!
mplayer -vo jpeg -frames 1 -ss 30 paris.flv
This will make a file called 00000001.jpg. Let’s put that in the right spot:
scp 00000001.jpg root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm
Add the video to the Library
Edit /var/mobile/Library/MxTube/VideoLibrary.plist on the iPod. Make a new dict entry in the list like so:
<dict>
<key>author</key>
<string>hank</string>
<key>duration</key>
<string>01:50</string>
<key>high</key>
<string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris-high.mp4</string>
<key>id</key>
<string>64ad536a6dQ</string>
<key>thumbnail</key>
<string>/var/mobile/Media/MxTube/paris.thm</string>
<key>title</key>
<string>Paris for President</string>
</dict>
Just fill in the right filenames for the thumbnail and movie like you used above. Also, change the author to yourself or the original director, and the duration accordingly. Keep the id something random. Also, you can change the display title as the last option there.
Other Pro Tips
Keep in mind that if you want to be able to delete the movie from the interface, you need to change the ownership on all the files to mobile:mobile using chown.
Results!
Well, it totally works, with sound even.
Good luck!
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Wed Aug 06 01:37:00 UTC 2008
Idea
I wanted to put images on my iPod Touch without using iTunes since, as most of us know, there is no good way to use it from Linux. It turns out there is a magic directory on the iPod Touch where it saves images from Safari. I simply looked at how it saved them, and applied it on my box here at home.
Requirements
- Jailbroken iPod Touch (I used WinPWN), with OpenSSH installed and working (the root password is alpine)
- Firmware 2.0 (Though, 1.x may work, I just haven’t tried it)
- A Linux box with a bash shell
- Cool images
convert and mogrify from ImageMagick installed
Method
These instructions might work for the iPhone as well. YMMV
All of your images must be in the format IMG_XXXX.YYY where XXXX is a number < 9999, and YYY is either JPG or THM (THM is a thumbnail). To rename our files, I use a simple trick I outlined in my last post:
EII=4; for i in *.jpg; do ls $i; \
NEWNAME=IMG_00`printf "%02d" $EII`.JPG; \
echo Renaming $i to $NEWNAME; \
mv $i $NEWNAME; EII=`expr $EII + 1`; done
That will rename all the JPEG files in order from 4 to, in my case, 62. Now, I have to make the thumbnails:
for i in `ls *.JPG | cut -d '.' -f 1`; do \
convert $i.JPG -resize 75x75! $i.THM; \
done
The 75x75! part makes sure they are exactly those dimensions. You end up with something like the following:
IMG_0004.JPG IMG_0016.JPG IMG_0028.JPG IMG_0040.JPG IMG_0052.JPG
IMG_0004.THM IMG_0016.THM IMG_0028.THM IMG_0040.THM IMG_0052.THM
IMG_0005.JPG IMG_0017.JPG IMG_0029.JPG IMG_0041.JPG IMG_0053.JPG
....
Now, note that the iPod can only display images under 100KB (to my knowledge). If your high-res image is too large, it will just display the magnified 75x75, which is really ugly. So, make sure all your images fit that description, and if they don’t, mogrify -resize them until they do (or take other measures as necessary). I used this:
mogrify -resize 400x *.JPG
All my images turned out to be between 30 and 90 KB. This also keeps the aspect ratio, unlike the 75x75!.
Now, SSH into your iPod (if you can’t do this yet, google it). You should have the following file:
/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/.MISC/Info.plist
Open this file in vi, and observe the plist>dict>integer part of the hierarchy:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>LastFileGroupNumber-100</key>
<integer>62</integer>
</dict>
</plist>
So, I put 62 in there since the last image I have is numbered 0062. It’s a very simple idea. Now, just load them onto the iPod:
scp IMG_00* root@ipod:/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE/
Let’s have a look from the iPod console!
HanksTouch:/var/mobile/Media/DCIM/100APPLE root# ls
IMG_0002.JPG IMG_0014.THM IMG_0027.JPG IMG_0039.THM IMG_0052.JPG
IMG_0002.THM IMG_0015.JPG IMG_0027.THM IMG_0040.JPG IMG_0052.THM
Beautiful. Now, to test it…
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Sat Mar 22 12:27:00 UTC 2008
I wanted to speed up package downloading to set up my apt-proxy today in Gutsy, so I decided to find the correct way to find the fastest Ubuntu mirror. It’s actually done like so (stolen from here):
- Click on “System | Administration | Software Sources”
- Under “Ubuntu Sotware” tab, choose “Other” in the “Download from” list box.
- Choose your country and then click “Select Best Server” and choose the recommendation.
This automatically updates the /etc/apt/sources.lst file. The same utility can also be reached from the Synaptic Package Manager, through “Settings | Repositories”.
In action:
It says mirrors.rit.edu is the best one for me. Makes sense.
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Sun Nov 11 02:07:00 UTC 2007
Notice that I can do a -g for a progess bar! Yay! Now for an action shot:
hank@rofl:~/tmp/coreutils-6.7$ cp -g coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb /nexus/mod0/www/deb/binary/
coreutils_6.7-1_i386.deb | 48% | 3.2 MiB | 118 KiB/s | ETA
Continue Reading
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Sun Nov 11 00:42:00 UTC 2007
Installing the package
Most people will want this. Add the following to your /etc/apt/sources.list at the bottom:
# Hankzilla
deb http://modzer0.cs.uaf.edu/~hardwarehank/deb binary/
Then run a sudo apt-get update. Then install it with sudo apt-get install wxwaste. Run it with waste.
Building from source
- Get it
- Install some dependencies:
# Checkinstall is optional, but it makes it nice since removal is just thru apt.
sudo apt-get install wx-common libwxgtk2.6-dev wx2.6-headers checkinstall
- Unpack the source, then
./configure && make && sudo checkinstall
- Add a nice menu listing:
# Put this in /usr/share/applications/waste.desktop
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Version=1.5b4
Name=WASTE
GenericName=Secure Filesharing
Comment=Facilitates encrypted filesharing between trusted clients
Icon=gnome-term-linux.png
TryExec=waste
Exec=waste
Terminal=false
Categories=GNOME;Application;Network;
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Sat Oct 06 11:20:00 UTC 2007
So, last month sometime, BrainSlayer got DD-WRT working on version 8 of the WRT54G. Now this was great news to me when I read it since I’ve been wanting to get rid of the crappy LinkSys management from the beginning. Some of the procedure worked, and some of it didn’t for me.
Do not try this if you don’t know exactly what you’re getting into.
Continue Reading
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Sat Sep 15 18:17:00 UTC 2007
So, earlier this year, I decided it would be cool to mirror Wikipedia. So, I successfully set up a local copy on my system, and it’s been just sitting there ever since. But lately, I’ve been interested in fulltext indexing offered by various indexing engines, and Sphinx has looked especially tasty. So, I figured I’d sit down and try it today.
I pointed it at my 16GB of Wikipedia text in my MySQL database.
Continue Reading
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Fri Apr 20 19:35:00 UTC 2007
I got mad at gnome-terminal today. It wasn’t opening links. So, as usual, GNOME hid the setting away somewhere completely insane.
.gconf/desktop/gnome/url-handlers/http
Why isn’t there just a .gnome-terminalrc? How hard would that be?
Tags: howto
Posted by hank,
Wed Mar 28 14:05:00 UTC 2007
So I found that my super key was not a modifier key in GNOME today, but rather a standalone key. THis was unacceptable. To change it, I did this:
System -> Preferences -> Keyboard -> Layout Options -> Alt/Win Key Behavior -> Super is mapped to Win-Keys
Now, I can change my shortcuts to not be stupid.
Tags: howto
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