Ubuntu / Linux Mint – Installing MediaInfo From PPA

MediaInfo is a handy application for querying media files about their video and audio bitrates and video resolution and so on:

• General: title, author, director, album, track number, date, duration…
• Video: codec, aspect, fps, bitrate…
• Audio: codec, sample rate, channels, language, bitrate…
• Text: language of subtitle
• Chapters: number of chapters, list of chapters
• Video: MKV, OGM, AVI, DivX, WMV, QuickTime, Real, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DVD (VOB)…
  (Codecs: DivX, XviD, MSMPEG4, ASP, H.264, AVC…)
• Audio: OGG, MP3, WAV, RA, AC3, DTS, AAC, M4A, AU, AIFF…
• Subtitles: SRT, SSA, ASS, SAMI…

Installing MediaInfo on Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic) and later releases is very simple via Personal Package Archive (PPA). Open a Terminal and enter the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shiki/mediainfo
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mediainfo-gui

Now that MediaInfo is installed you can just drag and drop files into the application to query them.

That’s it!

 

Windows – Sound Output Switching Utility

Whenever I need to switch the sound on my Windows PC between my speakers and my headphones it annoys me to have to go into the Control Panel to do it.

With a little bit of searching I found a great little utility called Sound Shortcut.

The utility does not need to be installed to run – but I created a folder in C:\Program Files for it so that it would not be accidentally moved or deleted.

When you run Sound Shortcut you will see a new icon in your system tray (as circled in red below).

Right click the icon and you will see a menu with the option to run Sound Shortcut on start-up.

Click the Start-Orb then Control Panel and then the Sound icon and you will see your current sound outputs.

As you can see I just have my speakers and headphones listed (as I had removed my SPDIF output from the list).

Now that I have just the outputs that I need listed I can quickly and easily switch between them by pressing Alt+1 or Alt+2.

Switching between audio outputs really couldn’t be simpler!

Source: sevenforums.com

 

Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid – No Sound When Playing Flash Video On YouTube With Firefox

There are plenty of posts online about issues with sound when trying to play Flash video on YouTube with Firefox. I encountered this issue today on a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.4 Lucid and managed to fix it without too much difficulty.

I had just installed Ubuntu but had not bothered to run Update Manager yet – so my first piece of advice is to update your system and reboot (if it is not already up-to-date).

I then installed the Flash-Aid Add-on in Firefox. Flash-Aid allows you to uninstall and install various instances of Flash (or Linux equivalents) via a graphical interface. Click Tools, Add-ons, Get Add-ons and then search for Flash Aid and install the Add-on.

Restart Firefox and then click Tools and Add-ons again. Select the Flash-Aid add-on and then click the Preferences button.

I decided to uninstall Flash completely and start over – so I clicked the Expert Mode check-box at the bottom of the Flash Aid window and then clicked the Removal Options tab.

I selected everything that I had possibly installed previously and then clicked the Installation Options tab. Here I selected Adobe, from repositories.

Then I simply clicked the Script Preview tab followed by the Execute button – this ran the uninstall scripts followed by the installation script.

After this I still did not have sound working on YouTube – but running Update Manager and rebooting the computer fixed the issue.

Flash-Aid is a great tool for quickly and easily managing the version of Flash that you wish to use.