Low volume on YouTube in Firefox on Debian Stretch

I was watching a couple of videos on YouTube today, and noticed that the volume was very low, even with the volume controls in YouTube and Gnome turned up to full.

I found the solution was to go to Sound settings and click on the Application tab. Firefox output is via CubebUtils, the level of which was set much lower than the main output volume.

Raising the output level of CubebUtils until it matched the main output volume resulted in a much louder volume, with CubebUtils output rising and falling in sync with the main volume control up to 100%.

I don't know whether the low output setting for CubebUtils was the result of one of the less technically minded users of this computer meddling with the settings (one of the main users is only three!), or the result of an update to Firefox or Debian, but if you too are suffering from the same issue, maybe this post will help.

External DVD drive not detected in Debian Jessie

The CD/DVD drive in my laptop long since packed in working, so I bought a cheap external drive from Amazon. (£12.99, free delivery.)

I plugged it in and ...nothing. The drive did not appear in Thunar. I thought I might have wasted my money on a drive that is not compatible with Linux, but then I tried VLC and that played the DVD all right. After that, the drive was mounted and visible in Thunar.

However, I tried the same thing today and could not get VLC to play the DVD I was trying to play. And it is really frustrating trying to solve a problem like that with a five year old girl asking you every 15 seconds if you have managed to play her Dora the Explorer DVD yet.

Eventually I had to give up, suspecting that the cheap drive might have broken. After lunch I tried booting into a Crunchbang Live USB, and to my relief found the drive was automounted and working.

I noticed the default name for the drive in Crunchbang was dev/dvd, so booted back into Debian and tried that: it worked.

But still the drive didn't automount. Later on, after aforementioned small child had watched Dora and chanted the obligatory mantra of "Swiper, no swiping!" three times plus various other exhortations and was sated, I managed to find the solution to the problem in a more leisurely period.

It seems there's a bug in Jessie which means drives are not auto detected.

Solution found on the Debian Forum.

The solution is near the end of the page, specifically:

To determine if kernel polling is enabled:

    cat /sys/module/block/parameter/events_dfl_poll_msecs
    cat /sys/block/sr0/events_poll_msecs

If you get 0 or -1 from both of those commands, kernel polling may be disabled.

To enable kernel polling permanently (survives a reboot), add the following command to your /etc/rc.local file (anywhere before the 'exit' line in that file):

    echo 2000 > /sys/module/block/parameters/events_dfl_poll_msecs

From udevil Homepage.

debian-multimedia.org now "registered by someone unknown to Debian"

Debian recently got multimedia, but previously to that, Debian users may have added a repository debian-multimedia.org to enable multimedia. This changed to deb-multimedia.org to make clear that it was not part of the Debian project.The debian-multimedia.org domain is now "registered by someone unknown to Debian".

Sound advice I think for Debian users would be to make sure they don't have that repository in their sources files.

Debian gets multimedia support!

As of course users of Debian Testing have probably noticed (especially if they read this blog), Debian Wheezy has multimedia support:

Multimedia support

• In Debian wheezy, ffmpeg has been replaced by the libav fork, which is considered to feature a more conservative release process and thus fit better to Debian's needs. It provides all libraries and prepares an upgrade path for existing application packages. 

• Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively. For most use cases, installation of packages from third-party repositories should not be necessary anymore. The times of crippled multimedia support in Debian are finally over!

NewInWheezy

Some useful webcam applications in XFCE

I've been trying out some useful applications in XFCE with my new webcam, a cheap but Linux friendly HP.

The first may not seem an obvious choice, but the only problem I had with the webcam was sound. The webcam has an internal microphone, but in some applications I couldn't hear it. mhWaveEdit is a sound recording application, which was able to record sound from the webcam, proving that the microphone did work. Knowing that it did work, I was able to get all the other applications I tried to work too (with a bit of perseverance!).

I first tried it with Pulseaudio, under which it picked up the microphone immediately, but later when I was investigating sound problems in other applications, I uninstalled Pulseaudio. Under Alsa, I had to enter the name of the webcam microphone, which is hw:1,0. To find the name of the webcam microphone, use this command:

arerecord -l

[Correction: the command should be arecord -l]

The microphone name is then hw:[card number],[device number].

In Skype the microphone worked under Pulseaudio and Alsa. In Pulseaudio it's just a question of making sure that the webcam microphone is set as the fallback microphone in Pulseaudio Volume Control, because Skype just sees the pulseaudio server; in Alsa, Skype sees the different possible inputs, and it's necessary to select the webcam microphone- fortunately the name in the menu was descriptive, telling me the make and model of the webcam as well as the system name, hw:1,0 again.

In Gnome I could use the webcam to take pictures and record videos with Cheese, and I wondered if I could do the same thing with an application in XFCE. I couldn't find a single application to do both, but it is possible to take pictures and record video.

Camorama is a simple application that let's you view the webcam output and take pictures, and it doesn't bring a cascade of dependencies on XFCE like Cheese.

The application does seem to be affected by a bug which makes it freeze immediately after opening, requiring a forced close, but it works fine if restarted. I am running Debian Testing (Wheezy), so maybe this bug will get fixed before the release. (GUVCView, reviewed later on, is also affected by this bug.)

It's possible to capture webcam video output with VLC, with which Debian XFCE comes installed, so first I gave that a try. There are plenty of tutorials for this on the web. Basically go to Media > Open capture device and select the webcam and microphone. The names in Linux are non-descriptive system names (hw:1,0 again- use the command above to check what the system names belong to). Windows versions of VLC seem to give a descriptive name to each input, telling you it's a webcam, and giving the manufacturer's name, but Linux users are less mollycoddled. To record video, hit the dropdown arrow next to play and select convert.

That's the theory, anyway. I found that video way recorded, but the sound track consisted mostly of scratches and crackles like a badly tuned short wave radio station. Google suggested trying plughw:1,0 instead of hw:1,0, but that didn't work with Pulseaudio.

Later on I tried again with no Pulseaudio and plughw:1,0 worked. A page on VORTEXBOX about the difference between hw and plughw gave me the clue I needed:

...unsupported sample rates will be converted to a working rate.

I tried dropping the sample rate in VLC and found that sound recording started to work. 11025 seems to be the highest that will work: the default is 48000.

The final application I tried is GUVCView. As mentioned before, this application is affected by the same bug as Camorama: when opned, it freezes within a few seconds, requiring a forced close, but when restarted it works without issue.

GUVCView did not work for me with the default settings, but after a lot of fiddling, it did. I had to find the right camera output setting by trial and error and for some reason the avi video format did not work but mkv did. Sound worked with the default or pulse inputs in Pulseaudio and the USB; with ALSA I had to select the HP 2200 USB hw:1,0 input.

 

MP4 video doesn't play in Totem on Debian Wheezy

This is an issue I noted when I first tried Debian Wheezy. Tonight my daughter was fixated on watching "Five Little Monkeys", which of course just happened to be an MP4 file. Totem wouldn't play it. I downloaded VLC and that would, but later I decided to see if I could track down the problem.

I found this post on the Ubuntu forum pointing to a Launchpad bug: it seems the problem has been fixed in Ubuntu. I don't know how quickly bug fixes make their way from Ubuntu to Debian, but at least there are some workarounds available: the easiest one obviously being to install VLC.

Download BBC iPlayer content on Linux

My wife informed me last night that I'd missed the start of a new series of a program I like on the BBC. I checked the BBC iPlayer site and found that the episodes I'd missed were still available. I didn't have time to view it right then, so I was intrigued to see a download link which offered an install option for the BBC iPlayer Desktop, which claims to let me download content and watch it later on, but upon clicking it nothing happened.

Apparently there is or was a Linux version of the BBC iPlayer. While Googling it I came across Get_iPlayer, a Linux command line program that downloads content from the BBC web site, but without the 30 viewability limit that iPlayer apparently imposes.

There's a useful tutorial at christopherdowning.co.uk.

The Get_iPlayer website says:

The BBC may at some point choose to effectively protect their streams with DRM or some ‘effective technological measure’ in which case get_iplayer will no longer be a useful tool for those streams.

So it may not work forever.

There are of course some legal and moral issues in downloading BBC content in a fashion that the corporation never intended which now follow:

ZZZZZZ

Too boring, read it on the web site.

MP3 enters Debian

The Debian Wiki Multimedia Codecs page states:

Legal Issues

As long time users of Debian may know, there has been a long history of legal concerns when it comes to using various multimedia related software due to software patents. Because of this, various multimedia codecs could not be made available within Debian. However, Debian's position on software patents has changed, resulting in the inclusion of these various multimedia codecs within Debian. 

I noticed while writing the previous post that some applications that used to require additional packages from the deb-multimedia.org repository in order to rip or convert to MP3 now seem to have that option enabled with only the Debian repositories.

The Debian Wiki Multimedia Codecs page still suggests that extra packages from deb-multimedia.org are necessary, but as far as I can see this information is obsolete.

I can certainly convert from .ogg to .mp3 in SoundConverter. I don't have any audio CDs at hand to test Sound Juicer, but the rip to MP3 option is certainly enabled.

debian-multimedia.org name change

debian-multimedia.org has become deb-multimedia.org, requiring repository sources to be updated to the new name.
There is also an update for the multimedia keyring. I noticed some strange behaviour with this and couldn't work out what was going on until I happened to look at the debian-multimedia.org page. I hadn't updated the repository sources so the keyring update was marked auto-removable.

Multimedia breezy in Debian Wheezy

Previously on this blog, I've bemoaned the absence of information on running multimedia in Debian. In January 2010 I wrote:

My experience with Debian was made more difficult than it needed to be because there was no multimedia installation page provided by Debian to refer to- I had to get information from a lot of different pages, many of them blogs or Linux resources rather than Debian pages.

And in May 2010:

There's no equivalent of Ubuntu's restricted-extras package in Debian, which makes enabling multimedia less of a breeze. I got Flash and MP3's playing without too much trouble, but playing Flash files I'd saved to my hard drive resulted in an error message. With a bit of Googling, I found I just needed to install a Gstreamer plugin. Not too much of a big deal, but just another issue that would be off-putting for a newbie.
Debian generally doesn't go out of its way like Ubuntu to be user friendly or attractive- a lot of features that are enabled by default in Ubuntu are not present in Debian. They can be enabled, but it takes some Googling, some head scratching and some delving into system settings.

I noted in the January post that work was going on to make multimedia in Debian easier, and I'm pleased to say that after my recent Debian Wheezy install, I came across this excellent Debian Wiki multimedia page which made installing multimedia a breeze.

MP3 in Fedora 15

I've been using a Fedora 15 Live USB to test Gnome 3, and also looking at how easy Fedora 15 is to do everyday task. Probably one of my most common everyday tasks on Linux is listening to MP3s and watching rips of TV shows and films. I was able to do this on Fedora 15 without much trouble, by following a series of notifications and advice links. Today I came across a review of Fedora 15 where the author (a person with lot more IT experience than me) has gone down the same road as me but somehow failed to reach the end.

Movie player is default application for MP3 files and it suggests to search for MP3 plugin. Of course I want to search. And search is... unsuccessful. Manual search in Package Manager is also unsuccessful. You probably know that MP3 support in Fedora is famous topic.

This has inspired me to write a walk-through for anybody struggling to listen to MP3s or play a movie in Fedora 15. (I've chosen a video file for this walk-through because I get video and MP3 working in one swell foop.)

The review writer has done what I did, tried to play a file and seen a notification about missing plugins and an option to search for them:


Here we go with the search:


And my search is also unsuccessful:


(I think that notification should really say Failed to find plugin.)

However, if the review author had clicked the More information button, he would have found the answer. The button launches the Fedora Project Wiki page:

If you're seeing this page, it is probably because you tried to search for something in PackageKit, but it could not find what you were looking for in the Fedora repositories. Look at the contents below to find information about specific issues you might encounter.

Scroll down the page and you'll find that the decoders you need are actually codecs which cannot be included in the Fedora repository because they are "patent encumbered or under an unacceptable license", and that you need to get them from a third party repository. Follow the link and you'll be offered several. I've used rpmfusion.org before, so I clicked on that, and then on the Enable RPM Fusion on your system link. I opted for Graphical setup via Firefox web browser, and selected Fedora 15. This brings up the option to open an rpm file:


After the download, there's a prompt to install the file:


A request for additional confirmation:


[Update: Repeat the process for the nonfree repository.]

Now we go back to our media file and try to play it again. We get the same notification about missing plugins- but don't be disheartened:


This time the search finds the plugins we need (in the third party repository we added, of course).


And we get another request for additional confirmation (and a chance to look at the packages that are going to be installed).


Then we are asked if we trust the source of the packages. (This is important! In this case, we can trust the signed packages from this trusted source, but clicking through confirmation dialogues like this without being sure is not a good habit to get into.)


And finally we can watch our film. (And listen to MP3s too, as the film required the MP3 codec.)



Update: Tried this procedure myself after a clean install of Fedora 16, and although video worked, MP3 coded audio in video (or indeed, just MP3 files) wouldn't.
In the end the solution was to manually install the GStreamer  streaming media framework "ugly" plug-ins and the Non Free GStreamer streaming media framework "bad" plug-ins.

Enable hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers on ATI X1600 in Debian Squeeze

If you have a ATI X1600 graphics card, are running Debian Squeeze and enjoy fragging bots in Open Arena, and find that you can't run the game because hardware accelerated video isn't working and the game runs like cold treacle, try adding the debian-multimedia.org repository and updating libdrm-intel1, libdrm-radeon1, libdrm2. These libraries...

...implement the userspace interface to the kernel DRM services.
DRM stands for "Direct Rendering Manager", which is the kernelspace portionof the "Direct Rendering Infrastructure" (DRI). The DRI is currently used on Linux to provide hardware-accelerated OpenGL drivers.

There must be some sort of patent-encumbered aspect of these libraries that is disabled in Squeeze, because installing the updates from debian-multimedia.org allowed me to run the game at full speed.

How to enable mp3 output in SoundConverter

SoundConverter is a program I've used before to convert sound files to a format that will play on my MP3 player (basically just that as it plays only MP3 and WMA files). I converted some MP4 files to MP3 format,
probably in Ubuntu at the time
[EDIT: Actually it was in Lenny: I've been here before and forgotten]. Now MP3 encoding requires LAME, which due to some patent issues, is not installed in most Linux distros by default. In Ubuntu, it's in the multiverse repository. A post on the Debian forum today reminded me of the issue- I checked and found I hadn't even installed SoundConverter on my Debian Squeeze. When I did install it, of course MP3 encoding wasn't enabled.
A quick Google search brought up instructions for enabling MP3 output in the major Linux distros. I added the debian-multimedia.org repository as instructed and installed the gstreamer0.10-lame package, after which MP3 output was enabled.
But that's not the end of the story. I noticed that after I had added the debian-multimedia.org repository, Synaptic was telling me there were updates available for several packages. At first I couldn't find any information about why this might be, and was wary about letting a third-party repository update packages, but then.... well, I think this will have to be another post.

Free as in Freedom or Free as in Beer?

I now have a stable operating system running only free software (free as in freedom) running on my old Compaq (see below). If it were a person, it's feet would be two inches off the ground.
But can I listen to MP3's, watch video clips on the BBC or YouTube or watch DVD's? That will require some non-free software (as in freedom, but still free as in beer). It will also leave the computer distinctly earth-bound and not in its previous extramundane state.
MP3's were easy. Just a case of installing libxine1-ffmpeg.
Flash required a bit more effort. I had to add a repository for lenny-backports ( "Be warned : The resulting system can't be considered plain "stable" anymore"). If, like me, you're wondering what backports are, the Debian Wiki has an explanation.
DVD's also required adding a repository- this time debian-multimedia. After installing libdvdcss, and inserting a DVD, Totem popped up and auto-played it, but only the first chapter- the copyright notice and introductory screen. I installed MPlayer but that had the same problem. A quick Google suggested that this is a common problem in Debian- the support for DVD menus isn't there (both Totem and MPlayer can display DVD menus in Ubuntu). One media player that can handle DVD menus in Debian is gxine. Information on installation is in the link above.
After adding the debian-multimedia repository and checking Update Manager, there was a warning about "new dependencies for some new applications or newer versions of existing dependencies" and an option for a "smart upgrade". (As described here.) I took the option for a smart upgrade and it seemed to work out all right, but still, what was all that about?
In short, enabling the proprietary/non-free/possibly illegal packages which a lot of people (including me) use without much thought is trickier on Debian than on Ubuntu. Even on Ubuntu, it can be daunting if you're using Linux for the first time, or don't have much computer experience. I can see why distros like Mint are popular.
My experience with Debian was made more difficult than it needed to be because there was no multimedia installation page provided by Debian to refer to- I had to get information from a lot of different pages, many of them blogs or Linux resources rather than Debian pages. It something that Debian seems to be working on, which is good to know.
The feet of all Linux users do not hover two inches above the ground through purity and holiness.