Hackszine.com: Linux Multimedia Archives

Archive: Linux Multimedia

January 2, 2008

Open source game development

One of the more interesting recent news items is the announcement of Apricot, a new open source game development effort that is promising to produce a complete 3D game and development/production stack by the end of July 08.

The team will work on a cross platform game (at least Linux, Windows, OS X), using Blender for modeling and animation, Crystal Space as 3D engine and delivery platform, and Python for some magic scripting to glue things together. It is not only the purpose to make a compelling 3D game experience, but especially to improve and validate the open source 3D game creation pipeline, with industry-standard conditions.

I've only monkeyed with Crystal Space and Blender in the past, but I'm really impressed to see how far both of these applications have come and how they are now able to integrate with each other. There's a plugin for Blender called blender2crystal which makes it possible to develop maps and characters within the Blender 3D modeler, then export those models (including their physics and animation properties) into scriptable entities that can be used directly in the Crystal Space 3D engine. Tying the functionality of these two applications together is such a good move. Hopefully Apricot will help develop a solid model and some best practices for producing an entire game using these two tools.

If you can't wait until July to start digging through the Apricot code, there are several demos that have been made using Blender and Crystal Space that you should check out. The general outline is that you develop your game's 3D artwork within Blender, use Crystal Space as the underlying 3D engine, and then write your game logic in Python scripts which can control the underlying 3D engine via the CEL (Crystal Entity Layer) API.

Resources:
Project Apricot - Link
Crystal Space (3D Engine) - Link
Blender (3D Modeling Tool) - Link
CEL (Python Scripting for Crystal Space) - Link
blender2crystal - Link
Blender 3D: Noob to Pro WikiBook - Link

July 11, 2007

Play ripped DVDs with VLC

Steve Anderson wrote in about an underused feature of our favorite open source video player, VLC.

I discovered yesterday that the wonderful VLC media player has the ability not only to mount a DVD directory that's been ripped to the hard drive, but also to play a .iso image of a DVD. Seeing as I've been using it for ages without knowing this was possible, I figured a lot of other people would be ignorant to this feature!

Maybe you want to test an ISO that you've created before burning it to a disk. Perhaps you'd like to store your DVDs to your harddisk without transcoding them, retaining all the menus and special features. Using VLC, you should be able to do either by entering a "dvd:" url in the Open dialog box.

Example URLs to Open and play a DVD ISO:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/dvdimage.iso

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdimages/dvdimage.iso

Example URLs to Open and play a ripped DVD folder:

Windows - dvd://c:/somedirectory/DVDFOLDER

Linux - dvd:///home/username/dvdcopies/DVDFOLDER

Resources:
VLC DVD Trick - Link
Get VLC - Link

June 4, 2007

Stream music to your Airport Express from Linux

It's still Alpha, but raop_play is an Airport Express client player that will allow you to send audio files, including http streams, to your Airport Express.

Better yet, there's an ALSA driver included with the package, which will make your Airport Express look just like a second audio output device. Once that's set up, you can just configure your preferred music applications to send audio straight to the ALSA raop device. How cool is that?

Apple Airport Express Client Player - Link

Related:
Stream Music to Airport Express Without iTunes - Link

April 22, 2007

Run an iTunes (DAAP) server in Linux with Firefly

Firefly, formerly mt-daapd, is an open source digital audio server that can stream your music library to iTunes. Linux appears to be the most supported platform, but there is also beta support for Mac OS X, Windows, and even the AppleTV!

One of its cooler features is that it's capable of transcoding your music files on-the-fly to a format that's playable by your iTunes client. So if you've been building up a huge OGG or FLAC library, Firefly will let iTunes know that these songs are available and it will automatically convert them into a format that can be played on the client.

Links:

Firefly Media Server
Firefly/mt-daapd Wiki - quick-start guides for serveral OSs here
Running Firefly on AppleTV

April 4, 2007

Ripping Vinyl with GNU/Linux

It's time consuming, but with the right process you can transform your vinyl collection into digital audio for archiving, sharing and playing on portable devices.

To make the most of your ripped analogs, you'll need to go a little further than just recording the audio with your sound card. There's the whole process of normalizing and splitting tracks into seperate files, of course, but it's also not a bad idea to make multiple encodings so you can have both mp3 playback and a lossless archival copy. Then there's file naming and ID3 tags to think about...

Luckily, you can do all of the above with free software. There are even tools to make the tagging and naming step as simple as possible. Now, there's still work involved, but think how slick you'll look when you're lugging an iPod instead of that other portable audio device.

Ripping Vinyl with GNU/Linux -Link.

April 2, 2007

Linux Dual Monitor Support

If you're lucky enough to have a dual headed video card and an extra monitor lying around, there are a few options for getting a dual-monitor setup working in X Windows.

If you have a dual-headed nVidia or ATI card, the binary-only TwinView and BigDesktop drivers (respectively) will probably perform well, but if you don't fall into either of these camps, there are still options available.

Xinerama is a standard X extension which will work with just about anything, but you give up that ability to do OpenGL direct rendering on the second screen. For many uses, this may not even be an issue. If you need the 3d support on both monitors, however, a subset of open source drivers are supported by the MergedFB driver, which does support 3D direct rendering on both screens.

Check out the dual monitor howto on the Ubuntu Forums. It covers all four options and should be relevant for any current Linux distro -Link.