Installing HandBrake on Fedora 13

Handbrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.

Installation is straight-forward and much of this material is taken from Compiling HandBrake on Linux

Install the following packages

# yum groupinstall "Development Tools" "Development Libraries" \
"X Software Development" "GNOME Software Development"

# yum install yasm zlib-devel bzip2-devel \
dbus-glib-devel libgudev1-devel webkitgtk-devel libnotify-devel \
gstreamer-devel gstreamer-plugins-base-devel

More Information

1. HandBrake Wiki
2. HandBrake Wiki FAQs
3. HandBrake Site

Another Useful DVD-Backup or DVD-ripping tool is Thoggen. For more information, see Installing Thoggen on Fedora 11

Inkscape - Open Source Scalable Vector Graphics Editor

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Xara X, using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Inkscape supports many advanced SVG features (markers, clones, alpha blending, etc.) and great care is taken in designing a streamlined interface. It is very easy to edit nodes, perform complex path operations, trace bitmaps and much more. We also aim to maintain a thriving user and developer community by using open, community-oriented development.'

Available for both Mac, Linux and Windows

Screenshots of Inkscape

Installing Devede on Fedora 11

DeVeDe is a program to create video DVDs and CDs (VCD, sVCD or CVD), suitables for home players, from any number of video files, in any of the formats supported by Mplayer. The big advantage over other utilites is that it only needs Mplayer, Mencoder, DVDAuthor, VCDImager and MKisofs (well, and Python, PyGTK and PyGlade), so its dependencies are really small.

To install devede on Fedora 11, first you have to install RPM Fusion. For more information on RPM Fusion installation, see Blog Entry RPM Fusion Repository. Remember to do a "yum check-update" after you have install the repository

Step 1: Install devede

# yum install devede

Step 2: Launch devede

$ devede

Step 2: Explore the options. Some of the key features are

• Selection of Video output format (PAL, NTSC)
• Customised Menu Title Background, Music, Font
• Video Output size in relations to Video Medium
• Can burn to ISO or MPEG
• etc

Installing Thoggen on Fedora 11

Thoggen is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+. There are several other DVD rippers. There is a good article Choose the DVD ripper that's right for you which give a good account of the various DVD ripping application available on linux.

Some of the features of thoggen (taken from Thoggen Website) are as followed:

• Easy to use, with a nice graphical user interface (GUI)
• Supports title preview, picture cropping, and picture resizing.
• Language Selection for audio track (no subtitle support yet though)
• Encodes into Ogg/Theora video
• Can encode from local directory with video DVD files
• Based on the GStreamer multimedia framework, which makes it fairly easy to add additional encoding formats/codecs in future.

To install thoggen on Fedora 11, first you have to install RPM Fusion. For more information on RPM Fusion installation, see Blog Entry RPM Fusion Repository. Remember to do a "yum check-update" after you have install the repository

Step 1: Install thoggen

# yum install thoggen 

Step 2: Install libdvdcss2. libdvdcss is a free software library for accessing and unscrambling DVDs encrypted with the Content Scramble System (CSS).

# sudo -s
# rpm -ivh http://dl.atrpms.net/all/libdvdcss2-1.2.10-5.fc11.i586.rpm 

Step 3: Install gstreamer and related gstreamer-plugins

yum install gstreamer gstreamer-plugins-base gstreamer-plugins-good gstreamer-plugins-bad

booh - photo album generator

Booh is a free software static Web-Album generator for Linux. It takes series of photos and videos, and automatically build static web pages to browse them.

Booh has a number of unqiue features compared to the other dynamic web-album genertor. The fulling listings is at the Booh website. Here a subset of the list

1. automatic rotation of portrait photos thanks to information read in .jpg file (EXIF)
2. immediate display of images (preloading in browser)
3. sub-albums support
4. multi-processor support to speed up thumbnails generation
5. Full video support, including thumbnailing (with seek time specification possibility) and transcoding
6. ..... and much more. See Booh Website
   

Smile - Alternative Slideshow

Taken from an article I have read in LINUX Format....June 09 Edition

Want to explore an alternative slide show, you may try to use smile. Before you install, it will need to settle some dependency namely

• Mplayer
• Sox, Sox Support for OOG and MP3
• Mencoder

Avidemux Video Editor

Avidemux is a free video editor designed for simple cutting, filtering and encoding tasks. (URL: http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/) . Available for Windows, LINUX, MAC OS

LINUX DVD Ripping Tools

DVD Ripping Tools from LINUX

1. lxdvdrip is a tool to make a copy from a Video DVD for private use. It automates the process of ripping, authoring, preview and burning a DVD. It requires dvdbackup
2. DVD::Rip a full featured DVD copy program written in Perl. It provides an easy to use but feature-rich Gtk+ GUI to control almost all aspects of the ripping and transcoding process.
3. dvdbackup is another command-line DVD ripping. However it is not able to handle the latest encrypted DVD
4. QuickRip is a quick and easy but basic DVD ripper based on MPlayer and transcode. It is intended for those who do not care to configure framerates, clipping or other rarely-used options. It features both GUI and CLI interfaces.
5. Thoggen is a DVD backup utility ('DVD ripper') for Linux, based on GStreamer and Gtk+.
6. Winki The Ripper aims to be the easiest program for video encoding. It is actually just a graphical frontend for GNOME written in python to command line tools like mencoder, mplayer, mkvtoolnix, oggenc and lsdvd.
7. Lemonrip is an Linux application for ripping and encoding DVD into AVI files.
8. HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded DVD to MPEG-4 converter, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows.
9. iSofter DVD Ripper Platinum Convert DVD(VOB/IFO/VRO) to Adobe Premiere Windows Movie Maker Sony Vegas compatible AVI