r3dux.org

Flash on Linux has always been a mess, especially on 64-bit, so when I upgraded my flash plugin the other day to the latest 11.2 beta I wasn’t in the least bit surprised when it broke. This time, watching videos with people in them had the people looking like they were from Avatar – all the skin was blue, and in general the colours were well off. For example:

Flash being, well, Flash...

To fix this up, you need to twiddle with the flash settings at /etc/adobe/mms.cfg, or if you wanted to, do the twiddling through the Flash-Aid plugin like below (in my final working config I actually use the top option of GPU validation as enabled and disable VDPAU):

Flash Plugin Acceleration Options

Once that’s done, restart your browser and hey-presto – correct colours in Youtube:

Flash Colours Restored

You may have to turn on or off some combination for it to work with your particular machine in a trial & error style, because what might work in YouTube might crash when using other flash video sites (vimeo, gametrailers etc). After some playing around, I’ve decided to live with the bad youtube colours and use the following settings in the /etc/adobe/mms.cfg config file:

$ cat /etc/adobe/mms.cfg 
OverrideGPUValidation=1
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=0

And as I’m a curious lad, I thought I’d make a table of what works and what doesn’t (on my setup – LMDE w/ NVidia 290 drivers):

Looks like there’s no clear winner that works for everything… Oh wells, there’s a good write-up with alternate solutions and things over on WebUpd8 here – even though they talk about flash 10.2 on Ubuntu, this is the first time I’ve had this issue and it’s on LMDE (Debian based) with the flash 11.2 beta and the same fixes work here. I guess if you’re that bothered, you could always downgrade to some previous flashplugin (like something from the 10.x series) and see how that holds out.

But on the upside, it’s kinda funny watching things in Avatar mode =P

Just noting this for future reference, but I finally got iTunes working properly on a Windows PC that would at random:
- transfer some songs to iPod Touch devices successfully,
- transfer some other songs, then crash, then the device reports no music on it, or
- corrupt the device so badly it needed fresh firmware restored.

And the the culprit turned out to be…. Zone Alarm. No kidding. Turn off Zone Alarm and everything worked instantly.

iTunes is still a god-awful PoS though, but at least it’ll now transfer music and apps. If you’re getting “app could not be installed because it is not signed” issues with iTunes, and you’re installing legit apps, chances are that turning off Zone Alarm will fix it right up. Amazing.

As it’s Christmas and I’ve got a little bit of free time, and since I saw that quakeforge 0.6.0 was released the other day, I thought I’d have a play around with it as I’d not played any Quake (1) for ages… so with lots of fighting to compile and use it properly I finally got quakeforge up and running – and was distinctly unimpressed. Grr! So, this got me wondering about what good quake engines are available at the moment (apart from FuhQuake and Tenebrae) – and then I came across the DarkPlaces Quake engine – and it rocks!

The above is a self-captured version of the Quake Done Quick: With a Vengence episode 1 speedrun – and doesn’t she look purty? It’s almost a shame that everything is moving so fast as you don’t really get a chance to check out all the cool particle effects, shadows, texture detail and all the other eye candy.

The above capture is using:

• rygel’s “high” texture pack ( the “ultra” pack – at ~2.7GB of textures – would kill my 3yr old laptop =/ ),
• DP pretty water v0.51,
• Romi’s rtlights file: For ID maps, For mission pack 1 maps,
• Ogro’s monster skins, and
• Seven’s effectinfo.txt settings file with a tweak to the underwater grenade bubble spacing (line 926 – changed from 6 to 1).

Then it’s just a case of cranking the effects and lighting up to “full” from the Options menu, and capturing the footage with glc-capture through the command:

glc-capture -o ~/test.glc -s ./darkplaces-glx -game rygel_textures_high -game dp_pretty_water -game ogro_monster_skins -game qdq

Finally, to get the resulting capture file (~3.6GB!) to an avi using h264 and with a gamma tweak to 1.5 I used the folling shell script (which I found here):

#!/bin/bash
AUDIOFILE=$(echo $1 | sed 's/.glc/.mp3/')
RESULTFILE=$(echo $1 | sed 's/.glc/.avi/')
 
# Extract audio
glc-play $1 -o - -a 1 | lame -hV2 - $AUDIOFILE
 
# merge audio with .glc video file
glc-play $1 -o - -y 1 | mencoder -demuxer y4m - -audiofile $AUDIOFILE -oac copy -ovc x264 -x264encopts qp=18:pass=1 -vf eq2=1.5 -of avi -o $RESULTFILE

Rawr! =P

As a final note, if you really wanted to see the fastest Quake speedruns, then you’ll want to check out Quake Done Quickest – but as the demos aren’t available as a single, combined pack (you have to get each level individually) – I just stuck with QDQ:WaV, which is still super-awesome =D

Had this song stuck in my head on-and-off for the last five days. Maybe this will exorcise it…

Good track, good vid – I think I prefer the running up that hill Kate Bush cover and The Bitter End, as songs, but this is still very engaging.

I actually first heard this track in the soundtrack for SSX 3 (best snowboarding game that exists – including up to 2011) on the PS2 instead of on getting a Placebo album – but there you go… I guess any press is good press – and it turns our they’re making a new SSX (trailer) to be released in 2012 – hope it’s good!

Was listening to some Big Pauper (Panzah Zandah) stuff the other day when I heard this on the (free) Cops Eat Flowers EP – and I really like it, it’s kinda corky and has a cool beat and some nice samples and stuff. Perfect summer trip-hop/chillout stuff, so I thought I’d share.

There’s lots more free/pay-what-you-want stuff at the Big Pauper site – Me & THIS Army (Radiohead remixes) is especially good, and there’s also some nice tracks on the Beck remix album Aphids on the Lettuce!