subtitle trouble

My friend gave me a copy of Final Fantasy - Advent Children. It has an srt file with english subtitles. But for some reason, mplayer wouldn't recognise the subtitles.

Then I realised that the subtitle file and avi file must have the same name. So a simple renaming solved the problem, and I could play the subtitles

Copying VCD tracks using cdfs

I tried to copy a vcd just by copying the avseq01.dat and other .dat files, but I was getting an I/O error. So I found out that I have to install a program called CDFS. You can download it from here.

Next, I unzipped the folder, used "make" and "make install". I had to do an additional step: sudo insmod cdfs.ko This is to activate the filesystem. See the INSTALL file for more details.

Now I mounted the VCD, not using iso9660, but cdfs, like this: sudo mount -t cdfs /dev/dvd /media/cdrom

Now when I browse the /media/cdrom folder, I can see the vcd tracks as mpeg files. All I have to do is copy them. Its taking a long time, but its working...

Apparently, CDFS has a lot of other uses, like copying data from corrupt multisession disks. Get more info from this site.

Update: 05 August 2006: Easier solution:

Just get vcdimager and use vcdxrip :)

Enable DMA

Is your CD/DVD Burning too slow? Does it make your system hang? Maybe you need to enable DMA !!

I bought a DVD writer, an LG model, and I noticed that burning was slower than usual and it was making my system hang.

To check whether DMA was enabled, I did:

sudo cat /proc/ide/hdd/


The last line was something like this:

using_dma 0 0 1 rw


Notice that the value in the first column is zero, which means that DMA is not enabled.

Then I ran the command:

sudo hdparm -d1 /dev/hdd


And Tada !! CD burning doubled in speed, and no more hanging. cool, eh ?

Edit: Everytime you reboot, DMA will be disabled, so you have to take appropriate steps to make sure that DMA is enabled on boot. Ubuntu users can follow this guide.

Resizing lots of images at once

My sister got engaged recently, and I had a lot of high resolution pics, which I wanted to upload. I needed to resize these images, in order to make them small and upload them.

I found out about a command called "mogrify". All I had to do was:
1) Create a separate folder, and backup the high-res pics, as they will be overwritten.
2) Run the command mogrify -geometry 640x425 ./*.* in the directory that I had to resize the images.
3) Wait...

In a couple of minutes, all the images will be resized !!

Mogrify can do a lot more than just resize images. Run mogrify -help for details. :)

Why windows Vista won't suck.

I came across this article from slashdot. Why Windows Vista won't suck

Well, I'll be able to tell that only after I use it. Moreover, my computer isn't fast enough to support Vista. I've only downloaded a transition pack that changed the graphics to Vista style :-P

Whatever the case, there seem to be some major improvements in Vista. Lets wait and see