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Entries from June 2012.

Rosa-users mailing list is now open

7th June 2012
ROSA Linux is letting us know that their first public English mailing list is now OPEN.

Feel free to go and register.

This should be a nice addition to their English speaking forums.
Tags: linux, mandriva, rosa. | No comments

Skype 4.0 on EL6 (CentOS/Stella, ScientifixLinux, RHEL, PUIAS) update

22nd June 2012
UPDATE 14th August 2014: Microsoft has released a new Skype version, 4.3.0.37 - you need AT LEAST this version to be able to login any more as they seem to have changed something in the authentication process. It is available in my repo, grab the latest from here: http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/dextop/el6/i386/

So after a long long time we finally have a new Skype linux release - and it's not even a beta!
This seems to be the first release under Microsoft's auspice and I hope it will run well and not bother the users with too many annoyances (I hear the Windows version has in-call ads now? wtf!).
As usual, EL users will still not be able to just "rpm -ivh" their packages - this has never been Skype's strongest point, not even after M$'s acquisition, but it's not like I was expecting anything.
Here's how to install it manually: http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Skype.

UPDATE: Now there is an RPM that does all the dirty work. If you run Stella or Centos with nux-dextop repo active then you can just yum install skype, otherwise:
wget
ftp://mirror.yandex.ru/fedora/russianfedora/russianfedora/nonfree/el/updates/6/i386/skype-4.0.0.7-3.el6.R.i586.rpm
yum localinstall --nogpgcheck skype-4.0.0.7-3.el6.R.i586.rpm
The RPM maintainer is Arkady L. Shane of the Russian Fedora community. Thank you, Arkady!

Enjoy!
Tags: centos, el6, linux, rhel, scientifixlinux, skype, stella. | No comments

Hardware accelerated video playback on EL6 (RHEL, Centos, SL) and Intel SandyBridge

23rd June 2012
Recently I got to play with a linux laptop that had an NVidia card and was impressed by how well and efficient mplayer is when using VDPAU.
My personal laptop however is an all-Intel one with a 2nd generation i5 SandyBridge CPU and no NVidia GPU, but an Intel HD 3000. This is quite a popular setup nowadays and this is actually great because it turns out we can have hardware accelerated playback using entirely open source software, no binary blob required. Linus will be happy. :-)

Don't get me wrong, this is a great machine and mplayer uses around 30% of one core when playing 1080p video, however this is no match for the under 10% when using NVidia's VDPAU.

So let's start. What we need is LibVA from splitted-desktop.com and gstreamer-vaapi (to enable acceleration in Totem) or/and a version of mplayer with VAAPI patches. I'll assume you are using Stella or EL6 with my repo nux-dextop.

yum install libva-freeworld gstreamer-vaapi
And that's it, open some HD content in Totem (aka Movie Player) and behold low CPU usage.

Thanks to Tux99 at SL forum for packaging gstreamer-vaapi.

If you want to use mplayer though we need to work a bit more and build it from source (until I'll make a package of it).
We need to install some development packages first: 
yum install gcc make freetype-devel alsa-lib-devel pulseaudio-libs-devel yasm-devel patch subversion libva-freeworld-devel

Next we need to get mplayer-vaapi and build it: 
cd ~/Downloads
wget http://www.splitted-desktop.com/static/libva/mplayer-vaapi/mplayer-vaapi-20110127.tar.bz2
tar xjf mplayer-vaapi-20110127.tar.bz2
cd mplayer-vaapi-20110127
./checkout-patch-build.sh
...wait for the build process to finish then you can merely copy the mplayer binary to somewhere in the path and that's it - we do this not to overwrite or mess up other pre-existing mplayer installatons in the system. 
cd mplayer-vaapi
mkdir -p ~/bin
cp mplayer ~/bin/mplayer-vaapi

At this point we're pretty much done, try testing it by playing some HD mp4 file with the following parameters: -vo vaapi -va vaapi. 
mplayer-vaapi -vo vaapi -va vaapi /path/to/HDvideo.mp4
and enjoy low CPU usage. :-)

If you want to skip inputing these parameters each time you want to use VA-API then simply add the following to ~/.mplayer/config : 
vo=vaapi,xv,
va=vaapi


Here's the difference on my system:

Stock MPlayer, no acceleration:


VA-API enabled MPlayer:


This should work across all i3/i5/i7 chipsets (Intel HD 2000 & 3000), feedback welcome.
Tags: centos, el6, intel, libva, mplayer, sandy bridge, scientificlinux, stella, vaapi. | No comments