Tag Archives: tutorial

It’s movie time: Plone 4 installation tutorial

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This blog post starts long overdue series of Sauna Sprint 2011 results.

Sauna Sprint 2011 was held in Tampere, Finland and it was a shared venture of EESTEC student organization and Plone open source community. Due to circumstances on the venue we were not probably as productive, measured  in quantity, as one could have been when locked in to the university basement with one gigabit fiber connection. However, I believe the seeds of this sprint will hopefully have some long lasting positive effects to make Plone more admin and developer friendly.

During the first sprint day the EESTEC students got a head first dive to learn Linux and Plone. Based on their expressions they didn’t have 100% fun time when trying to get Plone running on their computer…. or after getting it there doing basic admin things like installing add-ons and keep Plone still going on. Especially on the Windows platform which actually receives most downloads (as mentioned by in random IRC conversation by one Plonista) installing Plone + add-ons was not entirely trouble-free. It is unforgivable that an attempt to install an add-on will ruin your site to non-working state. Of course you can fix buildouts and things, but how to do it is unreachable for the audience piloting Plone and thus such information effectively does not exist. The default support answer “recover for back-ups” is not fun either.

The fellowship of sprint could not fix Plone site admin and developer experience altogether as someone had to warm up sauna and others were hunting mooses for the food. However a brave team of EESTEC students recorded a basic installation tutorial video for Plone 4 for Linux. Now I finally have been able to upload this to YouTube and it’s time for the global premier of the movie:

Yarr…. Kudos for the tutorial video team! Everything that counts in as making it easier for people to enter Plone is what the community needs. Hopefully this will inspire thought for the upcoming Plone conference and sprints.

Ps. Happy talk like a pirate day ⚓

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How to encode h264 video files for Nokia Series 60 standalone playback

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Bored with Spiderman 3 which came with your Nokia N95 8 GB? This guide shortly tells how to get movies into your N95 on Ubuntu Linux using ffmpeg video encoder. The aim is to encode video suitable for playback from Nokia N-series (N95, N78, others) mobile phone memory card. We use h264 + AAC codecs which provides the best quality/compression rate for Nokia phones currently.

Ubuntu does not distribute proprietary codes. First thing you need to do is to rebuild ffmpeg.  Since Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron ships with ffmpeg from 2007, which is aeons old in video codec years, you need to build libx264 and ffmpeg from SVN sources. Here are detailed, valid, instructions. Note that FFMPEG trunk is not currently stable (September 2008), so you need to use revision 15261 which needs this little patch. Indeed, this is a very difficult month to start your career in the dark world of video encoders.

To make it legal and support open source codec development,  please pay for your codecs.

Then we use this guide by Robert Swain. We have a tiny sub 2,4″ screen, we do not care about the quality and do one pass encoding. By empirical research, I have found that the following MPEG-4 profile parameters are compatible with N95 8 GB and provide the optimal result. You can vary video and audio bitrate depending on your taste.

Here is a script which recursivelu encodes all detected video files suitable for mobile format:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Optimal movie encoding for Nokia N-series mobile phones
#
# Copyright 2008 Red Innovation Ltd. 
#
# Say hi if you find this useful.
# We do some professional mobile video publishing, so if you
# need a helping hand please call us.
#
# Usage: Run encode.sh in any folder and all video files are recursively converted to mobile phone suitable format
#
# Note: We expect all the source material be in 16:9 aspect ration
#
# Also see http://www.nseries.com/index.html#l=support,search,faq,general,video%20encoding,53848
#

VIDEO_BITRATE=300k

AUDIO_BITRATE=72k

# Assume locally build ffmpeg + x264 in /usr/local/bin
# http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=786095
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib

# Search all source AVI, MPG and WMV video files
# Place all encoded files to the same folder with the source, with added .mp4 extension
find . -iname "*.avi" -or -iname "*.wmv" -or -iname "*.mpg" | while read src ; do
        srcfile=`basename "$src"`
	srcfolder=`dirname "$src"`
	dstfile="$srcfolder"/"$srcfile".mp4

	# The magical string!
	# Size and cropping is for 16:9 source material, so that 320:240 display will have black bars.
	# Fex pixels off... note that h264 sizes must be multiplies of 16, use 256x144 for streaming
	# N95 RealMedia player does not seem to respect MPEG-4 embedded aspect ration info.
	/usr/local/bin/ffmpeg -y -i "$srcfile" -acodec libfaac -ab $AUDIO_BITRATE -s 320x176 -aspect 16:9 -vcodec libx264 -b $VIDEO_BITRATE -qcomp 0.6 -qmin 16 -qmax 51 -qdiff 4 -flags +loop -cmp +chroma -subq 7 -refs 6 -g 250 -keyint_min 25 -rc_eq 'blurCplx^(1-qComp)' -sc_threshold 40 -me_range 12 -i_qfactor 0.71 -directpred 3 "$dstfile"

done