Saturday, January 7, 2017
10 days on Debian
10 days on Debian
I am happy to say that Ive officially been running Debian 64 "Squeeze" on all of my home computers for ten days now. The last computer to make the jump was my Mediacenter which Ive typically used as an Ubuntu based XBMC box since I built it a little over a year ago, but do to CONSTANT issues with Ubuntu 64bit like flash not working, HD video content not playing back, constant seg faults on frequently used programs, odd behavior from the X server... the list goes on and on. I finally got around to backing up all of the several hundred movies and ripped CDs I had on the 1TB hard drive (just in case, which turned out to be unnecessary but in terms of data loss its always better to err on the side of caution).
Installing Debian on my mediacenter turned out not to be quite a walk in the park and immediately had me realizing how much downstream in Ubuntu land does not get committed upstream to Debian. First I had to wrestle with getting FGLRX installed and configured. Luckily, when I first made the jump to Linux Ubuntu did not have tools like Jockey yet. While I despise them (Canonical) for pulling a Microsoft on us and dumbing down the operating system, I can understand why such tools exist. But I digress.
Like Id mentioned earlier, the primary function of this particular computer is to play back audio and video content so getting graphics acceleration working was priority 1. Then after getting the display working properly and FGLRX configured right I was very happy to be finally rid of a problem that constantly plagued me while running Ubuntu. Namely, my video card randomly choosing not to use the HDMI port and defaulting to the DVI port which I had nothing plugged into. Very frustrating, and generally embarrassing as it seemed to happen most often whenever Id be having people over for a movie night or a karaoke party... Its pretty hard to sell people on how cool Linux is when you have nothing but problems just getting the screen to work right.
But then came the next hurdle: getting the sound to work. In all fair ness, the sound worked just fine out of the box provided you were plugged in to the audio output jack on the onboard sound. Getting sound through HDMI was another story altogether. The problem turned out to be that the HDMI was not registering as an audio device in the sound applet, but ALSA did manage to detect it. After using the command line to detect my sound devices and then forcing output through the HDMI, I was pleasantly surprised to hear music finally coming out of my surround sound. Just in case youre wondering, the commands I used were
aplay -l
to list my audio devices, and then
sudo aplay -D plughw:1,3 ~/Music/Muse/Origin of Symmetry/New Born.mp3
In actuality, the first attempt to play anything resulting in deafening static coming through my surround sound speakers. Just on a hunch, I converted a song into a .wav file and then tested it using the same command. Worked like a charm. So I knew I was halfway there. Audio was capable of coming from the speakers so it was just a matter of configuring ALSA to use the HDMI port by default. Adding the following lines to /etc/asound.conf (the ALSA manual configuration file) did the trick:
type hw
card 1
device 3
}
So, with that I now had both sound and accelerated video playback through my awesome 50" HDTV. All I had to do beyond that was install the necessary audio and video codecs, conversion tools, rippers, and of course XBMC. One issue that I keep running in to is XBMC crashes whenever I try to play any HD video content, but playing HD video through VLC and Totem works flawlessly on Debian, whereas HD playback was always choppy using any program on Ubuntu. I suppose I can deal with having to play HD content outside of XBMC, but it would be nice to get everything in one place. It seems that the issue is with the 64 bit build of XBMC on Linux, as HD content played albeit poorly on 32 bit Ubuntu.
}
So, with that I now had both sound and accelerated video playback through my awesome 50" HDTV. All I had to do beyond that was install the necessary audio and video codecs, conversion tools, rippers, and of course XBMC. One issue that I keep running in to is XBMC crashes whenever I try to play any HD video content, but playing HD video through VLC and Totem works flawlessly on Debian, whereas HD playback was always choppy using any program on Ubuntu. I suppose I can deal with having to play HD content outside of XBMC, but it would be nice to get everything in one place. It seems that the issue is with the 64 bit build of XBMC on Linux, as HD content played albeit poorly on 32 bit Ubuntu.
Another thing that Im discovering does not work the same way on Debian as its Ubuntu counterpart is Winff, a very easy to use GUI frontend for the FFMPEG conversion tool. Long story short, Winff is anything but easy to use particularly because of the complete lack of presets and documentation. The more complete set of presets available on the Winff web site simply dont work at all, constantly throwing errors about missing codecs and improperly worded settings. Rather disappointing, really. So, Ive been hacking away at creating my own presets for the default Debian Winff, but its a painstaking process involving a lot of trial and error, and video conversion is time consuming to say the least. However, I have successfully created some Xvid/mp3 format .avi files which should be compatible with just about any computer system and Im working on fine tuning the results to make the highest quality files at the smallest size possible. Ive also been able to create files that will play back on my Android phone, but the quality wasnt really that great. But then again, using DVDFab to create Android compatible videos resulted in disappointment as well. Im sure that with enough work, Ill be able to come up with some respectable videos for my phone but it will take time. Once I come up with something decent, Ill post my results.
Available link for download
