IT Gang - A place for tips and tricks

I have downloaded some very old and nice Romanian songs played by Compact, my wife's favourite band. After I have unzipped the archive, I double clicked on it and then Totem Movie player started. But then I got an error because I was missing some codecs...

It was not the first time I got an error from Totem player, but this time I was really getting mad! Instead, as the famous saying says ("Don't get mad, get even!") I googled for "winamp for linux". I found a version 3 alpha that did not look very nice, nor stable, and then I found this on the winamp support forum:

Some people reported that Winamp can run under Linux using Wine (with limited features, eg. only classic skins). No guarantees though, Winamp is a Windows program.

(source)

Ok, so no linux version for Winamp... Not good, but I can live without it. But what player to use?

And so I found amarok which looked nice. But, most important, they had instructions on how to get the needed codecs to play mp3!

To enable MP3 support, the rpmfusion repository should be added to Yum. Click here to find out how to do that.

Once rpmfusion is enabled, the easiest way to enable all the freeworld/nonfree codec support, is to:

yum update @sound-and-video

This will enable mp3 support for Totem player also. But you can still go ahead and download amarok if you need a more robust mp3 player. I for one am using amarok.

PS: This command will also update all video codecs for Totem player. This means that from now on you can also play movies that were not able to play before (this includes compressed AVI, WMV format and more!)

[quote]
Have ever laid your eyes on a cool scene from a movie? Something that you would want to capture as an image and put it as your desktop, avatar, etc. ? So what do you do when you want that done?

"Well", says the unexperienced but still Windows familiar person, "that's an easy task! You start playing the movie with some video player and the press the <> button. Open up <> and paste the contents of the clipboard and save it in whatever format you want".

Those of you who watched Cartoon Network and their cute cartoon called "2 Stupid Dogs" will recognize this quote:

Quote:

Now, isn't that cute? ... BUT IS WRONG!!!!

[end quote]

This is just the starting part of a forum post I once posted on a tips and tricks wannabe forum. You can find the post here: http://www.i-hate-microsoft.com/capture-a-frame
-of-a-movie-in-media-player-t3.html

But blogging is more fun :) And now I have a solution for it so "it's tiiiime to blllogg it".

The problem: You are playing a news movie using Media Payler. You see your neighbor's face and want to take a screenshot so you can make fun of his haircut. You pause the movie, press the print screen button (Prnt Scrn key, with or without the combination with ALT), you open paint, paste the screenshot and save it as a JPEG formated image. And what do you get? This:


(Please note this is the actual screen shot I saved using MS Paint. You can test it yourself by following the steps described above).

What you actually expected to see, that is the content of the movie, is missing. Why? Because of the way movies are played in Windows. That is, for hardware acceleration purposes, the movie part is just a "layer overplayed over the player window" ( :D ). Having said this, when you take a screen shot of the player, you only get the player window and some pointer to the memory location where the video layer is located. When you paste that in MS Paint, you see (kind of) both layers, but if you close Media Player, only the player image remains (because the video layer pointer points to nothing).

Solution? Go to: Control Panel->Display->Settings tab->Advanced->Troubleshoot tab and drag the Hardware acceleration slider to None. Save the settings and try the capture again:


That's it! "Keep it safe and smooth people!"

NOTE: While this setting has benefits, it also has some drawbacks. Play with it at your own risk and read the note offered by MS on the Troubleshoot tab before proceeding. I did this once and I lost my desktop image. That's not a big deal, but who knows what else can happen. Disabling hardware acceleration also means less detail in graphics applications. Bottom line - handle with care and knowledge. If you are unsure, just leave it as is and use a smart screen capture tool.