Haiku Challenge Day 5

As I skipped sunday I am back at Haiku today on monday. The first thing I wanted to do today was watching the newest linux action show and I downloaded the video file and could watch it without any problem.

I thought it would be neat to show the video on my Samsung TV/Monitor so I tried plugging in the VGA cable to see how Haiku would handle it. It somehow automatically tried to clone the display output but somehow failed with the refreshing rate as it was blinking all over the place. It might be due to the nvidia chip build into my laptop as I remember that on earlier alphas on my intel chip based eeepc 701 haiku could successfully clone the output. Anyhow there is no configuration tool for a second monitor. The screen utility only shows the current internel display. Nevertheless I tried changing the resolution which had an effect on both displays but the refreshrate on the TV was still not correct so it did not stop flickering.

Btw. I uploaded the above photo taken with my smartphone to my Haiku machine just by plugging it in and I immediately get asked if I want to mount the smartphone read only or read/write which is btw. a pretty nice feature if you want to make sure not to delete anything accidently from your camera/smartphone.

The next thing that I tested was DVD playback. Sometimes I still want to playback some old dvds and this works pretty fine with Haiku. I just installed the VLC and could playback the dvd without any big problems. Menus and extras played fine too. This just works as expected.

What did not work was ripping the dvd I found Handbrake for Haiku (its basically the older version what was available for BeOS) it just crashes if I try to open up the dvd directly or indirectly by pointing to the dvd directory. Too bad for this. But I found an mplayer 1.1 package which includes mencoder that does dvdripping just fine. So I just executed

mplayer dvd://3 dvd-device /dev/disk/atapi/0/master/raw -v -dumpstream -dumpfile Dateiname.vob

to dump a simply vob stream that can be played back either by mplayer or vlc. It can also be converted simply with mencoder to an avi file like so

./mencoder ~/Desktop/Dateiname.vob -oac lavc -ovc lavc -o ~/Desktop/Dateiname.avi

All in all DVD ripping is a little bit complicated. At least a one click solution like handbrake working would be ideal.

The last thing I did today was trying to capture a screencast. The BeScreencapture utility is the only known screencasting application for Haiku. I tried this on my native resolution (1280x800) but the resulting screencast was too choppy. So I tried reducing the resolution to 800x600 and redid the screencast which is still a bit choppy but a lot better.

[Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uDBvuArfh_g]

So this was basically my 5th day in Haiku land.