Book review Linux Multimedia Hacks Tips and Tools for Taming Images, Audio, and Video by Kyle Rankin

Reviewed by LeeMcKusick

Linux Multimedia Hacks is for a Linux computer user who wants to listen to music, watch video and edit images. The book provides 100 how-to-do-it essays or hacks organized into five chapters.

Each hack describes a new function you can add to your computer. The hack instructions tell you what files to download, how to set up the application and explains a bit about other programs that contribute to to the final result.

The author, Kyle Rankin spoke at a Peninsula Linux Users group meeting on his Knoppix Hacks book. Multimedia Hacks has a comparable level of technical competency. This book names the best available open source applications and shows some of the best uses of the applications. Kyle has a website http://greenfly.org that continues with further hacks and discussions.

The benefit I have got from implementing 4 out of the 100 hacks is I now have streaming audio and I can now readily compress and annotate photos for use in email.

The good news is everything I tried from the book works. The bad news is audio, video, broadcast radio, web page video and broadcast TV is still a zoo. Like a zoo, all kinds of interesting stuff is still locked in proprietary cages. The most improvement is local multimedia applications and data on your own machine. The outer world is still riddled with inconsistencies, not well described, with wildly varying quality.

One of the themes of the book is in some areas Linux matches and surpasses the other two proprietary computer operating systems. I see clear signs that indeed Linux is catching up to the multimedia abilities of Windows and OS-X.

Linux provides a different and more complicated musical universe from the clean white appliance world of I-tunes. Linux matches and exceeds the "push the flush lever" ability of XP to download and display USB camera images.

I found Chapter 1 "Images" provided a couple of ideas that I used right away. I needed a thumbnail photo of myself holding a Fresnel solar concentrator. I stepped out in the yard, took the photo, downloaded the image and crunched the image using "convert" into a thumbnail as inspired by Hack 3 from Chapter 1. Done in 10 minutes.

Other hack projects show interesting things that I am unable to finish. Hack #5 that tells how to apply a watermark to a photo. A watermark is a text line like "Photo by Lee McKusick". The easy part of this hack is using "convert" with the correct command line. The hard part is creating a watermark file. That was skipped. The author lapsed into passive voice saying "once the watermark file has been created...".

About 1/3 of Linux Multimedia Hacks is dedicated to Audio. Chapter 2 focuses on "local music". That is getting your CD collection playing in Linux, pushing audio over your local network, indexing, documenting and tagging audio files, burning CDs from your own collection.

"Big music" as in stuff that is out on the Internet is addressed in Chapter 4 "Broadcast Media". The most usable item is this group is "streamtuner" which I downloaded and used with no difficulty.

But saying streamtuner works is not the same as being happy with the outcome.

For instance, after installing streamtuner I wanted to find a radio station broadcasting Neil Young's new "Living With War" Internet pre-release album. No success. How about finding any radio station playing music by the composer Philip Glass? No success. How about using streamtuner to access KCSM San Mateo Community College Jazz? No success.

It turns out, with further reading of Linux Multimedia Hacks, that partial solutions to some of these problems exist. The most solutions exist for the local computer side of things . There is an amarock indexer and there is a MusicBrainz^? distributed database under construction.

The out there Internet is still not well indexed, there are still multiple formats and there is more streaming music and more than any person can attend to.

Tuesday, May 16, 2006

-- LeeMcKusick - 16 May 2006