Tuesday, February 17, 2009

How I adjusted the brightness of an MOV file

This past Valentines Day (2009), my wife and I hosted our monthly Couples-Club meeting at our house. The men hired a barbershop quartet to come and deliver roses, a card and sing them a couple of songs. I was able to record a video of the event on my 5MP Kodak digital camera. The problem was the video was too dark and some of the people could not be seen. Adjusting the brightness of the video turned out more work than I imagined.

I first thought to use Kino on my laptop but I remembered that application liked to convert everything to some DVI format and resave it into a much larger file. I never took the time to learn how to filter the brightness so I gave up on Kino with not too much effort. I did some searching in the Synaptic Package manager that comes with Ubuntu and found Avidemux.

I thought using Avidemux would do the trick nicely. I was able to figure out the Audio/Video format (copy does nothing to the source, it just makes a copy) and had to play with the output audio because it kept crashing on the audio codedec when I went to save the video. I was able to convert using different video codedecs but all the audio codedecs that did not crash, would create output files that had the audio truncated after about 19 seconds into the 4+ minute video. This even happened when I did a straight copy of the Video and Audio source. This lead me to believe there must be something wrong with Avidemux. I Googled high and low and did not find any solution to this problem so I decided to see if mencoder had an option that would increase the brightness.

After doing some Googles with mencoder and brightness, I came across the following web site that gave me the answer. Here is the command I used to increase the brightness and reduce the size so I could play it on my Nokia N810 Internet tablet:

mencoder 100_1470.MOV -oac mp3lame -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=1:vbitrate=300 -vf scale=320:240,eq2=1.0:0.8:0.1:0.7 -ffourcc DIVX -ofps 15 -o test2.avi

The eq2-1.0:0.8:0.1:0.7 was how the brightness was increased by 10% (third fractional parameter).

Skype runs now on Acert Aspire 9410

I downloaded Skype the other day at the urging of my daughter (she has a Microsoft Vista Dell Laptop that has a built-in video camera). I had tried using it a couple of years ago on Windows but did not have a reason for using it at the time, all the kids were still home. Now we have two girls in college and one in the US Marines so now I have a good reason to look at it again.

I chose to download it from the Skype web site even though I learned today, I believe I could have just as well installed it from the Medibuntu (I installed it from there on my work ThinkPad T61P). When I used it for the first time with my daughter (she is attending college at Iowa State University, go Cyclones!), video worked fine between the two machines but my daughter was not able to hear anything I said. To say the least, the conversation was a bit one-sided. I told my daughter I would work on getting it fixed so we could have a better experience with Skype the next time. me

I started debugging by looking at the Gnome volume applet and sure enough, the microphone was not listed on the mixer. When I enabled the microphone, it was of course muted. Now I thought this would work but when I tried the Skype Test Call contact, I could hear nothing. I tried a number of other settings in Skype for the audio but they did not work (I am running Ubuntu 8.10 and PulseAudio is what all my audio works with on Skype and other applications). I then tried enabling the Mic Boost in the Gnome volume applet and set it at its highest level. When I tried the Skype Test Call again, I could barely hear my voice so it looked like I was making progress.

I always remember reading about people using the console mode alsamixer control to fix lots of audio problems. I always think it should not work because I am configured to use PulseAudio server and not the Alsa audio server. When I brought up alsamixer, it only showed me one playback device at 100% and one capture device at 0%. I increased the capture device to 78% and when I ran a Skype Test Call, I could hear myself very well. I can't wait to call my daughter, I'm sure she will be pleased to hear my voice!

Wednesday, February 04, 2009

Solved no sound on Acer laptop (9410) w/ Ubuntu 8.10

I noticed the other day that sound from Amarok was not working on my Acer Aspire 9410. I tried running alsamixer without any parameters and only saw a single device. After googling a bit, I ran across the following command:

alsamixer -D hw:0

When I ran this command, I was able to see more devices and sound began working. I am not sure if this is needed every time I start my laptop. I will post back the next time I boot.

I also added the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel model=auto