zoe: itunes m4a and other problems

[Gain Paolo Mureddu]

zoe at purdue.edu wrote:

>Hey,
>
>thanks to all who gave advice on earlier questions;
>I was able to mount my hfs plus drive, after discovering that filesystem tag 
>is "hfsplus" and not "hfs+ or "hpfs" (I have no idea what hpfs is, but it was 
>mentioned in the man page for mount, while hfsplus wasn't.)  I was able to back 
>it up with my new DVD burner with little problem, reformat and re-install. 
>Thanks :)
>
>After downloading and installing a bunch of individual packages I was able to 
>get mplayer, vlc, and ogle to install.  VLC works but is slow.  Ogle didn't 
>even have the courtesy to install a man page, and it crashes every time I try 
>to launch it, leaving a frozen terminal window behind.  Perhaps I made a 
>mistake in installing it.
>  
>
You may want to uninstall Ogle and instead use Xine which has proper DVD 
playback, plus navigation menus support (Ogle's offspring)

>I've had the best luck with mplayer, although I had to spend a few hours 
>reading the man page.  It will play DVD's, although not very well, the video is 
>sort of 'jerky'.  No doubt my PII 350 isn't up to the challange of decoding.  
>My understanding of the situation is that I could get a faster processor, or 
>try to find a compatible (AGP 1x) video card with hardware DVD decoding.  It 
>seems like a new processor might be the more useful of the two, as it would 
>make other tasks faster as well.
>
>1. At what point are intel/amd processors able to fully decode/display DVD 
>video?  I've seen PIII boards for relatively cheap at the sunday market, and 
>with a trade in it probably wouldn't cost too much.  Is a PIII sufficent for 
>such a task?  what MHZ should I be thinking about?
>  
>
I'm pretty sure you'll be fine with a 500 Mhz processor, though a proc 
in the 700+ order would be preferable. Pretty much all DVD playback 
software recommends a 500+ Mhz processor. Also, it'd be nice if your 
video card supported XVideo acceleration (XV) and has ideally 16 
Megabytes minimum (this could prove a great advantage when playing back 
video like XViD or DVD).

>2. Almost all of my music is in the iTunes (m4a) format. (a few months ago I 
>used an iBook.  cash ran out and I had to hock it.)  Only about 10% of it 
>plays, the rest doesn't, mplayer prints out pages upon pages of errors, opens a 
>large video display window, then prints end of file.  The music which does play 
>is that which I ripped from CD after buying the iBook or that which is in mp3 
>format; the music which does NOT play was ripped with an earlier version of 
>iTunes on a beige G3.  I've heard of people having similar problems with iPods, 
>and I believe their solution was to 'update' the formatting of their music 
>files with iTunes.
>
There is a module (I don't know exactly what is it called) for XMMS 
which supports mp4 (m4a) and AAC (Apple Audio Compression) formats, and 
as far as I know works very well with music files downloaded with iTunes.

>  
>
>Does anyone know what exactly the problem is?  perhaps with the right arguments 
>mplayer can play these correctly?  is my only option an XP and iTunes install 
>followed by a tedious re-encoding?
>  
>
If you can get the propper codec, you will not need to re-encode anything.

>3.  Someone reccomended tux commander for use as a file browser.  I've tried it 
>and like it a lot.  Specifically, I like the ability to create multiple options 
>for file types which appear in the contextual menus.  What I would really like 
>to be able to do is create an action for music files which would print the 
>absolute path of the file to the last line of a given text file, which could 
>then be used as a playlist for mplayer.  Is there a command which will print 
>the complete path of a file?  (I know there is a way to do this using the '>' 
>symbol, where one can append the displayed text resulting from a command to a 
>file ex: cat something.txt > somethingelse.txt)  I know that 'pwd' displays the 
>complete path of the current directory, is there a similar command that one can 
>apply to a file?
>  
>
I wish I could help there, though you could just list the contents of 
the directory with something like find to actually print to std out the 
paths of the files, something like this should do:
find / -iname *.m4a > my_playlist.txt

>4.  Before, when I was working off the 4 gig. drive and did not have Gnome, 
>KDE, or XFCE installed I was able to start an X session which would load only a 
>clock and a terminal window.  Now that these guis are installed, this appears 
>not to be an option.  Is it still possible to launch x11 without launching 
>Gnome, KDE etc.?
>  
>
Don't you have a failsafe option there? This is pretty much equivalent 
to what you describe as a rudementary X session.

>
>thanks,
>-Zoe
>  
>
You're welcome, and hope this info helps.