Happy New Year everyone!
I've got a strange problem where my dad's laptop will sometimes associate with the wifi AP (but never ever get a DHCP response from it) when the laptop's running Kubuntu 9.04 or 9.10. A temporary install of Slackware 13 on the same machine showed that the laptop will associate with the AP and get an IP address very fast and with no problems. My laptop with a wifi device that uses the same driver works perfectly in Slackware 13...
Has anyone come across this problem? I've been on the #kubuntu channel today with not much useful help coming from there (understandable as it's New Years). There might be an issue with NetworkManager - that's now been uninstalled and replaced with wicd which seems to help a bit.
I was getting lots of "disassociating by local choice reason=3" in dmesg output which is output from the ieee80211 support layer in the kernel. The Kubuntu kernel that was tried also included 2.6.29.6 - which is the kernel that Slackware had. I suspect some weird ubuntu-ism or PEBKAC is at fault, but I'm running out of time to fix this.
The commands to reproduce: ifconfig wlan0 up iwconfig wlan0 essid myssid iwconfig wlan0 key s:mykey (yes the real key was correct but I'm not printing here) iwconfig wlan0 ap aa:bb:cc:dd:ee:ff dhclient wlan0
Somewhere after iwconfig key or ap, the wiconfig output lost all the ssid and key and ap settings (if they showed any beforehand). dhclient just sat there broadcasting for a response.
Wicd actually helped in the sense that once the GUI was told to connect, the iwconfig settings were set for essid/key/ap and the problem was that the interface could not get a DHCP response. The hardware RFKill switch was set to off (RF allowed).
Any ideas please?
Thanks, Srdjan
It is very much a long shot, but is there anyone out there with any knowledge of copying VHS tapes to a PC for archiving purposes?
I have a fair number that I need to archive sooner rather than later so any guidance would be brilliant.
On a side note, anyone happen to have a spare VCR I can loan/purchase? Preferably with S-video output.
Cheers,
Steve
On 01-Jan-10 02:52:13, stevey.eu wrote:
It is very much a long shot, but is there anyone out there with any knowledge of copying VHS tapes to a PC for archiving purposes?
I have a fair number that I need to archive sooner rather than later so any guidance would be brilliant.
On a side note, anyone happen to have a spare VCR I can loan/purchase? Preferably with S-video output.
Cheers, Steve
I have been solving this problem "the hard way" -- though to be honest it was a carry-over from archiving to DVD which I started doing some years ago.
Having myself a big collection of VHS tapes going back over more than 20 years, and wanting to transfer them to DVD, I bought a combo VCR/DVD player/recorder. This plays from, and records TV input (from aerial or from coax link) onto, VHS tape, and similarly plays from, and records onto, DVD; and it will also copy from tape to DVD and vice versa.
So I put a tape in, put in a DVD, initialise the DVD, set the tape to the desired start-point, choose "copy from tape to DVD", and start it. I then have to wait while the tape plays at normal speed, and have to be careful to stop the playback at the desired moment. Then the machine finalises the recording on the DVD, and it's done.
After that, I have a DVD which I can copy as a DVD-iso onto a computer, and then I have it on computer as well. Totem (on Gnome) plays the result with no problem. And I also have the DVD which can then be played on any DVD player.
I have only fairly recently been doing the latter, since I did not previously have a computer with enough HD space for storing much of that sort of thing.
For the record, the player/recorder is a "Bush DVRHS02 Combined DVD Recorded and VCR", which came at the relatively cheap end (£150 from Argos), but there are plenty of other models with similar functionality.
Of course, the direct solution would be to copy straight from VCR output via a TV input on the computer, but I have never done this so will not attempt to offer advice!
Hoping this helps, and Happy New Year. Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@manchester.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 094 0861 Date: 01-Jan-10 Time: 08:36:47 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------
On Fri, 01 Jan 2010 02:52:13 +0000 "stevey.eu" alug@stevey.eu allegedly wrote:
It is very much a long shot, but is there anyone out there with any knowledge of copying VHS tapes to a PC for archiving purposes?
I have a fair number that I need to archive sooner rather than later so any guidance would be brilliant.
Steve
I have done this successfully using the aerial out to TV card aerial input and then capturing with mencoder. Script below.
#!/bin/sh # # mencoder script to capture from VHS input through TV card. Produces file encoded in an avi container suitable for later burning to DVD # # $1 = filename # /usr/bin/mencoder tv:// -tv driver=v4l2:input=0:norm=pal:channel=52:chanlist=europe-west:device=/dev/video0:alsa:adevice=hw.1,0:amode=1:audiorate=32000:forceaudio:forcechan=1:buffersize=128 -ovc lavc -lavcopts threads=2:vcodec=mpeg4:mbd=2:trell:v4mv:turbo:autoaspect:vbitrate=2400 -vf pp=lb,harddup -oac mp3lame -lameopts br=128:cbr:mode=0 -ffourcc divx -o $1.avi # # end script
Note - only use "mbd=2:trell" if you have a minimum of a dual core processor and you use the threads=2 option, otherwise you may drop frames or lose synch (see Mplayer online instructions at "14.3.4. Encoding setting examples" of http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML-single/en/MPlayer.html
And if you want "high quality" (of doubtful value if you are recording from a standard VHS using the aerial output) try this (1 hour of tape = 2 - 2.2 Gig of output MPG)
/usr/bin/mencoder -tv norm=PAL:driver=v4l2:width=720:height=576:input=0:channel=52:chanlist=europe-west:device=/dev/video0:alsa:adevice=hw.1,0:amode=1:audiorate=32000:forceaudio:forcechan=1:buffersize=64 tv:// -oac lavc -ovc lavc -of mpeg -mpegopts format=dvd -vf pp=lb/ha/va/dr,hqdn3d,harddup -srate 48000 -af lavcresample=48000 -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg2video:vrc_buf_size=1500:vrc_maxrate=8000:vbitrate=7000:keyint=15:acodec=mp2:abitrate=192:aspect=4/3 -o capture.mpg
You will need to experiment to find free channels on the video card and then set the VHS player to output to that.
Some notes I made for myself which I meant to use in a writeup on my blog (but which I still haven't got around to yet) may be helpful.
--- start notes --
When writing about this, point to: http://forum.videohelp.com/topic307679.html for the mencoder line
and http://www.videohelp.com/tools/ for a list of possibly useful tools.
(and http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=11213&sid=e8dce0202973863690a89... for the debian mencoder line)
and then point to http://www.my-guides.net/en/content/view/75/26/ for info about creating DVD from the files using DeVeDe
1. connect tape player and use RCA to line in on card
2. capture with mencoder line above (to mpeg)
3. load captured mpeg into avidemux to strip out unnecessary crud (eg black lines at the beginning and at the end)
4. save the resultimg file (don't use avidemux to create iso - too complicated
5. import into DeVeDe and convert to iso
6. Use brasero (not K3b) to burn iso to disk
7. point to: http://mediainfo.sourceforge.net/en/Download for details of mediainfo cli tool for checking codecs etc.
Point to supported hardware at http://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/Supported_Hardware (mainly about DVB though, not analogue TV
excellent wiki at http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/Main_Page
and really good page on recording a stream at http://www.linuxtv.org/v4lwiki/index.php/TV_Recording (compares mencoder with ffmpeg for example)
point to the avidemux wqiki at http://www.avidemux.org/admWiki/index.php?title=Main_Page
---------- end notes
On a side note, anyone happen to have a spare VCR I can loan/purchase? Preferably with S-video output.
Unfortunately I recycled mine when I had converted all my important old tapes to digital format and copied to DVD. You could easily get one from frecycle (which is where I sent mine).
HTH
Mick
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The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------
I have had similar experiences capturing VHS into a digital format, I have a TV card (you can pick a nice one up for £40) so it thusly is a hardware encoder/decoder. It has an s-video input so I can plug something in and record in realtime.
Just take a sound feed in via my sound card to capture the audio and Bobs your uncle. You will obviously need some video capture software and audio capturing software or preferably some software that can take the video feed and audio feed and record them together to save later mux'ing them together.
On 01/01/2010 14:56, James Bensley wrote:
I have had similar experiences capturing VHS into a digital format, I have a TV card (you can pick a nice one up for £40) so it thusly is a hardware encoder/decoder. It has an s-video input so I can plug something in and record in realtime.
What model is it, if you can remember?
Just take a sound feed in via my sound card to capture the audio and Bobs your uncle. You will obviously need some video capture software and audio capturing software or preferably some software that can take the video feed and audio feed and record them together to save later mux'ing them together.
Yeah, that was my original plan.
2010/1/1 stevey.eu alug@stevey.eu:
On 01/01/2010 14:56, James Bensley wrote:
I have had similar experiences capturing VHS into a digital format, I have a TV card (you can pick a nice one up for £40) so it thusly is a hardware encoder/decoder. It has an s-video input so I can plug something in and record in realtime.
What model is it, if you can remember?
Mine is the DTV1000T (Check the URL below, its being phased out for newer models): http://www.leadtek.com/eng/tv_tuner/default.asp?lineid=6&seriesid=55&...
On 01/01/2010 21:51, James Bensley wrote:
2010/1/1 stevey.eualug@stevey.eu:
On 01/01/2010 14:56, James Bensley wrote:
I have had similar experiences capturing VHS into a digital format, I have a TV card (you can pick a nice one up for £40) so it thusly is a hardware encoder/decoder. It has an s-video input so I can plug something in and record in realtime.
What model is it, if you can remember?
Mine is the DTV1000T (Check the URL below, its being phased out for newer models): http://www.leadtek.com/eng/tv_tuner/default.asp?lineid=6&seriesid=55&...
So one would presume that something like the following should do the job:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Leadtek-Winfast-DTV2000H-TV-tuner-card-PCI_W0QQitemZ30...
2010/1/1 stevey.eu alug@stevey.eu:
So one would presume that something like the following should do the job:
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Leadtek-Winfast-DTV2000H-TV-tuner-card-PCI_W0QQitemZ30...
From a hardware point of view I would say yes but using it in Linux is
another matter, I have mine on a dual boot box with XP Pro and have never tried to use it in in my other OS which is Ubuntu. I would expect if you looked you would find some support for it somewhere though, but as I say I haven't looked yet, its still on the to do list.
Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
I was getting lots of "disassociating by local choice reason=3" in dmesg output which is output from the ieee80211 support layer in the kernel. The Kubuntu kernel that was tried also included 2.6.29.6 - which is the kernel that Slackware had. I suspect some weird ubuntu-ism or PEBKAC is at fault, but I'm running out of time to fix this. [...] Any ideas please?
I wonder if one or the other had patched the kernel. Similar problems seem to appear at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/knetworkmanager/+bug/2721... http://bugzilla.intellinuxwireless.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1629 but I hate networking and don't know enough to spot the cause.
The fixes suggested on intellinuxwireless.org don't look quick, while I think ubuntu haven't got a fix yet but their page is rather confusing.
Hope that helps,
2010/1/1 MJ Ray mjr@phonecoop.coop:
Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
I was getting lots of "disassociating by local choice reason=3" in dmesg output which is output from the ieee80211 support layer in the kernel. The Kubuntu kernel that was tried also included 2.6.29.6 - which is the kernel that Slackware had. I suspect some weird ubuntu-ism or PEBKAC is at fault, but I'm running out of time to fix this. [...] Any ideas please?
I wonder if one or the other had patched the kernel.
I think the only patch the Slackware kernel had was the recent security bugfix with afaik IP networking. Maybe this is making it work. I can't say about ubuntu - do they patch their kernels? I suspect they do. I did actually try 2.6.29.6 vanilla, and had no luck getting wifi to work.
Similar problems seem to appear at https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/intrepid/+source/knetworkmanager/+bug/2721...
Comment #81 seems to suggest this is a kernel issue, and one should try earlier kernels, but I doubt this is the case for me as 2.6.29.6 works on a different distro.
Also I should have mentioned (sorry) that this is with WEP. Most of the problems I've seen in bug reports are due to WPA and wpa_supplicant; (and also with NetworkManager).
http://bugzilla.intellinuxwireless.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1629 but I hate networking and don't know enough to spot the cause.
Only comment #11 seems relevant - the same reason value is given for disassociating, but the machine in question has not been doing a suspend/resume cycle.
The fixes suggested on intellinuxwireless.org don't look quick, while I think ubuntu haven't got a fix yet but their page is rather confusing.
Thanks for the links - it did bring up a possible command i could try: modprobe -v iwl3945 disable_hw_scan=1
It might be some hardware scan feature is causing a problem.
Thanks
Srdjan
-
James Bensley -
mick -
MJ Ray -
Srdjan Todorovic -
stevey.eu -
Ted.Harding＠manchester.ac.uk