::A Geek in Korea::

One of my long standing issues with moving to Linux was trying to find a suitable video conversion application for my Cowon D2. It had to churn out suitable files and let me transfer them without booting into Windows. I tried, and failed, many times to find a solution to this problem, and was content to just boot Windows from time to time.

My second thought was to try virtualization, running Windows inside Linux. This wouldn’t force me to reboot, but I’d have to get my Cowon D2 working with virtualization software. This wasn’t any easier to configure and I’d still have to convert files in Windows.

Not long ago, it seems that Iriviter became a Java application. Since it is multiplatform, it’s easy to run. I set it up and had it convert a video. I was excited to get it working, and send an email to the creator of the program thanking him for his work to make it easier to use. Sadly, this is before I opened one of the converted files. The audio for one of the files I converted was broken and sounded horrible. Back to the trenches.

I decided to try out Avidemux once again. Since I am not a codec/encoding junkie, I don’t know all the proper settings to get it working. I went to the iAudophile forums, hoping to see if there were any tutorials to get it working. I didn’t find anything particularly helpful, but a thread with some encoding snobbery mentioned that the D2 couldn’t handle “B-Frames“. I don’t know what B-frames are, but decided to poke around to see if that might have been the source of my problems. I find out that Avidemux had settings for B-frames. I turned off, unchecked, and lowered all the settings I could for everything I could find. I encoded a video and crossed my fingers.

Success! With blind luck I happened to have stumbled upon what was keeping Avidemux from encoding proper videos. Video settings are as follows:

In the main menu, select video and set it to Xvid. In the “Configure” menu, in the Motion & Misc tab, uncheck BHVQ and lower “Number of B-Frames” to zero. In the Quantization tab, I’ve been moving the “Type” to “MPEG” and lowering the B-frame quantizer settings to zero as well. I haven’t done exhaustive testing to see which of these settings do what. In filters, I add a resize to 320×240, and possibly black bars to keep the ratio correct and from looking odd. I don’t touch anything else. Audio is set to “copy”, and a save the output as an .avi file.

These settings work for me. I’m just a monkey pushing at buttons that get a desired result. I’ve successfully transcoded Xvid files with these settings to watch on my D2 with no problems. There is no “batch” setting with Avidemux, so I have to babysit the process to fill up my player. This isn’t idea, but it’s a start. Hopefully I’ll figure out what is causing my iriviter problems so that I can just cue up a lot of videos and not worry about B-frames and quantization, whatever it is.

In an odd twist, my current game of the week happens to be a Linux friendly old school style deathmatch FPS game. Nexuiz brings back the glory days of college LAN Quake 2 deathmatch sessions for me. Back then, I had a ton of friends that were heavily into FPS games, shooting each other from room to room in the dorm. I played Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake 2 and 3, but dropped out of the FPS scene after Half-Life became popular.

For whatever reason, realistic shooting games never appealed to me very much. I like my violence cartoon-like and over the top. Nexuiz’s creators have gone out of their way to recreate this exact style of FPS, and I’ve been loving every minute of it. Currently I’m working my way through the Campaign mode. There are Bots that are fairly decent, and different winning scenarios. One of the reasons I don’t play modern FPS games is that I burn out on the scenarios extremely quickly. Nexuiz’s campaign mode is a different game style each time you play.

The level design and look of the game is extremely polished. This could easily be a commercial game from a few years ago. It supports all the beautiful goodies that come from advanced video cards, but runs fine and looks great without it too. I’ve got my effects shiny and showy, but I’m still running at a constant 60+ frames per second.

I don’t play shooters online (I’m a LAN only kind of guy), so I can’t comment about the community. The bots are keeping me entertained, and the campaign mode is extremely challenging and different. The weapons and level design are extremely good.

I’ve been up late into the night blasting opponents for a few days, and I can’t believe this is a product that is free for all. It’s even in the Ubuntu repositories for easy installation! Search for Nexuiz and give it a try. For those of you that think running Linux means nothing to play, this game is more than worth checking out if you love classic deathmatch like I do.