HowTo: Deal with BD+ copy protection when ripping Blu-ray titles using Ubuntu
A fair while back now, I wrote an article detailing how to decode Blu-ray titles using Ubuntu and an LG GGC-H20L Blu-ray optical drive.
This article detailed how to decrypt just about every movie under the sun except for a newer type of protection called “BD+” which I never got around to supplementing my original article with.
What is “BD+” protection? Well in short, it’s the deliberate corruption of random parts of the video track of the movie (well, OK – that is a highly simplified definition as BD+ protection can do a lot more than that, but the end result is the same – to prevent unauthorised playback which includes ripping). The idea BD+ is that when you rip the title, you can still watch the movie, but with some or all of the screen corrupt at various stages in the movie which well and truely ruins the movie-watching experience, especially since you paid good money for it and should not be forced to buy a dedicated consumer Blu-ray player when you’ve got a perfectly good PC that can do the same task.
But hang on, if the movie is deliberately corrupt, then how come it plays fine in a stand-alone consumer Blu-ray player or PlayStation3 console?
Well, let me tell you about that and how to get around it yourself.
HowTo: Make use of Ubuntu PPA repositories
What is a PPA repository?
A PPA is a Personal Package Archive hosted by the ubuntu.com servers that contains binaries and/or source related to a project. The project can be anything from a new application to a backport of an existing one. A good example is the easy availability of OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 to Intrepid users before Jaunty came out rather than having to deal with the mess of packages from Sun’s own website.
PPA’s can be wholly personal to you or may be open to the public. In particular it is very useful for providing Ubuntu packaged versions of a given application instead of dealing with tarballs or converting RPM packages.
So how does one make use of a pre-defined PPA and are there any things to be wary about? Read on.
HowTo: Build a MythTV box from scratch using Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04
MythTV is a project that brings analogue and digital television to your Ubuntu-powered PC. It primarily functions as your television and personal video recorder (PVR), but can be made to do many other things (refer to the official MythTV site for more information), however one thing that can catch people is actually building a MythTV box from scratch. Over the years, MythTV has been one of the largest causes of baldness in users who have torn out their hair in frustration.
Nowadays, tailored distributions such as Mythbuntu make the task pretty much trivial, but not everyone likes to use the tailor-made distributions. For one, Mythbuntu has a lot of its own branding across it which I personally don’t really like, and I’d prefer not to have it install all of that plus XFCE as the default desktop and then have to undo it all just to get back to a regular Ubuntu desktop.
Since I recently built a MythTV server for my folks, and on top of that connected it to their aging CRT television rather than the latest in visual technology, this makes for a perfect tutorial on how to take a vanilla Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 installation and turn it into a simple, functional MythTV server without all the branding. We are going to just install only the components required to get MythTV up and running. Anything else you add is purely up to you.
HowTo: Fix MythTV’s Frontend not going full-screen in Ubuntu Jaunty.
The next version of Ubuntu is here – 9.04 aka “Jaunty Jackalope”. Along with a wealth of new features comes a wealth of new minor bugs to fix. Not enough to be show-stoppers, but enough to annoy the heck out of you, and here’s a doozy.
If, like most people, you have Compiz enabled and you start the MythTV Frontend, you will notice that rather than go full-screen, Myth will start as a window, essentially, even if your settings within Myth say to go full-screen.
In a single-screen scenario, the MythTV window will start just underneath the upper Gnome panel and the lower Gnome panel will sit over the top of the Myth window, obscuring part of the display. Proof that it’s a window can be found by holding down the ALT key and then dragging the MythTV display around with your mouse.
If you’re like me and use two displays with Myth being run on the second screen, you will see a gap at the top of the screen that is the same height as the upper Gnome panel and you will see your wallpaper showing through there, as shown in the illustration below.
Click for full size (520K)
Here’s how to fix this problem.
EDIT June 2010: This problem still plagues Ubuntu 9.10 and 10.04, and this fix will work for those releases as well.
HowTo: Uninstall software that makes Ubuntu’s boot process fail
Whilst rebuilding a friend’s Medion laptop, in my attempt to get the Wireless LAN adapter working, I set about trying to use ndiswrapper and the Windows drivers. Unfortunately upon rebooting, the system failed to boot, always locking up when the boot process tried to load the Windows driver. It was so bad that I wasn’t even able to boot to a recovery prompt because it still attempts to load the hardware drivers before dropping you into a root shell.
The solution was simple – get rid of ndiswrapper and that will prevent the offending Windows driver loading which I can then delete afterwards, but how do you do this when you can’t even boot to a terminal?
With the assistance of an Ubuntu LiveCD (on USB stick in this case), I was able to remove ndiswrapper without needing to do a complete re-install of the system. Here’s how to do it.
HowTo: Install OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 in Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 right NOW rather than wait for Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04
OpenOffice.org 3.0.x has been out for awhile now, but unfortunately did not get released in time to be included with Ubuntu Intrepid 8.10 back in October 2008, so Intrepid shipped with OpenOffice.org 2.4.1 instead. Bummer.
OpenOffice.org 3.0.x will be included in Ubuntu Jaunty 9.04 in April 2009, but as some people have noticed, there are some useful features in OpenOffice.org 3.0.x (such as much improved Word doc importing) that can make waiting another four months seem like a bloody long time to upgrade. You want 3.0 now, not in four months!
So for the impatient among you, here’s the most painless and easiest way to upgrade your OpenOffice.org to 3.0.1 without having to deal with downloading individual packages or TAR archives from the OpenOffice.org website, or manually having to satisfy the extra dependencies that OpenOffice.org 3.0.1 requires.
Virtualbox 2.1
Sun’s ubiquitous virtualisation application Virtualbox has been updated to version 2.1 and brings with it a number of new additions to warrant a major update, with two of the most interesting new features being 3D acceleration support and Networking changes that negate the need for bridging the host adapter to the guest.
Subtitle Downloader
I’m a big fan of simple applications that fill a big void or annoyance in life, and one of those annoyances is finding suitable subtitle files (.srt files) for your movie rips. To fill this void is a simple application called SubDownloader that does its best to crawl the ‘net for suitable subtitle files for whatever movie you select in the file browser.
Adobe Flash Player 10 for Linux 64-bit
Finally got around to downloading the Alpha of Adobe Flash Player 64-bit for Linux to try it out, and I have to say it feels good. My desktop box at home is no slouch, but clearly the old 32-bit wrapper and plugin combo was holding back Firefox badly – I notice it loads a little more snappily and heavy Flash-laden pages load much more smoothly and quickly.
Normally I wouldn’t endorse an Alpha to anyone but cutting-edge users, but I have to make an exception here. I’m going to keep using it until I come across a major show-stopper such as Firefox lockups or what-not.
If you’d like to try out the 64-bit plugin for yourself, here’s what you have to do.
HowTo: Create your own subtitles to display on video in Totem
Subtitles – a simple, but effective means of communication for speakers of non native languages and the hard-of-hearing. We see subtitles in DVD’s and on TV in various forms.
It would be good to utilise subtitles for a home video that you have encoded to give to your parents or grandparents, both of whom are a little hard-of-hearing, but it’s an effort to add subtitles to a video, encode it again and it will ultimately bother those people who don’t need to view the subtitles.
You don’t have to encode the subtitles as part of the physical video, however. Most media players, including Ubuntu’s Totem have the ability to overlay subtitles on top of the video being played back. This allows you to create your own custom subtitles and be able to modify them as required without any need to re-encode the video.
