Petter Reinholdtsen

Recently I have spent some time evaluating the multimedia browser plugins available in Debian Lenny, to see which one we should use by default in Debian Edu. We need an embedded video playing plugin with control buttons to pause or stop the video, and capable of streaming all the multimedia content available on the web. The test results and notes are available on the Debian wiki. I was surprised how few of the plugins are able to fill this need. My personal video player favorite, VLC, has a really bad plugin which fail on a lot of the test pages. A lot of the MIME types I would expect to work with any free software player (like video/ogg), just do not work. And simple formats like the audio/x-mplegurl format (m3u playlists), just isn't supported by the totem and vlc plugins. I hope the situation will improve soon. No wonder sites use the proprietary Adobe flash to play video.

For Lenny, we seem to end up with the mplayer plugin. It seem to be the only one fitting our needs. :/

This weekend we had a small developer gathering for Debian Edu in Oslo. Most of Saturday was used for the general assemly for the member organization, but the rest of the weekend I used to tune the LTSP installation. LTSP now work out of the box on the 10-network. Acer Aspire One proved to be a very nice thin client, with both screen, mouse and keybard in a small box. Was working on getting the diskless workstation setup configured out of the box, but did not finish it before the weekend was up.

Did not find time to look at the 4 VGA cards in one box we got from the Brazilian group, so that will have to wait for the next development gathering. Would love to have the Debian Edu installer automatically detect and configure a multiseat setup when it find one of these cards.

The Norwegian Unix User Group is recording our montly presentation on video, and recently we have worked on improving the quality of the recordings by mixing the slides directly with the video stream. For this, we use the dvswitch package from the Debian video team. As this require quite one computer per video source, and NUUG do not have enough laptops available, we need to borrow laptops. And to avoid having to install extra software on these borrwed laptops, I have wrapped up all the programs needed on a bootable USB stick. The software required is dvswitch with assosiated source, sink and mixer applications and dvgrab. To allow this setup to work without any configuration, I've patched dvswitch to use avahi to connect the various parts together. And to allow us to use laptops without firewire plugs, I upgraded dvgrab to the one from Debian/unstable to get one that work with USB sources. We have not yet tested this setup in a production setup, but I hope it will work properly, and allow us to set up a video mixer in a very short time frame. We will need it for Go Open 2009.

The USB image is for a 1 GB memory stick, but can be used on any larger stick as well.