LINICKX.com

Fedora 10 & ffmpegthumbnailer

nick — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 19:36:00 +0100

I've recently upgraded from F7 to F10 and was surprised to see that ffmpegthumbnailer hasn't made it into the yum repo's yet!

As I use ffmpegthumbnailer for PS3 Video thumbnails I needed to find a solution to this.

If I had the time I'd knock up a .spec file & rpm, but for the time being I thought I'd post my bodge.... NUMBER ONE, if you've never typed "configure;make;make install" before you need to install the development tools.

sudo yum groupinstall "development tools"

Next pick up a couple of extra dependencies...

sudo yum install libpng libpng-devel ffmpeg ffmpeg-devel

You should now find that, if you download the source, unpack it - gunzip ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0.tar.gz;tar -xvf ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0.tar and cd ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0 hopefully you can complete ./configure without any errors.

If you try make at this point it'll probably fail with errors, this is how I fixed that....

cd /usr/include/ffmpeg/ ln -s libavcodec/avcodec.h ./ ln -s libavformat/avformat.h ./ ln -s libswscale/swscale.h ./ ln -s libavformat/avio.h ./

Now you can... get back to the build

cd ~/ffmpegthumbnailer-1.5.0 make sudo make install

If all has gone well you should have a working install :)

LINICKX - PlayStation ID

nick — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:22:00 +0000

Original PlayStation 3 Firmware Suggestions

nick — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 12:20:00 +0000

I can't find an official suggestions or "request for enhancements" webpage for sony's ps3; I'm sure the developers are fed of of people asking for in game access to music or the web browser so it's hidden away somewhere, but I think I have some genuine fresh ideas.... maybe?

Dynamic Bookmarks from Avahi / Bonjour / ZeroConf
I don't have a keyboard for my PS3 the reason for this is that I have a PC/Laptop, in the event I want to do some heavy browsing my 1st thought won't be to use my PlayStation, this being said, I do occasionally use the PS3 to check specific websites; when I download content from the PlayStation Store I have a tendency to log into my cacti install and check on my bandwidth usage, typing http://192.168.168.168/cacti into my bookmarks was a real pain via the on-screen keyboard, but if the PS3 could have learned this from network that would have been really cool. Direct Access to my bookmarks from the XMB would be nice too.

UPNP Media Servers & the XMB need a re-think
My mediatomb server shares out my "media" directory, in that directory I have all of my A/V content. The thing is to switch between watching my latest family video and viewing pictures of the fireworks last week rather than just playing "any" content available in the directory, I have to scroll all the way back to the start of the XMB change from video to picture and then dive all the way back through my directory structure, perhaps something like \~/media/family/events/5Nov09/..... this can become quite tiresome.
My Solution would to make media servers an extra top level XMB entry which appears when a server is found, thus allowing users to directly drill through any content.

If anyone happens to stumble across this page and knows where I should submit my ideas feel free to leave a comment.

Thoughts on Life With Playstation

nick — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 12:33:00 +0100

I've upgraded my Folding@Home to Life with Playstation, the idea is nice, make the folding application more useful to people and hopefully harness more CPU time.

The thing is I have the following questions........

Why has the address bar been disabled within the web browser?
I can click "more news" which opens a browser session to google news, so why can't I hit "start" open a "go to" dialog and browse any page I like? Folding would get a lot more of my CPU time if I could watch you tube video withing the "life" interface.

Do the folding developers own a PS3 remote control?
Ever seen this, a bluetooth remote control? It works great with the PS3 media player, I can pause, skip and seek all music and video content, I find it a bit weird how the "life with playstation" application doesn't support any of these buttons!

Hopefully these are just small gripes which can be easily fixed in the next addition, but the remote control thing is a real show-stopper for me, Folding CPU time is limited to "controller charging" time only for me until I can control my music properly within this app!!

Dear Insomniac

nick — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 09:01:00 +0100

In light of yesterdays ps3 news please can you release a patch to covert Ratchet & Clank skill points into Trophies.

I think this would be a good use of the system, it would be nice for us gamers to automatically earn some trophies based on some of the games we've already played; this idea benefits the publishers too as "friends" will be able to see other users games and may be influenced to buy them ;)

...and DUELSHOCK3 support too please.

Thanks!

Cisco Pix Firewall in front of a Playstation 3.

nick — Wed, 05 Mar 2008 22:14:00 +0000

If you saw this tweet, you'll see that a little while ago I had some fun with Playstation 3 online gaming; it's probably my own fault because I'm possibly the only person with a version 6 Cisco Pix Firewall at home in front of their playstation.

If you want to get online gaming working though your firewall there's a really good online reference here and my specific grumble about having to open up a shed load of ports for EA's Burnout paradise is documented in their support area.

To summarize, this is what I've got open:

General Playstation Network Ports, these always need to be open.

udp 3658
udp 3478-3479

Open these extra ones for Motor Storm

udp 3659 - 3660

Open these extra ones for Burnout

udp 3659
udp 9600-9699

If you to have a cisco pix, you'll need to open an entry on your outside access-list, something like

access-list outside permit udp any any eq  3658

and you'll need a static entry....

static (inside,outside) udp interface 3658 playstation3 3658 netmask 255.255.255.255

For lots of ports the access-list command supports the range statement, so

access-list outside permit udp any any range 9600 9699

But you won't be so lucky with statics, you'll have to add an entry for each port, I created a small bash shell script to automate the task...

#!/bin/bash
#9600-9699
for i in `seq 9600 9699`;
do
        echo "static (inside,outside) udp interface $i playstation3 $i netmask 255.255.255.255"
done

I then pasted the output into my pix. If you are having problems here are some references that might be useful are the cisco pix command ref and the pix nat guide.

I'm not sure I like green!

nick — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:17:00 +0000

I'm proper into the 24hr wallpapers I have around me at the moment, fedora's infinity 24 changes whilst I'm at work and the PS3 XMB changes whilst I play.

The thing is my ps3 wallpaper has changed from yellow to green, now this wouldn't normally be an issue as most gameplay happens in the evening and the screen changes to black by then, but looking at the wikipedia page for the XMB I'm in for some pinks & greens in the next couple of months.... not to my taste at all, it's a shame that Sony don't let you choose which colours the XMB scrolls through... ho-hum it was nice whilst it lasted, I wonder if I can find any cool animated wallpapers for my PS3? :?

Antivirus Software for Playstation 3

nick — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 13:37:00 +0000

I've been offline for a while, but I've just seen this:

The Associated Press: New Antivirus Software for Playstation 3
The company bills the software as the first of its kind for a home gaming system. It was released earlier this month as part of a PS3 upgrade and will be free until April.

This is a really positive thing to see; by the fact that there is a market there shows that "Joe gamet" is thinking about security , it's a shame that sony aren't giving this away for free but I guess that business .

A word of caution to our friends, please, please enure that you product doesn't affect performance else we will end up back to the old days where the first trouble-shooting step will be to disable security *cry*.

Playstation 3 News

nick — Tue, 09 May 2006 19:50:00 +0100

Looks like Sony have finally given the world some firm information about the PS3 although at �400 I don't think I'll be an early adopter ;-) The new controller design is out too, I actually wonder if the boomerang shaped thing was actually a secret joke on the public by Sony ! Any-who bring on the PS3 gaming greatness !!!!!!