Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Fri, 24 Jun 2005, David Moberg wrote:

> sindi keesan wrote:
>
> > Thanks, but could someone with a much faster connection than my
> > dialin volunteer to download this enormous package and post just
> > the racook codec separately?
>
> It looks like you already have managed to separate the racook codec
> from the others. I needed to download the all-codecs package (it
> looks like essential, plus some Windows codecs and symlinks) to
> compile this new MPlayer, so I still have that. I will put it on
> a CD-R and email small codecs if anyone needs them.
>
> > What other codecs are commonly used by internet radio?
>
> I haven't had any audio codecs missing, other than racook. Video
> is another story.

Is a52 video?  The WM audio I tried to listen to came with a small colored 
rectangle that changed frequently, vaguely stained-glass looking.

I will look for a way to make mplayer play only the audio portions of WM - 
with video, even with a 56K modem, a 28K broadcast is full of skips (and 
the video part of it is not edifying or even interesting).

I hit Ctr-C to get out of the WM broadcast and was rewarded with the loss 
of my two VGA vts, which went and stayed blank.  TTL kept working. 
Next time I will experiment with running mplayer on a WM file in VGA 
(rather than TTL).

> > Many thanks for all your work.
>
> I hope this will be the last version until 'they' release a stable
> 1.0 version of MPlayer.

Is that likely to be before or after a 'stable' FreeDOS?

> I'm glad to hear that everything is working.
mp3, rm, and wm, are working - what more should I check, the DVD playing?
(First I need to get the DVD drive to behave properly with IRQs and DMAs 
again).


Speaking of DVDs, we were given a 500MHz Compaq Armada laptop with no 
power supply or hard drive (or hard drive enclosure), for which we found 
an HP power supply.  It has some ROM problem which might be brought on by 
a combination of a dead battery (three of which came with it - the least 
dead one worked for two boots only, from floppy or CD-ROM) and a BIOS 
which is too old for the Pentium III Coppermine cpu.  The solution is to 
flash with a BIOS upgrade.  The Compaq/HP sites only offers BIOS upgrades 
for a particular hard drive (which we have not got).  I found a set of 
BIOS upgrades (Award Bios 2.5 6 7 8 9 and A) that are supposed to work on 
another computer with the same CPU.  Are BIOS upgrades specific to the cpu 
or the computer?  I was hoping we could get the thing to boot one more 
time from floppy disk, then make a 4MB RAMdisk in DOS, cable the file to 
it with LLPro, and try to run the .exe in DOS.  With our luck it will 
require Windows.  Someone else managed to use a ROM burner but we don't 
have one of those.

Then we could attempt to make a large RAMdisk with linux and load linux to 
it from CD-ROM drive.  I presume we would need to use a kernel that 
produces larger than 4MB RAMdisks.  We could then run mplayer from RAMdisk 
to watch DVDs.  The laptop came with two DVD-ROM drives, at least one of 
which works to boot from a linux CD.  Or could we possibly run linux 
from CD and use mplayer, or would it be too slow that way?  Not that we 
normally take the time to watch  many movies, but it is a challenge.

There are 64MB onboard and two 128MB memory modules, which won't work in 
the Toshiba laptop.

Would a DVD-ROM drive from this computer work in a slower Gateway laptop 
which lets you plug in either a floppy drive or a CD-ROM drive?  If so, is 
linux likely to identify it as a plain IDE drive?

This is all theory unless we get the thing to boot consistently.  We have 
left the best of the dead batteries charging for two days and don't want 
to try booting again until we are ready to flash the ROM.

 > > David
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org