Baslinux mailing list

["David Moberg" <davidjmoberg AT lycos.com>]

sindi keesan wrote: 

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

a52 is an audio codec. I usually associate a52 with DVDs, since
many of them use it for their audio. I've never seen streaming a52
before. The video was likely one of the Windows Media codecs (MPEG4
based) and someone probably didn't realize that video isn't very
useful over a 56K modem if you're trying to stream high-quality
audio at the same time.

> 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).

The problem is probably on their end, not yours. Even so, you will
(most likely) not be able to tell their server to only broadcast
audio if both audio and video are combined into one multiplexed
file. If it is a playlist, and both an audio and video stream are
listed, you may be able to play just the audio stream. To stop
MPlayer from decoding video after a download, use -novideo.

> 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).

If you don't display the video (with -vo null) the VGA screens should
still work on exit.

> > 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?

Likely before. 1.0pre7 is almost there, it just needs a couple of
tweaks and fixes (like ffmpeg crashes and to reduce bloat a little).
Then there would be testing of that release, and eventually a 1.0
release which works. BusyBox already has their 1.00 release. uClibc
is stuck on 0.9.27, it seems.

> mp3, rm, and wm, are working - what more should I check, the DVD playing?

No need to. I can guarantee that it works.

> 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).

Highly unusual. BIOSes are supposed to work with many different IDE
hard drives.

> 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?

Both. More to the motherboard (computer) than CPU. One for the
same model (with a slower clocked CPU) should still work. A
different manufacturer/model series is probably out of the
question. But I would be careful with a BIOS update. Make sure
that the software knows that the update will work.

> Someone else managed to use a ROM burner but we don't have
> one of those.

Fairly simple devices. Everyone seems to charge an arm and a leg
for them.

> 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.

I am hopelessly confused about this. I see two options:

1) Use a CD-based distribution. This will require two DVD drives,
OR a distribution which lets you eject the CD.

2) Use loadlin, in which case you can install everything to the
hard drive. Or am I missing something?

> 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?

The pinout is likely completely different. Laptops are proprietary
to the extreme. If you can plug it in, it should be IDE.

> 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.

Why do you run it on battery power? Don't you have a power adapter?

(Sorry, list, for drifting off-topic)

David

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