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  • From: sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] MPlayer
  • Date: Sat, 25 Jun 2005 17:53:14 +0000 (UTC)

On Sat, 25 Jun 2005, David Moberg wrote:

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.

I think this was from a .ram link.

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.

This link claimed to be 28K realaudio but ended in .asx.

Most of the other 'realaudio 28K' links I tried to listen to at a 'classical Realaudio' site did not work - 404K not found, or loud noises, or text flashing by. These were my two successes.


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.

But it will still download the video, right? In which case I will forget about that station.

If given a choice, I will choose to listen to anything but WM/asx


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 will try that, or -novideo.

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.

Will you wait for 1.0 uClibc to compile against uClibc again?
My partner would still like the most recent dosemu for BL2 or BL3.

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.

Speaking of BIOSes and hard drives, we just determined that my 533MHz computer works with hda hdc and hdd but only once in a while with hdb. I never had a BIOS go bad on JUST master slave before. Luckily this computer works without an hdb. On a Compaq we could not skip it or /dev/hdc would not work (it was the CD-ROM drive, and to mount it you had to first attempt to mount it as /dev/hdb and then mount it as /dev/hdc, so we moved it).


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.

I will try the upgrade for the Armada with a specific brand of hard drive. We don't have a lot to lose here anyway. The thing has only booted twice out of many tries and we have no hard drive case for it.

I tried to update some BIOS once and was told it was the wrong one. Similarly for modem upgrades.


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.

We have two DVD drives but only one can be used at a time, or the floppy drive. One slot, three drives. I suspect the other DVD-ROM drive may not work and they replaced it. We also got 3 batteries, two of them dead, one nearly so.

How will a CD-based linux let us flash the BIOS with a 2MB .exe file?
(Which I hope does not require Windows, like modem upgrades often do).

Are there linux-based BIOS upgrade programs for Award BIOS (2A or earlier)? It has to be later than about April 2000.

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

_WE_ are missing something - a hard drive and an enclosure for it. The problem is how to run a 2MB .exe file with no hard drive, from DOS. I was hoping we could set up a RAM disk in DOS and transfer the file to it and run it from RAMdisk (assuming we get the correct update program)

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.

If you can plug in the floppy drive or the DVD drive into the same slot, I doubt it is IDE, so there goes that idea. Maybe someone else has a working Compaq Armada without a DVD drive and not much RAM.

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?

It was given to us with no power adaptor or hard drive or hard drive enclosure, third hand, by a friend who got it from a coworker with a ROM errror. It came with two dead and one nearly dead battery.

We managed to find a power adaptor, an HP (they seem to own Compaq now) but according to a website I found, someone else determined that the ROM error on boot has something to do with voltage. So we put in the least dead battery and tried to run it from power supply AND battery. My theory is that it only boots with a charged battery, but a small charge is enough, and we used that up with two boots. It did not boot at all without the battery.

(Sorry, list, for drifting off-topic)

No, this is supposed to be related to using BL and mplayer on this computer, if we can get the dratted BIOS updated so we can at least burn BL3 to a bootable CD, and run it off that to use it as a DVD player which would generate less heat than a desktop computer. It is in the 90s this week again here. I should get BL put onto the other pentiums to use in the basement.

Other people have used CD-ROM linux because they did not have a floppy drive - has anyone used it instead of a hard drive?

I read that you can buy a new ROM and burn the BIOS to that. Could we move the BIOS ROM to some other computer and upgrade it from hard drive there? Or would it have to be the same motherboard to run that program?


It is a nice computer apart from its glaring problems - builtin 56K modem (I hope not a winmodem) and 100Mbit ethernet, and two PCMCIA slots, and speakers.

David

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