Open Source - Linux and Video on a Laptop

Greeting CDROM

Marghanita da Cruz
5 December 2006

Want to share your photos and video with your family and friends?

My own 2006 Annual Greeting list includes family in India, UK, USA and Australia.

After extensive research, prototyping and testing during 2006, I eliminated using HTML and DVD, and settled on a CDROM.

There were two problems with the DVD. Firstly one created on an Apple Macintosh in Australia was unreadable in the UK. The exact cause of the problem is unclear, but it wasn't fool proof enough for my purposes. There are also licensing issues with the DVD encoding - which could be a problem for Open Source software.

I used K3B on Knoppix to burn the CDROM. Though the video and photographs were edited, captioned and encoded on Ubuntu Breezy Badger using the Gimp, Kino and FFMPEG

Theora/Vorbis/Ogg are open formats and viewers are pretty much standard issue with Linux Distributions. In out of the box Ubuntu Breezy Badger OGG/Theora/Vorbis clips can be viewed with the firefox browser or totem.

An OGG plugin is available for Quicktime. I have tested the quicktime/ogg viewer under Windows XP home edition. Viewing the video directly from the CDROM doesn't always work smoothely (CDROM drive can't keep up) - so, it is a good idea to go for a low resolution image. Perhaps a point in favour of using a DVD.

My 2006 greeting CDROM includes a

• a message in simple text file
• a folder of photographs in JPG and
• a folder of family trees in GIF

Australia Post has a Postpak CD/DVD mailer (AUD9.90 for pak of 10), which can be snail mailed at standard international letter rates. The local postage from Sydney to Perth was AUD1, AUD1.25 to India and AUD1.85 to UK. You do need to complete a customs declaration for International Destinations and provide ID when lodging the item over at the Post Office.

References and Further Reading

• GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program.
• K3b - The CD/DVD Kreator for Linux - optimized for KDE - licensed under the GPL
• About Xiph
• "Ogg Vorbis is a completely open, patent-free, professional audio encoding and streaming technology with all the benefits of Open Source."
• Theora
• The Ogg container format
• DVD player and disc Licensing (4C)
• MPEG LA's MPEG-2 Patent Portfolio License
• JPEG is a commonly used standard method of compression for photographic images, created by the Joint Photographic Experts Group a joing committee of ISO and CCITT
• "GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format using a palette of up to 256 distinct colors from the 24-bit RGB color space."- wikipedia

The Year of the Pig, 2007, in the Hsia calendar, is symbolized by two elements "with fire sitting on top of water."...Raymond Lo

www.ramin.com.au/linux/greeting-cd.html © Ramin Communications 2007. Last modified 17 September 2008.