Sysadmin Ramblings » iPod

iPod not recognised by Songbird (Fedora 11, Songbird 1.1.2/1.2)

uphill — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 05:01:17 +0000

I was trying to get Songbird to recognise my ipod and it wouldn’t because the ipod was automounted under /media. I put the UUID of the iPod_Control partition in my fstab. I used blkid to get the UUID of that partition.



[root@server0 ~]# blkid /dev/sdc2

/dev/sdc2: LABEL="IPOD" UUID="ABCD-1234" TYPE="vfat"

I then put the UUID in fstab



UUID=ABCD-1234    /mnt/ipod    vfat  user  0 0

After this, I ejected the iPod using “eject /dev/sdc”. Reinserting the iPod i then mounted the iPod using “mount /mnt/ipod”. After all that I restarted songbird and the ipod was detected right away.

The preferences button on the add-on was greyed out for me the whole time btw.

Extracting audio from a VOB/DVD

uphill — Wed, 25 Apr 2007 19:42:56 +0000

I have a DVD from which I wish to extract an audio clip. I used the raw VOB files and mplayer. The clip I wanted is 37 seconds long and starts 18 minutes and 53 seconds into the first VOB file.
mplayer -ss 18:53 -endpos 37 -vc null -vo null -aid 128 -ao pcm:file=vts.wav VTS_01_1.VOB The important thing to note is that the end position (-endpos) is relative to the start position (-ss). This gives me a WAV file that I could use right away, but I wanted an MP3 for my iPOD.
lame vts.wav vts.mp3 Now I have an mp3 of the audio clip starting at 18:53 and lasting 37 seconds.

ejecting iPod under Linux

uphill — Sun, 23 Apr 2006 00:43:22 +0000

Symptom: iPod is blinking “Do Not Disconnect” even after you’ve umounted the filesystem. You need to eject the iPod. Umounting is not enough. You need to send an ALLOW_MEDIUM_REMOVAL to the usb device. The easiest way is with eject. Depending on your system, you may need to be root, or allow suid on eject (chmod u+s `which eject`). I’ve found that suid on eject is the most consistent solution, but I don’t like suid executables on the system. sudo should also work, but I haven’t tested this yet.

There is a patch in the recent eject that should solve this if you own the device (chown `whoami` /dev/devicename). Anyway, if your device was mounted under /media/usbdisk, do this: eject /media/usbdisk (This just executes “eject /dev/sde” on my system, but it doesn’t require you knowing the device name) After a few seconds your iPod will flash and you’ll be ready to go again…

If you already umounted the filesystem, eject will not work. You’ll need to try remounting the filesystem and ejecting or just pull the plug and reconnect.

Howto import songs and videos onto an iPod in Linux

uphill — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 19:31:39 +0000

There is an excellent package for working with an iPod on Linux. gtkpod. Since version 0.99.2 it supports importing of Video’s To install gtkpod, you’ll need libgpod. With both installed, you can run gtkpod (it’ll be in your menu under Sound & Video, called iPod Song Manager) and tell it where your system mounted your iPod. On my machine the mini mounts to /media/ipod and the video mounts to /media/usbdisk. gtkpod 0.99.4 RPM SRPM SPEC
libgpod 0.3.2 RPM SRPM SPEC

The songs are in iPodControl/Music/f??/*mp3. The videos are in the Videos dir. To put a video on the iPod, first encode it properly. Next using nautilus, drag the file from your computer to the iPod in gtkpod. Or just go to “+ Files” icon and click on it. Once your file is imported, it should be at the bottom of the list of songs/videos. Right click and select “Edit Details” to give your video an Artist, Album and Title. Mp3’s with proper tags should already have their information set correctly. Don’t forget to click “Sync” before ejecting your iPod. (I find using “eject /media/usbdisk” to be the most effective way of undocking the iPod).

Howto encode DVD video for an iPod (ffmpeg)

uphill — Tue, 07 Mar 2006 16:35:19 +0000

My co-worker just got an iPod so I thought I would try and encode a DVD onto it (an unencrypted DVD that I own, for backup purposes only, not to be used for public performances, etc, only I looked at it, I shut it off when someone looked over my shoulder…blah blah). The ffmpeg that comes stock on RHEL4 is insufficient to do the transcoding. I built a newer version and mucked around a bit and got this going. I have a simple wrapper (there are numerous versions of such scripts floating around).

ffmpeg-20060306 RPM SRPM SPEC

Find your VOB files on the DVD
[uphill@burnaby ]$ mount /dev/dvd [uphill@burnaby ]$ cd /media/cdrecorder/VIDEO_TS [uphill@burnaby ]$ ls *VOB [uphill@burnaby VIDEO_TS]$ ls *VOB VIDEO_TS.VOB VTS_03_0.VOB VTS_06_0.VOB VTS_09_0.VOB VTS_12_0.VOB VTS_01_0.VOB VTS_03_1.VOB VTS_06_1.VOB VTS_09_1.VOB VTS_12_1.VOB VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_04_0.VOB VTS_07_0.VOB VTS_10_0.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB VTS_04_1.VOB VTS_07_1.VOB VTS_10_1.VOB VTS_02_0.VOB VTS_05_0.VOB VTS_08_0.VOB VTS_11_0.VOB VTS_02_1.VOB VTS_05_1.VOB VTS_08_1.VOB VTS_11_1.VOB Then run ffmpeg on them to encode them for the iPod (this is for a 4:3 format file) [uphill@burnaby VIDEO_TS]$ ffmpeg \ -i VTS_01.VOB \ # input file name -f mp4 \ # output file format -r 30 \ # frame rate -vcodec mpeg4 \ # video codec -maxrate 1000 \ # maximum video bitrate tolerance -b 700 \ # video bitrate in kbit/s -qmin 3 \ # minimum video quantiser scale (VBR) -qmax 5 \ # maximum video quantiser scale (VBR) -bufsize 4096 \ # rate control buffer size -g 300 \ # gop (group of pictures) size -acodec aac \ # audio codec to use -ar 44100 \ # audio sampling frequency -ab 192 \ # audio bitrate -s 320x240 \ # output resolution -aspect 4:3 \ # aspect ratio /tmp/output.mp4 # filename for output Your output file should then be able to transfer the file to your iPod and enjoy. The VOB files on the DVD are not likely to be split up exactly as you would like to have them. To get the whole movie off the dvd, you’ll need to feed all the VOB’s into ffmpeg, note that the menu’s are also stored in a VOB file, so you’ll want to figure out which ones those are and not include them.

For example, the menu’s on my DVD are in VTS_01_0.VOB, so I did the following: [uphill@burnaby VIDEO_TS]$ for vob in `ls *VOB |egrep -v VIDEO\|01_0`; do echo -n "$vob "; done; echo VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB VTS_02_0.VOB VTS_02_1.VOB VTS_03_0.VOB VTS_03_1.VOB VTS_04_0.VOB VTS_04_1.VOB VTS_05_0.VOB VTS_05_1.VOB VTS_06_0.VOB VTS_06_1.VOB VTS_07_0.VOB VTS_07_1.VOB VTS_08_0.VOB VTS_08_1.VOB VTS_09_0.VOB VTS_09_1.VOB VTS_10_0.VOB VTS_10_1.VOB VTS_11_0.VOB VTS_11_1.VOB VTS_12_0.VOB VTS_12_1.VOB [uphill@burnaby VIDEO_TS]$ Then I simply pasted this output into my ffmpeg line above.

[uphill@burnaby VIDEO_TS] cat VTS_01_1.VOB VTS_01_2.VOB VTS_02_0.VOB VTS_02_1.VOB VTS_03_0.VOB VTS_03_1.VOB VTS_04_0.VOB VTS_04_1.VOB VTS_05_0.VOB VTS_05_1.VOB VTS_06_0.VOB VTS_06_1.VOB VTS_07_0.VOB VTS_07_1.VOB VTS_08_0.VOB VTS_08_1.VOB VTS_09_0.VOB VTS_09_1.VOB VTS_10_0.VOB VTS_10_1.VOB VTS_11_0.VOB VTS_11_1.VOB VTS_12_0.VOB VTS_12_1.VOB | ffmpeg -i - \ #the rest of the options... I still need to play a bit with the settings, I optimised for quality, I need to have a low quality setting also. I will probably built yet another wrapper for all this too, why not, everyone else is :-D