Init

Recently did an install on my girlfriends laptop of Ubuntu 9.04 (E1705) . Everything went really well excpet for the obnoxious PC Speaker beeping all time. So to disable this guy you need to edit the blacklist file:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf

Now you need to add this at the bottom so that your computer wont load the pcspkr module next time it boots:

# Damn PC Speaker is annoying
blacklist pcspkr

Restart the machine and you wont hear that obnoxious beeping anymore!

OR Remove the Module

You can also remove the module as was pointed out below. This may be a better solution because you do not have to restart and it takes immediate effect.

sudo rmmod pcspkr

My brother has a zune that my parents bought him, this all took place unknown to me because I would have suggested an ipod or something else. Not that the little player is bad, the software for Zune is so terrible that I wont even begin discussing the issues I have had with it.

Handbrake can convert video from all kinds of sources to something readable by your zune, I will discuss the presets for handbrake here and they should work for all Zunes except the Zune 30 because it doesn’t support MPEG-4 or H.264. If you have a Zune 30 you can use these methods to convert video, however the Zune software will convert whatever your videos are to WMV during the syncing process.

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My family has a ton of photos, we all have digital cameras and are pretty liberal with their use. Most of our family videos are on DV tapes or even dreaded VHS… I should have them all converted over already but I have been slacking on that job. Recently my father purchased a high resolution video camera (Cannon HF100) which does 1080P video quite fantastically. However the camera creates its files in some format that was up until recently not able to be read by major media players like VLC and Totem.

The files are .mts which are also known as AVCHD (Advanced Video Codec High Definition) files. These are high-definition MPEG transport stream video used by Sony, Panasonic, Cannon and other HD camcorder manufactures. .mts is based on the MPEG-2 transport steam and supports 720p and 1080p video formats.

My family wanted to be able to view our files on our media center, which is currently running ubuntu and sometimes Boxee. I wanted to choose an open standard that would ensure the highest quality and best transportability for these files because we really only want to convert them once. For this I wanted to go ahead with the Matroska video container becuase it seems to be on the rise in popularity while it supports great compression using MPEG and x264, most players natively support it and many hardware based players are adding support for it every day.

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