Essentially you load your program, then load up the video you want to edit. You can quickly move through or play the video until you get to your first cut point ( where you make your beginning mark). You then quickly move to the end point ( the end of your selected cut ) and mark your end cut. Note you can also move almost frame by frame if you need to.

After you have selected the piece that you want to keep, you then click on the transfer button to put the file into your buffer. The amazing part here is that the process is almost instantaneous! I’ve used other “professional” editors to do this and it takes forever to transfer the selected video from one point to another.

At this point you can save the clip from the buffer ( again extremely fast ) or mark and cut another section from the same original video ( using the same process above ) and instantly  paste it at the end of the video in the buffer, or even load up a different video that you would like to cut a section out of and paste it onto your copy in the buffer.

Digital View, the company who sells this software, makes a lite version available for you to try for free, but the small cost of this software is worth every penny to get the extras available with the full package. It is an amazing piece of software that I cannot live without. It cuts my work down by more than 90%! Anyone who wants to clean up their home video, or post videos on you tube NEEDS THIS SOFTWARE - Trust me on this one!

Linux/Ubuntu has all sorts of amazing free Audio and Video tools available in it’s library. The problem that I have found with most of them is that they are trying to compete with the professional packages. This means that they usually have way too much “stuff” to do in order to do a simple task like cutting out a small section from a larger video for posting to You-Tube.

I’ve downloaded and tried pretty well everything out there, and nothing…. let me repeat that NOTHING came close to doing the job as quickly, easily and smoothly as  EasyMPEG did and it frustrated the heck out of me!

It took a lot of research to find a tool that comes close ( it’s not perfect but it’s pretty close ) to what my favorite software could do. It is called DVBCut ( an odd name I know ) and while it seemed to exist “out there” in the Linux environment, it did not officially exist for Ubuntu.

I originally downloaded the source code ( the pieces that usually let one “make” a program with ) from Sourceforge ( dvbcut.sourceforge.net ) but it compiled ( tried to create the program ) with way too many errors. No matter what I tried I could not get the program to compile let alone run properly.

That is, until a week later I found a German site ( that’s right German…. and no I don’t speak German ) that seemed to detail the similar sorts of problems I was having with it.

Within their pages ( wiki.ubuntuusers.de/dvbcut ) were listed a bunch of programs and libraries ( special extra pieces found in the operating system ) that  were needed, which I added:

• scons
• libqt3-mt-dev
• qt3-dev-tools
• libao-dev
• libmad0-dev
• liba52-0.7.4-dev
• libboost-dev

But before I  tried to recompile the program, a little further down on their page, I found an entry that they recommended for your sources.list ( the list of places/repositories that you authorize your computer to download software from. )

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/fabricesp/ppa/ubuntu lucid main

After adding this line to my sources.list ( you can see how to do all that here ) I was able to install and run DVBCut by just issuing the command

sudo apt-get install dvbcut

And voila I now have a quick little editor that works quite well within my Ubuntu environment. Unfortunately, it still isn’t as easy or as good as my original Windows EasyMPEG utility, but it’s still faster than any of the other tools that I found.  I have hopes that it will get even better and until then, if I need to, I can always reboot back into Windows to use my “old faithful”.

For those who are only running Linux and especially Ubuntu, I hope dvbcut will help in cutting down the amount of time it used to take you to put together your video. If my EasyMPEG experience is any measure to go by, you should be immensely pleased with the results!

I had done this in the past using a not very well known release of Linux called Cygwin, which is a Linux-like device designed specifically for Windows. I’ve used it on all my previous laptops and it has paid for itself many, many, many times over. One of the favorite tasks I liked to use it for was to open up a window on my Windows machine that would ( for all intensive purposes ) allow me to access my main Linux machines desktop as if I was logged into it directly.

So now, that the Bing was operating as it should, I decided to see what else was out there and with luck maybe Ubuntu ( my favorite version of Linux ) had such a release itself. It really didn’t take very long to discover it. It’s called Portable Ubuntu Remix and it plays very well indeed. It’s installed just like a regular Windows application and can be uninstalled just as easily. It doesn’t partition your drive, nor even take up a lot of disk space. The whole package is very very compact and self contained ( from what I could discern. )

Once the program launches you get a small menu bar on your desktop ( usually near the top ) that looks very similar to the top bar of a normal Ubuntu desktop, and that’s all. The menu’s are your typical drop-down menu’s found in Ubuntu which open up to show you all the options, programs, tools, etc as those found on a usual Ubuntu install. It even includes the Ubuntu software center under the System menu to add and delete programs as you see fit. Open Office, Firefox and a bunch of other programs, tools and games come preinstalled.

The regular Windows programs are left untouched and still run fine. Launching an Ubuntu application actually opens up a window that looks just like a normal Windows application and can be manipulated just the same way. The Ubuntu menu bar can be shrunk down to a small, running icon on the desktop by just clicking either the right or left arrow at the edges of the menu.

The really neat thing is that, after a bit of digging behind the scenes, I’ve discovered that the main engine of Portable Ubuntu Remix is Cygwin! Which means all the tools and scripts that I had previously developed on my other laptops should be readily portable and straightforward to implement.

Also, since it works and installs Cygwin I was able to find its’ bin path  ( the directory that contains all the binary programs essential to Cygwin ) and add it to my Windows path giving me instantaneous access to Linux tools when I need them in Windows!

For those looking at a simple way to install Linux on their laptop without doing a partition, but making it a completely independent installation ( without the overhead of Windows getting in the way ) and doing it without too much trouble I recommend two other ways that I have found:

1. The first option is to download and install a LiveCD version of Ubuntu on either an SD card ( if you have one available ) or a USB stick. This will run slower than if it was installed on a hard drive, but it will give you an idea as to whether it will work on you computer or not. Configure your computer to check either/both of those ports for a bootable operating system first and voila, when you turn or reboot your computer you will boot up into your Linux environment! For those who are hoping to do this on a smaller Netbook ( like the CherryPal Africa for example, ) Ubuntu now makes a version configured for smaller netbook screens called the Ubuntu Netbook Edition. Their webpage even has further directions on how to install it on a USB stick if you need help!
2. The second  ( which I haven’t tried out yet ) is something called Ubuntu Wubi. It somehow installs Ubuntu within your current disk structure but sets up the computer to dual boot ( give you an option as to which operating system you want to run. ) It also, like Cygwin, or Portable Unix Remix, keeps all the files within one folder structure, making it easy to install, and easy to uninstall if you are through playing with it. The only trick here is don’t just delete the folder to remove it but rather follow the uninstall instructions that come with it. Needless to say I will be trying it out on one of my older laptops. I’ll let you know if there are any surprises…. but I’m not expecting any.

Till next time!

Don’t get me wrong, I was given a choice of icons that I could have selected for it ( instead of the boring default one ) but I didn’t think any of them properly reflected what the program was really about. So I went out and found an icon library – there are thousands of them out there…. and found an icon it it that would suit, but for the life of me I couldn’t get the icon selected. Every time I went to the directory that the icon ( or for that matter any other icons ) existed. I found it empty…. I knew I was missing something but REALLY! It shouldn’t be this difficult! 

So I’ve been looking on and off, for solutions for months and most of them said the same thing.

1) Go to your drop down menus and click on System -> Preferences -> Main Menu

2) Go the the program you want to change the icon on Left click on it then Click on Properties off the menu

3) Left click on the icon and select browse

4) Go to the folder that holds the icon

5 ) Select the icon and it’s done

That sounds great only no matter where I went after step  4  – NO icons ever showed up! Even if I knew they were there – it was driving me crazy. This shouldn’t be a difficult thing. Why couldn’t I find any icons this way!

Well today all was made clear, after once again doing a lot of searching on the Internet I found the missing step…. that’s right there is a non obvious step that most people don’t tell you about.

I found it buried as a one liner hidden in a larger article all about how you can change find and make your own….. it said

Using ‘Browse Icons’ you often get to what seem to be empty folders & you need to click on OK to open them & find they are not empty!

It is an extra step, and not well documented, and I really am not sure why you have to do it that way but you do and here it is…..

After step 4 you need to:

4a) Select the Folder you want then click on the OPEN button found on the browser window

4b) After a few seconds a window will open up showing you all the icons available in that folder

6 ) Select the icon you want then click OK

Why the extra non-intuitive steps? I’m sure there is a logical reason somewhere…. but once again it makes what should have been a simple process elaborate and frankly painful. If you have several folders containing icons it can take a while, unless you know the icon you want to add before hand….

So for those of you looking for the answer on how to change your Ubuntu Koala icons here it is

1) Go to your drop down menus and click on System -> Preferences -> Main Menu

2) Go the the program you want to change the icon on Left click on it then Click on Properties off the menu

3) Left click on the icon and select browse

4) Select the Folder you want that contains the icon you want to use and click on the OPEN button found on the browser window

5) After a few seconds a window will open up showing you all the icons available in that folder

6) Select the icon you want then click OK

7) Click on all close buttons as your icon has now been changed

Now it does appear that once you have done this, that in future you just need to select that folder from the drop down menu when you are browsing and all the icons magically appear. So there is definitely something going on. But really, would it have been so hard to just let a body browse and select the icon wanted instead of having to open the folder first and allow it to load up everything in it before selecting the icon one wanted?!

The reason I said “thankfully” is because although Adobe made and released a great software program that allowed one to read PDF format files ( originally called Acrobat Reader ), this at first wonderful piece of software became bogged down into newer, better, more powerful versions. Which resulted in bigger, slower, more cumbersome versions…. to the point that on some older computers the reader would take OVER a minute to load up before you could use it! It was worse than watching paint dry!

So the search was on for a PDF viewer that was faster and as powerful ( yes some of those add-ons that Adobe came out with were useful ) as the original Adobe Acrobat was, but faster…. oh please much faster….

For Windows there was a plethora of choices, but only one stood out from the pack, Foxit and I’m glad to say that it not only works fast, but gives me everything I ever really want in a PDF document viewer:

• It’s extremely small in size – only 5MB vs the 20+MB of Adobe Acrobat
• It’s extremely fast – there is no waiting time, you click on the document and it opens!
• It converts PDF text into plain text if you want to save it later for editing etc ( trust me I’ve used this feature a lot! )
• It annotates text – kinda cool – and neat that I can do that to make things easier to find after reading a large document
• Lets you search through the PDF quickly looking for keywords
• Lets you zoom in and out ( changing the text size ) with a click of the scroll wheel
• Pages up and down with no effort and again one can use the scroll wheel

It installed easily and quickly, without any problems. Foxit also offers a complete line of PDF software, both commercial and free, from editors to creators and more…. for those who are just interested in downloading the Windows version go here…. www.foxitsoftware.com/downloads

So, with Linux, or more specifically Ubuntu 9.10, the choice was no where as wide. Clicking on the Ubuntu Software Centre icon and doing a search on PDF viewer generated only four real hits.

• Document Viewer ( which I already had – it was fast but even changing pages wasn’t easy )
• Okular  for multipurpose reading (which seemed okay, but with no feedback as to useage I wasn’t sure)
• Xpdf (which to be truthful does most of what I want but for some reason I just didn’t get excited with it)
• ePDFviewer ( which for lack of information I didn’t bother with )

There were several other packages but they all appeared to be for reading, cataloging etc etc ebooks…. and while they may have worked as a generic PDF viewer, I certainly didn’t want every PDF document that I read imported and cataloged into some database to haunt me for the rest of the softwares life…. which leads me to a little rant here….

I find that I really am enjoying Ubuntu 9.10, or Karmic Koala as it is called, BUT the one item that drives me a little crazy has to be the updated “Ubuntu Software Centre.” Yes it looks real pretty, put please give us back the functionality of the older software tool! I depended upon the quick synopsis and more importantly the ratings system that it had. If a product had 5 stars I knew I could pretty well count on being satisfied with the product and 3 stars meant that value may or may not be there…. but giving me just pretty pictures and a very small description really doesn’t do anything for anyone…..

I wondered if Foxit had an Ubuntu version…. as I am finding more and more that many software companies – especially those who develop software for free use – are developing releases for other platforms as well.

Some googling around showed that indeed Foxit had tried to develop a version for Ubuntu, but that it didn’t work/install very well. So I went to their website to see what the problems were and if they had made any other versions that might have improved upon the issues and found that yes indeed, they have been and still are working on many, many versions and generating new releases for several platforms! All of which can be found here…. www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/desklinux/download.html Awesome!

I downloaded the latest .deb package and let my software manager handle the installation…. which it did quite handily, without any problem, and then tested it out on several test documents and ALL worked and viewed and printed fine…. Suffice to say that for Ubuntu 9.10 at least they got all the bugs ironed out!

So my recommendations? If you want to stay within the strict Ubuntu “opensource” environment then go with Xpdf. It works fine and gives you most of the functionality that people need when viewing PDF documents. If you want a little more, and want to keep your support/software options in sync with Windows then go with the Foxit solution. It works great and is identical regardless of the platform!

Suffice to say, unfortunately, there are still a lot of things that don’t run well in Linux and  while Windows XP “may” be starting to show it’s age, it’s still runs some of the accessories and tools that I can’t get to run on Linux and so I thought that I would clean up my older machine ( which has run XP for quite a few years now, and gave me some successful results with Ubuntu ) with a clean install of XP and try and get those things that won’t run on my newer Koala machine to run on it…. as I really don’t like having to reboot from one Operating System to the other every time I get a “brilliant” idea….

I unfortunately, of course, ran into a MAJOR problem ( which lucky for you generated this report – and why I’ve been off air working on it pretty solidly for almost a week. ) What happenned was that somewhere in amongst my repartitioning and reformatting my newer 500GB Seagate drive it decided to go into “security mode”. Just what this “security mode” is and does has still left me scratching my head… and there are a lot of others out there who have stumbled across this problem also… most sites refer to it as a “freeze lock”

• www.experts-exchange.com/Storage/Hard_Drives/Q_24284906.html
• www.articlesbase.com/data-recovery-articles/seagate-hard-drive-failure-causes-and-cures-856129.html
• www.xipher.dk/WordPress/?p=133

Suffice to say there are a lot of problems out there. The majority of the “free” solutions was to  try to build a boot disk and try replacing the MBR ( Master Boot Record ), getting Seagate to replace it, “remembering” the password used to lock the device etc etc etc…. I might have tried the MBR repair root, except I had thought that I had successfully “wiped” or “erased” the drive making sure it wouldn’t boot back into anything resembling what it first was.

Basically the symptoms were that the drive acted and looked normal, save for a mysterious 8GB partition that would pop up on it’s own from time to time. Deleting it seemed to work and repartitioning and formatting the drive seemed to work except when ever I tried to install Windows it would progress along to when it needed to boot on its own and fail! Responding that it could not find NTLDLR  ( which is an NT Loader for Windows XP….. ah the history…. ) after a lot of research I found the solution… So I followed the recommended to manually install the NTLDR.EXE,  using the Microsoft Repair option off of the XP install disk, only to discover that it was already there! But for some really bizarre reason, the computer would not recognize it, nor find it!

So, I replaced the files anyways and rebooted, it still failed, so I tried a repartition and reinstall from step one…. and that funny 8GB partition kept showing up, so I decided to look for tools made by Seagate that should have help me with this problem – Seatools from of course Seagate allowed me to do pretty well everything, and I tried everything, I secure erased the entire drive, analyzed it to death, etc, etc, etc and the software said that all was healthy…. it did find some bad sectors which I thought okay, maybe that was the problem….. but after attempting installation number 23…… NTLDR was still not found and that funny 8GB partition was back…. Everything seemed to say that I had 8GB of disk space locked out on the drive that was sometimes seen, and sometimes not…. and when the installation program ran into it ( because it obviously couldn’t see it ) the installation somehow failed, while trying to think that it succeeded….

Again all my research seemed to point towards a locked or frozen piece of the hard drive, but I could not find anything, anywhere that would let me fix it…. then I found an innocuous little reference to yet another free disk tool called HDAT…. or more properly HDAT2 and since nothing else had worked I gave it a try. It’s home page is www.hdat2.com.

It had all sorts of suggestions and fixes for both damaged Master Boot Records and “frozen” or security issues.. The in-depth analysis available with this package is amazing. This package will tell you more about your hard drive than anything else I’ve seen, and since it isn’t specifically designed for any particular manufacturer ( like Seagates is ) it’s a tool that should be in anyones library!

The analysis showed me that I still had a valid MBR ( Master Boot Record ) but that I also had 571 folders and a locked portion of the hard drive that I could not delete…. thankfully it at least found them AND acknowledge that it couldn’t delete them…. so I started doing some further analyis and everytime it found a problem I tried to fix it, and it reported that it couldn’t….. writes were not “allowed”…..

So I looked really closely at the “Device Configuration Overlay” or DCO menu and within that was an item marked “Freeze Lock” which meant that this tool should allow me to access that hidden frozen section that keeps XP from installing…… With a bit of playing ( sorry I didn’t write down the exact steps ) I found that even though security did not appear enabled I was still able to disable all security features and locks… when I was done I was able to partition the hard drive ( that mysterious 8GB partition disappeared ) and install XP as if nothing had happened.

HDAT2 will be my number one hard disk tool for any future problems ( and here’s hoping I wont have any more….) I recommend you check it out before you try any other solution – it saved me from having to go out and buy another 500GB drive…. Here is some more info from their home page…

HDAT2 is program for test or diagnostics of ATA/ATAPI/SATA, SSD and SCSI/USB devices. It will not execute in a DOS session under Windows. You should make a DOS boot floppy disk or CD/DVD and boot your system for it and execute this program from that floppy disk or CD-ROM. HDAT2 program has 2 levels:

Drive level testing- main function is testing and repair (to regenerate) bad sectors for detected devices - you get many information about detected devices File level testing- read/find/check items (MBR, boot, directories, etc.) of file system FAT12/16/32 - check/remove (regenerates) bad sectors records, flags in FAT table