Howto extract tracks from mkv and avi

This howto requires:

• mplayer
• mkvtoolnix
• your Linux box

Audio from Avi files (es. Xvid + MP3):

mplayer -dumpaudio "mymovie.avi" -dumpfile mymovie_audio_track.mp3

Tracks from Matroska MKV file:

List all tracks:

mkvmerge -i mymovie.mkv

File 'mymovie.mkv': container: Matroska
Track ID 1: video (V_MS/VFW/FOURCC, XVID)
Track ID 2: audio (A_VORBIS)
Track ID 3: audio (A_VORBIS)
Track ID 4: subtitles (S_TEXT/UTF8)
Track ID 5: subtitles (S_TEXT/UTF8)

mkvextract tracks *.mkv 3:mymovie_audio_track.ogg 4:mymovie_subtitle.srt

Creates two files, mymovie_audio_track.ogg (track 3) and mymovie_subtitle.srt (track 4).

Installing Plone on Debian

A little howto to quickly install and try Plone (a GPL’d CMS based on Zope) on your linux box. Well, the installer seems to do the job nicely.

Tested on Plone 3.* version, Debian “Lenny”.

• apt-get install g++
• Download latest version of Plone (Unified Installer)
  
• Execute:
  tar zxvf Plone-YOURVERSION-UnifiedInstaller.tgz
cd Plone-YOURVERSION-UnifiedInstaller
./install.sh standalone
gedit /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/README.txt &
gedit /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/buildout.cfg &
/usr/local/Plone/zinstance/bin/plonectl start
less /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/adminPassword.txt

README should be read to follow installation instructions, then you can modify Plone configuration on buildout.cfg, and then you can start Plone. On adminPassword.txt you’ll find your Plone passwords to use for administrative purpouses.

• Add /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/bin/plonectl start to /etc/rc.local before exit 0 (Red Hat) to run plone at any server restart or create a script on /etc/init.d/ (Debian) like.

Now you can test this CMS based on Python (I’ve tested it 4 years ago, maybe it hardly can replace Drupal but you can give it a try ).

RPM Rebuild on Linux Red Hat Enterprise

A quick howto on RPM rebuilding from source:

yum groupinstall "Development Tools"
yum install rpmdevtools
# unpack old tar.gz

tar zxvf my-package-0.0.0.tar.gz
mv my-package-0.0.0.tar.gz orig.my-package-0.0.0.tar.gz

[change interested files]

# create a new tar.gz file, preserving privileges

tar -pzcvf my-package-0.0.0.tar.gz my-package-0.0.0/

Create RPM from tar.gz

rpmbuild -tb my-package-0.0.0.tar.gz

The “-p” stays for “preserve privileges”

You got something like:

Wrote: /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/my-package-0.0.0.i386.rpm
cd ~
cp /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/my-package-0.0.0.i386.rpm ./
rpm -i my-package-0.0.0.i386.rpm

See also:

• How to build RPM packages on Fedora