Annoyances: April 2007 Archives

Dave posted "stealing flash videos" in Windows, so I decided how simple it would be to do the same in Linux. A quick search found a bash script for doing exactly what I want. It also had the added bonus of converting it into an Mpeg video. The only requirements are bash, wget and ffmpeg. An application to play the mpeg might also be handy. The version of the script that I'm using is:

#!bin/bash # by Crouse - Program name ytr = YouTube.com Ripper clear; baseurl="http://youtube.com/get_video.php?"; mkdir -p ~/YouTube ; mkdir -p ~/YouTube/tmp ; cd ~/YouTube/tmp ; echo " "; read -p "What is the youtube.com url you want to rip ? " urltorip ; read -p "What would you like to name the video (no spaces in the name) ? " nameofvideo ; wget ${urltorip} -O urlsource.txt ; fullurl=${baseurl}`grep player2.swf urlsource.txt | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1` ; rm * ; wget "${fullurl}" -O temp.flv ; ffmpeg -i temp.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 ${nameofvideo}.mpg ; mv ${nameofvideo}.mpg ../ ; rm -Rf ~/YouTube/tmp ; exit

It looks like instead of getting easier for Linux to support hardware, there are more obstacles being thrown in the way. I came across two stories today which do not bode well for people wanting to use Linux on commodity hardware. First of all, seemingly Phoenix are now creating a crippled BIOS which will only support Windows Vista. My own view on this is that the BIOS should only be responsible for getting the PC ready for whatever Operating System the user chooses. A four year old article mentioned in the post seems to suggest that Microsoft are "embracing" Phoenix. If this is true, is it not the same anti-competitive behaviour that Microsoft have already gotten in trouble for? I know there is LinuxBios, but I haven't been brave enough to try it yet, so I can't comment on how good it is. AMD also don't seem to be getting it. MythTv and Beryl are two popular projects. Yet if you want to use accelerated 3D on ATI cards with either of the these projects, you are out of luck. AMD are a hardware company, they shouldn't give a toss about the drivers as long as they work. I know the 3D graphics market is highly competitive, and there is lots of proprietry tricks used in the drivers to get the last ounce of perforance. I would still rather if they would give the specs to someone like Dave Airlie and let him do nice open source drivers without NDAs hanging over him. I don't care if I loose a couple of frames per second. I'd rather have decent drivers. How many more hardware makers are shooting themselves by placing such obstacles to using Linux? Hopefully with the likes of Dell commiting to use Linux friendly hardware, AMD and Phoenix might begin to see sense.

The little Coffee machine in the office is beginning to suffer under the strain, so I went onto Google and did a quick search for Coffee Machine. One of the sponsored links at the top was for Cafe Express. I duly clicked on it as it seemed seemed to be an Irish site, and got presented with a blank page with a play button in the centre.

Since ICANN Lisbon, EURid has been taking lots of abuse from all corners due to their business practices. Michele has talked about the conduct of EURid Staff during their session at Lisbon and John McCormac also has plenty to say about EURid Incompetence. One older post that was pointed out to me has really caught my eye. It is by Phill Parker and is simply entitled EURid Are Pure Evil. One of the EURid registrar rules is that you may only have one connection to the EPP server at any given time. However, certain registrars are gaming the system by getting "Registrars" accredited who haven't even got a website or any trading presence. These virtual accredited registrars are then used for additional connections to the EPP server giving those who follow the rules no chance. A quick bit of Googling led me to Commission Regulation (EC) No 874/2004 of 28 April 2004 available here. To quote the second paragraph of Article 4 of the above document:

The procedure for the accreditation of registrars shall be deter- mined by the Registry and shall be reasonable, transparent and non-discriminatory, and shall ensure effective and fair condi- tions of competition.

I'm by no means a legal expert, but what Phill describes seems like a very clear cut breach of the above paragraph. This only took me a couple of minutes to find, and I'm betting that it's only the very tip of the iceberg. What other EU Regulations are EURid breaching on a daily basis? It has become fairly obvious that EURid are totally incapable of handling a gTLD, I'll let Michele tell of why multiyear registrations are out :) Why are the European Commission not stepping in and asking serious questions of EURid?