mandelbr0t's Journal: 3 More Reasons to Love Linux

Well, it's 2010. Is it the year of Linux on the Desktop? Probably not, but here's 3 more reasons to love Linux.

1. LADSPA, the Linux Audio Devloper's Simple Plugin API. There's a lot of gems in here, though the documentation is pretty sparse right now. MPlayer natively supports these plugins, allowing this handy little piece in .mplayer/config:

   af=ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/dyson_compress_1403.so:dysonCompress:-24:0.25:0.5:0.5,ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/amp_1181.so:amp:8,ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/fast_lookahead_limiter_1913.so:fastLookaheadLimiter:0:-16:0.8,ladspa=/usr/lib/ladspa/amp_1181.so:amp:16

   This complicated audio filter chain uses the Dyson Compressor, Fast Lookahead Limiter, and the Amp plugins to turn on "Night Mode" audio. Great for watching action movies in the middle of the night without pissing off your neighbors! Theoretically, you could also do this at the system level by putting the same filter chain into your PulseAudio server, but I nearly went crazy trying to do that. Steve Harris has some really basic documentation for the SWH LADSPA plugins. These are available in Ubuntu as swh-plugins

2. HandBrake, a replacement for AutoGK, which seems to have trouble running properly under WINE in the latest version of Ubuntu. Instead of messing around with DLLs, try the native Linux version of HandBrake. Encodes in MP4 and MKV formats (XviD apparently on its way out). Ubuntu .debs available on the website.

3. K9Copy, a replacement for DVD Shrink. It's better in absolutely every way: it runs native, and it allows you to deselect titlesets before shrinking without any painful reauthoring. The menus appear identical to the original disc, and everything except the deselected items work properly. Very painless and quick way to copy dual layer DVDs to a standard DVDR, since there's usually a lot of junk (like extra versions) that you don't really want anyway.

So, 3 years now without touching a Windows machine. I think I've died and gone to heaven.