Enable Hardware Acceleration in Firefox

Posted by Cirrus on August 6, 2015
Posted in: Hardware, Software. Tagged: , , , , . Leave a comment

2015-08-06-193619_712x312_scrot

Firefox has (for whatever reason) disabled the hardware accelerated features for Linux users. Read on to find out how to enable it.

Hardware rendering uses things such as your graphics card and other ‘hardware embedded’ circuits to process the webpage. Software Rendering (this is what you do when not hardware rendering) purely uses your CPU. Typically, things that are enabled for hardware rendering are significantly faster when ran via hardware. It also will dramatically reduce CPU usage.

There are some computational tasks that are better handled by task specific silicon on your CPU and/or GPU. With hardware acceleration “off” the program will ignore these options if available (via both hardware and drivers) and will just use the inefficient software solution.

The main thing this affects is video playback in browsers.

  1. Check if Hardware acceleration is actually enabled in Firefox by visiting about:support looking for “GPU Accelerated Windows 1/1 OpenGL (OMTC)” under graphics. If this shows 1/1 you can stop right here, you do not need this tweak. But if it shows 0/1 here’s how you can force it on …
  2. Open about:config in Firefox (url bar)
  3. Set layers.acceleration.force-enabled and layers.offmainthreadcomposition.enabled to true
  4. Add export MOZ_USE_OMTC=1 in your ~/.profile or you can test this by running export MOZ_USE_OMTC=1 before running firefox
  5. Reboot and check about:support for “GPU Accelerated Windows 1/1 …”  If it shows 0/1 then you are not using HW accelleration.

ARC Welder && show_box.apk

Posted by Cirrus on April 8, 2015
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . 2 Comments

ARC Welder is a tool to help you test and publish your Android Apps using the App Runtime for Chrome (beta), ARC.
See Getting Started for more detailed instructions.

ARC allows us to run most any Android Apk’s on our PC’s and it’s multiplatform it will work on Linux, Windows, OS X and ofc ChromeOS. ARC is basically just a Chrome extension .crx and is installed in the same way you would install any other Chrome extension which im sure you are all familiar with

2015-04-08-213813_357x639_scrot   As you can tell from my previous couple of blog entries i like consuming media (video in general) outwith the  browser, not because im a Stallmanite who despises Adobe Flash (although i do) i just prefer my video streams to play in native media player as i find the quality and resource usage is better. So to follow in the same vein as my last couple of posts, this time im going to harp on about show box which is a Free application for viewing movies and TV series .  2015-04-08-213640_956x628_scrot

The Getting Started guide gives a simple step by step guide as how to install ARC Welder Once you have it installed on Google’s Chrome browser or the more ethical Open Source Chromium browser, then i highly recommend adding either the Mobdro.apk or Show Box .apk to ARC Welder, both have a wide selection of video streams to choose from, be advised once show_box is installed and launched a dialouge box will appear prompting you to update, choose the ‘remind me later’ option.  Both .apk’s  give instant access to hundreds of movies and every season of hundreds of the top TV shows , show_box also gives us the option to download the media, view it in the show_box internal media player, or the ‘open with ARC’ option which will open the media in your default browser, then you can just copasta the URL into your favourite local media player. It also allows us to choose quality of the stream ‘low’ medium’ ‘high’  the highest and most common is 720 p which is not too shabby.

I hacked around and got show box to open like a standalone app, without executing ARC Welder or chromium, by using an alias

alias showbox='/usr/bin/chromium --profile-directory=Default --app-id=eijgacohmegconnajkflbadbodniodab '

your ‘app id’ will differ, in linux i got mine by using xprop

Thats about it for show box & ARC Welder

Happy Hacking

PS: There’s an open ticket for ARC Welder bug on 32 bit OS currently only working on X86_64 OS

Streamlink (formerly Livestreamer) For Windows

Posted by Cirrus on February 16, 2015
Posted in: Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Capture

I figured i would write a tutorial for my Windows using brethren showing them the awesome livestreamer streamlink and how to go about installing and using this awesome bit of kit.  Livestreamer streamlink allows us to watch a number of streaming services in VLC or any media player you choose, which is great as it does away with the need for flash, those who bother to check out livestreamer streamlink will see a marked improvement in video quality and the RAM footprint and CPU cycles are drastically decreased in comparison to when using browser to view streams.
The Windows installer can be found here the installer includes a compiled version of Livestreamer streamlink (that does not require an existing Python installation) and RTMPDump for viewing RTMP streams. It will also generate a default config file all that requires editing is just the #player line, remove the # comment and point the player line to your players .exe .streamlinkrc it would also be wise to ensure the line rtmpdump= points to the newly installed rtmpdump .exe   the default directory for the .livestreamerrc .streamlinkrc is C:\Users\cirrus\AppData\Roaming\livestreamer.  Once you have done that, then that is us finished, easy huh?  now we want to find some sites which livestreamer streamlink has native plugins for, i will list a couple …

+ vaughnlive.tv

+ veetle

+ filmon

+ You Tube

To play the streams in Windows we open up the cygwin terminal (if installed) or the command prompt / powershell and simply type ..
streamlink url of stream best
for example
streamlink http://vaughnlive.tv/lmshows_ngbbc best

The chosen stream will then open in your chosen media player.

Livestreamer streamlink is in my top 5 applications and it is multi platform so Linux OSX and Windows users can benefit, see here for more info on livestreamer streamlink .

I tend to watch the nat geo wild stream often so i created a .bat file by opening notepad, pasting in this one line

streamlink http://vaughnlive.tv/lmshows_ngbbc best

save file as crime.bat and viola we have just created a shortcut to that stream, that might be handy for those who don’t like command prompt or powershell.

Stream All The Things To Your Ipad

Posted by Cirrus on December 29, 2014
Posted in: blog. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

  2014-12-28-235730_1033x533_scrot2014-12-28-235642_1033x536_scrot

EDIT: I filed a bug with livestreamer dev due to streamlive.to having changed their URL syntax which now renders this post  obsolete.

This is just a quick tip i stumbled upon and i think ipad owners will approve.

Being a long time Android user i am new to the ipad, the ipad air 2 was under the tree so i set about tweaking it to my liking, on Android one of my favourite apk’s is the Dragon VLC Player  it allows me to stream all the popular TV shows and live sports to my Android tablet best of all it’s free on Android.

So i then set about finding this for the ipad, alas it is indeed for sale in the app store but before i shelled out the 8 quid for it i looked around, after some trial & error i installed oplayer from the app store then once installed i opened up oplayer’s settings and i changed the players built in browsers homepage to http://mobileonline.tv this gives oplayer the exact same functionality as the £8 Dragon VLC Player, allowing us to access ilive.to and stream all the things, one has to just click on the hls or rtmp url’s [desktop users can ofc use these url’s in VLC etc. ] and chosen stream will open in oplayer. I hope someone finds this as useful as i do.

Happy New Year

Mac Revisited

Posted by Cirrus on September 19, 2014
Posted in: blog, Hardware, Software, Tech. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

                                                                                                         1                     0800-comparison-3-1

                     Long time followers of this page may remember back in March of 2012 i did up a hackintosh on an old Dell 620, that was my first foray into the macworld and i came away not overly impressed, Snow Leopard reminded me of Gnome2. Recently i went back for another look at OS X after cooking up a hackintosh which runs the OS Mavericks,  read on to find out how this Archlinux refugee fared in the adventure.

                   Firstly i went to my favourite torrent site and searched for ‘ OSX USB Install Intel’  i ultimately came away with this .  For anyone wanting to follow my steps ( i will give a tutorial of sorts as one or two folk on G+ asked me to share the magic sauce) this would be a great time to go and find out what hardware your PC is running, If using lolWindows then there is a free app named Speccy and if using Linux then you probably know how to find out what hardware your box is using.  Specificaly take note of the Soundcard, GPU and the NIC (network interface card) make and model. My machine has an ASUS mobo and an Intel i7 and an ATI HD4870 GPU  Audio is Realtek ALC888/ALC1200, NIC is RealtekRTL8111,  i will link to the appropriate kexts and a DSDT for that specific HW below.

Once i had my list of hardware i set about writing the newly downloaded image to a little 16Gb Sandisk USB stick, i was ofc using Linux so i used the ‘dd’ method.  Having formatted the USB stick to FAT32 filesystem i began to write the image, as root i cd to dir where image resides then ran this command replacing ** with the USB drive’s assigned letters

(never dd to /dev/S**1 etc. no partition numbers, always to root of device)

i renamed the downloaded file ‘OS X 10.9 Install USB.raw’ to simply osx10.raw

dd if=osx10.raw of dev/s**
  If using lolWindows use this to write the file to teh USB stick

Continue Reading

xcowsay MPD Now Playing

Posted by Cirrus on September 14, 2014
Posted in: General TechnoBabble, Software. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Leave a comment

Bxbxpx8 IYAAg8x W png large

    Simple shell script for MPD now playing, using xcowsay to define image

(any image can be used)

                                                               .

#!/bin/bash
OSD=$(mpc current)
xcowsay --at 800,20 --font=CaviarDreams --monitor=1 --image=/home/cirrus/djtux.png "MPD Now Playing" "$OSD"

Download xcowmpd.sh Script

edit the –at switch to define where on VDU image shows

and ofc edit the –monitor switch to define which VDU

see here for moar indepth configuration options

To have the script execute on MPD song change,

add this 1 line to ~/.ncmpcpp/config

execute_on_song_change = ~/path/to/xcowmpd.sh

Alternatively if not using ncmpcpp simply execute this script alongside mpd,mcp [edit to suit]

                                                                     

Here is some more of my simple shell scripts where xcowsay could be used opposed to notify-send

Open Cubic Player

Posted by Cirrus on March 22, 2014
Posted in: blog, General TechnoBabble, Software, Tech. Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , . 9 Comments

Hi

Again ill be writing about yet another TUI application, which will run with or without an X server. Those who know me are aware i prefer to use the console where possible, not because i wanna be l33t but merely because i find it does things better, faster and in many cases opens up moar options/preferences than you get with the GUI counterparts.  My latest find started life in or around December of 1994 as a DOS binary-only freeware. Thankfully at the tail end of 2003 someone took the time and effort to port it to Linux, and other ‘Unix like’ Operating systems.

Open Cubic Player as mentioned will run in a TTY as well as in a graphical environment, here’s a few scrot’s of OCP

2014-03-22-174907_476x182_scrot         2014-03-22-174127_644x418_scrot

Both images above are from the ocp-X11  ( the graphical environment)  now it’s only fair i show you some scrots of OCP running in a non graphical environment.

2014-03-22-175327_954x515_scrot2014-03-22-174541_644x421_scrot

Using ocp-curses we dont get the same visualisations, only the spectrum analyzer, whereas in the X version we have choice ofaround 4 visualisations

Video of ocp-curses

Continue Reading