Video

MythTV is great for capturing MPEG2 broadcast streams with a TV tuner card. However, its built-in software transcoder leaves a lot to be desired. The format (NuppelVideo, or .nuv) uses an older MPEG4 codec that’s inferior to the latest ones. Here’s how to produce better and smaller conversions in Ubuntu, by replacing it with Handbrake. Setup Start by adding the Handbrake launchpad PPA, then refresh your list of software sources.

Watching streaming video in Linux can be frustrating. The Flash web browser process (npviewer.bin) consumes a lot of processor time and it significantly raises the cpu temperature. I could live with Flash’s piggishness if it delivered good video. Unfortunately, Flash seems to stutter when you use CPU “on demand” frequency scaling to cut power consumption. On my desktop PC with an AMD BE-2400 dual core, I couldn’t get Firefox in Ubuntu 9.