Ubuntu Camera Drivers, revisited

I am trying to get rid of some old speakers, so I used my digital camera to take a picture of them, to increase the chances that someone on craigslist will come to my apartment and give me $5.

Then came the daunting task of copying the pictures off of my camera and onto my linux computer. Linux used to be awesome. In fact, all you had to do was plug it in and type something like this:

cp /media/disk-2/DCIM/whatever/*JPG ./`date +%Y-%m-%d`

Thats called a one liner. I am including it here, as a monument, to the good old days (about 5 years ago). I'm sure that I could make my Linux distribution do that--all I would have to do is spend 10 hours learning how linux camera drivers work and patching my kernel and probably tweaking about 10 poorly explained settings which might also totally screw up my system. 10 hours is equivalent to about 500 instances of me downloading photos.

Downloading pictures on mondern-ish ubuntu
I had to search my own blog to figure out how to do this, only to realize that last time I didn't write down the instructions, I just complained about it. These instructions are for anyone else that was dumb enough to upgrade ubuntu to the latest version. Whatever that is. My "uname -a" says Linux sonic 2.6.28-13-generic #45-Ubuntu SMP Tue Jun 30 19:49:51 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

Step 1: plug in camera and turn on. Then forget everything you know about linux, good software design and HCI. This is going to be worse than using Windows.
Step 2: Two instances of some crap camera downloading software called F-Spot will run because ubuntu thinks you plugged in 2 cameras. open one. The best camera downloading software ever is not an option anymore.
Step 3: dont ignore the dialog box that pops up--select the second USB address (I love how they write all this bullshit software to make things easier, and the proverbial dumb user ends up staring at USB addresses anyway. retards)
Step 4: You have to select a location to copy the photos to, but the normal Gnome file selection dialog makes this extremely difficult. Open a terminal and use mkdir to create the folder for your pictures. Then select "other location" and the dialog morphs into a second, slightly more usable dialog, so then select the folder you just made.

The entire retarded process looks something like this:

It took me about 10 minutes to figure out (had to plug in my camera twice), and then I wasted like 10 more writing this.

Ah, F-Spot photo crapware just downloaded all of the images on my camera except for the one I just took. Which was the reason for this miserable exercise in the first place.



[Edit] -- Ubuntu, Supplemental

I got the picture off my camera finally. I don't want to talk about it.

Today I decided I needed to extract an audio track from a movie file. Why? I have a music video and I want to play just the audio file on my ps3. You know, if I had friends and a party or something. The If You Build It They Will Drink approach.

There is some program called ffmpeg. If you run it with -i and only specify the input file, it will print info about the file:

dave@sonic:/media/disk-1/Nightwish$ ffmpeg -i GhostLoveScoreLOTR.mp4

Seems stream 1 codec frame rate differs from container frame rate: 50.00 (24998/500) -> 25.00 (25/1)
Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'GhostLoveScoreLOTR.mp4':
Duration: 00:09:57.75, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 356 kb/s
Stream #0.0(und): Audio: aac, 44100 Hz, stereo, s16
Stream #0.1(und): Video: h264, yuv420p, 320x256, 25 tbr, 25 tbn, 50 tbc
At least one output file must be specified


If you add an output file, like GhostLoveScore.aac, it will rip out the audio. How nice!

Except it doesnt support aac. Hm, what is that, some mac format? Is that more of the dreaded nonfree that keeps GNU nerds up at night? Oh look, I have an aac library already installed on my system. And I have some other library that I need for ffmpeg to use aac. Why doesn't it work? Oh, because on Ubuntu, ffmpeg is compiled to not use aac, whether you have the library or not.

You know what I've been doing on my Ubuntu computer lately? Browsing the web, watching movies, listening to music, and playing my crappy campaign for The Battle for Wesnoth over and over again. I can do all of that on a windows computer.

Anyway, for now I'm going to have to setup another computer just to extract that audio file. I think installing a different distribution of linux will take less time than figuring out how to recompile ffmpeg to stop being a little bastard.