QEMU, the book · 2 November 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
QEMU – Virtuelle Computer fur viele Betriebssysteme (virtual computer for many OSes) is the first book in QEMU. It is german only.
Robert Warnke, co-author introduced it on the mailing list this week.
Opensource MPL · 14 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
MPL aka Meridian Lossless Packing is an audio compression technique mostly used on DVD-Audio discs. For a long time only proprietary decoders existed until finally Ian Caulfield succeeded in understanding the format and submitted an initial implementation to FFmpeg.
Nellymoser Asao · 2 October 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
The Nellymoser Asao codec is a proprietary single-channel (mono) format optimized for low-bitrate transmission of audio. – according to the Multimedia Wiki
This format was once widely used in Macromedia (now Adobe) Flash files and currently is the only sane codec for encoding from microphone at the user.
For a long time there has been no support for this outside the Flash Player, thus people went as far as offering bounty for writing a decoder.
Now a few weeks ago someone took the nelly2pcm code and ported it into FFmpeg. Still not committed in its current state as Benjamin Larsson discovered it can be implemented with reusing much more code from the framework.
Also the codec is used with some changes under different names (information based on an old email), we have to get a view of those samples.
It will be available once the required changes are done. We can thank already the maintainers for their picky attitude about quality.
Parallels update · 19 September 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Finally my Parallels block device patch has been merged into QEmu.
It has been merged since a month now, just Savannah forgot to send out a cvslog message for some unknown reason,
Parallels · 27 July 2007 by Alex Beregszaszi
Parallels is a great para-virtualization tool for MacOSX. Pufi, a friend used this a lot, but once decided to try some alternatives. Now VMware is out with Fusion, doing the same job on the platform.
However, everyone faces the problem of reinstalling; it takes enormous time. Qemu has the tool qemu-img to convert between formats, it even knows how to write VMware images. Would be a great opportunity if it supported Parallels. Now it does.
Pufi gave me a bunch of disk images to work on. Sparse image formats used by commercial and open source tools are not really different, no breakthrough ideas, no real extras, just the same algorithms.
Watch out Qemu, hopefully this patch will be integrated.
Update: patch available here
NTFS to ISO9660 under Linux · 2 April 2006 by
I had faced a problem when trying to make backup DVDs of an NTFS partition under Linux. The partition was using Hungarian characters, like the á.
After some search, I found the solution:
mount /dev/hdb1 /mnt/hdb1 -o nls=iso8859-2
While NTFS uses UTF16 (?) internally, it is easy to convert to other character sets.
The second job, making an ISO out of it was easy:
mkisofs -J—joliet-long -input-charset iso-8859-2 -r -o backup.iso /mnt/hdb1
A notable site explaining Unicode under Linux.