FOSSwire

Gnac is a simple program for GNOME that allows you to convert audio files from one format to another.

It is built atop of the Gstreamer media framework, meaning that you can import any files that Gstreamer is capable of playing and then output to Gnac's supported formats for the conversion.

Once you've installed the program, it appears under the Sound & Video category, where you can launch it.

The interface is extremely simple. Use the Add button, or drag in a set of input files that you want to convert. Then select the output format from the list box at the bottom. Once you've done that, press the Convert button.

The default export options allow you to convert to Ogg/Theora and FLAC as well as WAV and Speex. While the number of export formats built in by default is nowhere near as high as with some programs, particularly those based upon ffmpeg, keeping just a few formats does keep the application simple.

For those people familiar with Gstreamer, it is possible to add to that list and add a new 'audio profile' with custom settings, so you are not strictly limited to those audio export formats.

Despite that limitation, Gnac is an effortlessly simple program with a great interface and could come in extremely handy if you're trying to batch convert a music collection to FLAC or Theora, for example.

The ability to drag a whole load of files in, choose the format and click Convert and then just leave it doing its work makes it perfect for batch jobs.

Gnac 0.1.1 has recently been released, packages for your distribution along with source code to build yourself can be downloaded from here.

MPlayer is one of the many available media playback systems for Linux and Unix-like operating systems and is particularly useful to many people thanks to its support of proprietary and non-standard video formats.

While the use of these formats will undoubtedly be controversial, the pragmatic Linux user will often still want to be able to enjoy media in these other formats, which makes MPlayer a good solution.

Inside your web browser, however, MPlayer's default plugin interface does not feel very integrated visually with the rest of the system.

Gecko-MediaPlayer is a custom browser plugin which uses MPlayer and its GNOME bindings to provide a better user interface for playing audio and video inside your browser. Any media playable by MPlayer that you come across online can be played back through the plugin, just like the mplayerplug-in package, but with a vastly improved user interface that feels integrated with the GNOME desktop.

Installing the Gecko-MediaPlayer plugin is generally as simple as installing the gecko-mediaplayer package. You may want to remove the mplayerplug-in package first if it is installed, to avoid conflicts between the two browser plugins.

Once you've installed and restarted your browser, any media that MPlayer can handle will show up in the new interface.

If you're a GNOME user that also chooses MPlayer as their media solution for the web, installing this package is a quick and easy way to improve your online viewing experience, through a better integrated UI.

There are lots of sites that offer streaming audio and video services these days. A lot of these use Flash video, but some older sites use other streaming technologies, including Real, Windows Media and QuickTime to deliver the content.

Downloading these streams so you can save them for later is almost always possible. It's worth pointing out at this point that you should check as to whether you have the legal right to dump streams to your machine, but I'll leave it to you to do this responsibly.

One of the ways you can dump this type of stream to your computer is to use the media player Mplayer.

With Mplayer already installed, you simply use the -dumpstream command line option to tell it to read the stream and save it to a file (by default, called stream.dump).

$ mplayer -dumpstream streamurl

streamurl in this example is the URL of the stream, which usually begins with rtsp:// or mms://. The hardest part of actually ripping a stream in this way is discovering this URL, as sites often don't make this immediately available.

I'd recommend the Firefox extension UnPlug for this purpose, as it can often discover the stream URL for you, even if it is unable to do the whole ripping process. You can then copy and paste that URL into your mplayer -dumpstream command, and you'll get the media file.

Again, though, do this responsibly and legally. ;)