Relax, It's Just an Alternative

Ok, so I'm finding out that the more I use my Ubuntu netbook for work applications, the more useful it becomes. Recently, Monument City Computronics has been doing some ad campaigns with a ad company. We're primarily a Windows desktop outfit (we use Linux on all our servers). I'm the only one who uses a Linux desktop system, but then I'm head of IT, so my prerogative. Last week we received a notice from the ad company that the latest commercial they've done for us was ready, and they they'd like to send it to us. I gave them access to our FTP server so they could just drop it onto our network. The file I received, however, was a corrupted ZIP file. We sent back to them the the transfer didn't work, so they overnighted to us a playable DVD and USB flash drive.

Here's where things get interesting. The DVD, as it turned out, was also incomplete. It played part of the video, but cut off before the finish, leaving a black screen for the remainder. Not an auspicious sign of success here. When our communications people tried to pull the video file off of the flash drive, they got a message from Windows stating that the flash drive hadn't been formatted. At this point, they were in a bit of a panic. One of them decided to bring the drive to me. So, I plugged it into my Ubuntu netbook, and lo and behold, there was the file: a 4.5 GB Quicktime video. This explained a couple things. First, the reason why the FTP file was corrupted was because there is a 2 GB limit on file transfers into our network. I figured at the time 2 GB was reasonable. However, the video was in uncompressed HD, which made it huge. The second thing was that since the file was in Quicktime format, it meant that the ad company we hired uses only Mac computers. They created the video on a Mac and saved it in Macs proprietary format, and placed it on a drive that was formatted in Mac's local file system.

Why then, do you ask, did my Ubuntu netbook read the flash drive when Windows coulnd't? Simple. The current Mac operating system (MacOS X) is based upon BSD which is a version of Linux. Thus, my Linux machine spoke the same language, file system-wise anyway. Thus, all I had to do was copy the file onto another USB flash drive with a Windows file system on it, and boom, we're back in business.

This week, one of our board members did some testifying at a hearing in the state legislature and it was recorded and streamed for the public. The bosses wanted a copy of the vid, but the state legislature opted to use Silverlight as their streaming solution. Unlike Flash Encoder, you can't download a Silverlight stream and save it directly. Fortunately, there is a free, open source video player called VLC which has a few hidden talents. One of these talents is streaming into a file container. So, I started the stream and save the initialization file (a WMV file that does a redirect to the streaming server), then I opened that file in VLC and told it to output the stream into a file container instead of viewing it. There. Problem solved.

More and more, I'm finding that my Linux system can handle the work I need to accomplish on the job, often with solutions that are simple and don't cast the budget anything. I still use Windows, of course. At home. Where I play a lot of my favorite MMORPGs. But that is about all I use it for these days.