Emil Krueper

I had to update my kernel to something 2.6.26, so VMware was broken again. I tried to fix it with the previously working fix from here, but that didn’t work. I had a look at the recently released vmware-any-any updates. No, these didn’t work for me either. When I tried to start a virtual machine I got a message like

Version mismatch with vmmon module: expecting 138.0, got 168.0

Yes, I know – using VMware Workstation 5.5 is pretty stupid and doesn’t make things easy – nonetheless no explanations now. Thus I extracted the vmmon.tar file and edited vmmon-only/include/iocontrols.h and in line 48 there is

#define VMMON_VERSION           (168 << 16 | 0)

I fixed this by modifying the version value from 168 to 138, saved the changes and once again ran the runme.pl script. Okay that helped. Alright. No, it obviously didn’t help.

Unable to change virtual machine power state: Cannot find a valid peer process to connect to.

GRMBL. Now that’s stupid. So I lurked around every corner and found this vmware-any-any-update117 version which finally helped me out.

HTH

P.S. Of course I consider dropping VMware for some other solution…asap.

Edit: For linux 2.6.27 just have a look at this page!

On Sunday we have been on a visit to my older brother and his family. Nerdy as I am I had our Sony Handycam with me on the trip and arrived back at home with plenty of new video footage. So I just wanted to make some videos available and digitalized and converted the dv source material from the camcorder with dvgrab and ffmpeg.

So this is some kind of a minimal HowTo, hope this helps someone.

If you are like me, you don’t like the idea to rely on 3rd party websites like younameit.xyz. There are a few good reasons to keep the video on your site – you have the physical control and you don’t need to accept confusing licence agreements. So here we go!

First I piped the output of dvgrab directly from the firewire to ffmpeg. This deinterlaced, converted and scaled the dv file to something more useful for a web page. I think that the following options are fine, feel free to change them and of course make use of man dvgrab and man ffmpeg.

dvgrab -format dv1 – | ffmpeg -deinterlace -f dv -i – -f flv -vcodec flv -s qvga -aspect 1.333 -qscale 3.5 -acodec libmp3lame -ab 32k -ar 22050 example.flv

Next I uploaded the example.flv file into the root directory of the domain. I use the open-source FlowPlayer Flash applet to actually embed the FLV video in my web page. I had to get a copy of the flowplayer.swf and flashembed.js from their page and copied the files to the root directory as well.

And finally I added the following lines to the html page.

<!– include flashembed –>
<script src=”flashembed.js”></script>

<!– this DIV is where your Flowplayer will be placed. –>
<div id=”videodiv” style=”width:640px;height:503px”></div>

<script>
// place Flowplayer to our DIV
flashembed(“videodiv”, “FlowPlayer.swf”, {config: {

// Flowplayer configuration as comma separated list
videoFile: ‘example.flv’,
initialScale: ‘scale’

}});
</script>

That’s it. You should now have your video embedded in your page.