Recently I found this application, OBS Studio, for screencasting. It is the best screencasting software I found, and it is cross-platform.

In Linux, I tried several applications before, recordMyDesktop, SimpleScreenRecorder, and even ffmpeg command-line, and none of them is satisfying. The main issue is either audio recording not synchronised or audio difficult to configure.

OBS Studio is user friendly and easy to configure and the audio is synchronised with the video. Great!

I don’t use RhythmBox or Banshee, as they are too bloated for me. I was a Winamp user.

I tried Audacious, DeadBeef, and Clementine. The following is a brief comparison,

Clementine global hotkey gives me trouble to navigate the audio file within the application.

This is just a sharing about my favourite software applications which are less popular comparing to others.

Linux distribution: Arch Linux vs Ubuntu, Linux Mint. Reason: Highly customisable.

Desktop environment: Xfce4 vs GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon, Mate. Reason: Traditional desktop look, lightweight yet feature-rich.

Programmer text editor: jEdit, Emacs vs Sublime Text, Atom Reason: jEdit - Cross-platform, unlimited window split Reason: Emacs - Cool!

Text editor: medit Reason: Tab view, start by opening last opened files.

As my favourite web browser, Firefox, with the powerful extensions, (in my opinion) no other web browser is better than it. There are a lot of web browsers based on Chromium or using WebKit engine. Namely Google Chrome (based on Chromium), Opera (WebKit engine), Safari (WebKit engine), Konqueror (KDE web browser), Epiphany (currently called Web, GNOME web browser), and other less popular web browsers such as Midori, QupZilla, etc.

However, Firefox uses another layout engine, that is Gecko. That is why the rendering of the webpages may have some differences comparing to the WebKit engine. For the web developers, they can always see the differences.

I tried several Linux software for plotting the graph. These are some of my summaries of review.

Genius Mathematics Tool

The graph is not in Cartesian form. But very convenient and easy to define the equations.

Gnuplot

Very difficult to prepare the graph and difficult to manipulate the graph. Need a lot of commands.

QtiPlot

Similar to Gnuplot, can use the table form as the data. Can work with ods and excel files. Can use latex to add the label. Can define the function of graph easily. Much more better than Gnuplot. But the graph is not the Cartesian form.

Recently, I tried Audacious. It is too nice. Banshee and Rhythmbox, both of them are storing the audio files as in the library, but Audacious just uses simple playlists. Rhythmbox allows the users to create playlist too, yet it is not as simple as Audacious, which allows us to sort the playlist easily, and using shortcut key to queue the songs we want to listen.

Recently I also found that OSD Lyrics is just wonderful, which allows me to replace what I need in TTPlayer (千千静听). Because TTPlayer is built for Windows only, and works badly in Wine. OSD Lyrics is able to download the lyrics and display the lyrics. It is actually a standalone tool which can work with other audio players, such as Amarok, Banshee, Rhythmbox, and Audacious.

I was using VirtualDub. It is the best (for me). I can simply mark the part of the video that I want to remove, or copy, or move, or duplicate. Moreover, with the plugins, I can also add the subtitles, overlay, and other effects on the video. Though there are less wonderful 3D effects like other software, it is very easy and good to use. There are some limitations, such as it can only load the AVI files. However, codecs of the video is based on what we have installed on the Windows. Thus, we can encode to the smaller size AVI with the codec such as Xvid. There is modified version, VirtualDubMod, yet I still prefer VirtualDub. Another problem is that VirtualDub is only available on Windows. Though, we can use Wine to run VirtualDub smoothly. However, we needs to install the codecs that we need to Wine, so that VirtualDub is able to use the codecs. Because I am using Linux, so I am looking an alternative that can work like VirtualDub. I tried some software. The followings are my little comments on the tested software.

In my opinion IBus (Intelligent Input Bus) is the most popular input framework for Linux. Previously, SCIM is the most common input framework. This is because Ubuntu uses IBus as its default input framework currently.

There are two Chinese pinyin input for IBus, one is ibus-pinyin, another is ibus-sunpinyin. I prefer ibus-pinyin, since it is more common, and support the Traditional Chinese character; sunpinyin does not.

But today, I found another input method, that is libgooglepinyin, it is a fork from Google Pinyin for Android. Whoever uses Google Pinyin before should know that it is faster than a normal pinyin method, it works like Sogou Pinyin. It is available for Arch Linux using AUR. Super good.

Recently, I visited the China website for listening some songs using Firefox 7.0, and found that I need a plugin called Moonlight, since I am using Linux.

So, this Moonlight is the Silverlight alternative for Linux. If you visit the website such as 1ting.com, then this is what you need.

However, Moonlight xpi file is not compatible to Firefox 7.0. Thus, some modifications towards the xpi file is needed. If using Arch Linux, it is available in AUR (submitted by me).

Yah, after posting about VLC, now it is SMPlayer. What is so good about SMPlayer? SMPlayer, playing the RMVB file is smoother than VLC. I don’t know why. Next, playing the f4v file (Flash video), the video is also smoother than VLC.

So, because of the needs or watching RMVB movie and f4v movie, that is why I use SMPlayer frequently.

But under Linux, there is a small problem about SMPlayer to play the video with a separate subtitle with Chinese encoding, namely GBK. To play the video in the Unicode locale, the subtitle will shows the characters with underline only. To get the locale of your Linux, enter “locale” in the command-line, it will show something like this,