Ubuntu 14.04: Media Programs

This is a continuation of my series on installing Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr.  My previous post covered installing programming environments and applications.  In this post, I’ll go through the different media programs that I installed back onto my laptop.  If you would like to see the complete list of posts, check out my Ubuntu 14.04 install page.

Visual

One of the most important programs that I use now is Shutter.  It allows me to easily take screenshots of what I am working and edit the screenshots.  The shutter package is easily installed from the Software Center.  Once installed, I tweaked a few of the settings in Edit > Preferences.

First, I changed the path for the screenshots from the Pictures folder to a new folder that I created called screenshots.

Setting Shutter Output Path

In addition, I checked the first two options on the “Behavior” tab to allow it to start when I boot up the computer.

Shutter Preferences

I installed the following other programs for working with visual media:

  • Gimp: for editing photos
  • Inkscape: vector-based drawing
  • Xournal: has features that allow marking up a PDF

Audio

Videos

These are the programs I use for playing and editing video:

Codecs

This installed many different things for media.  For example, I noticed that it installed True Type fonts.  It also installs codecs for playing videos, etc.

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

In addition, I installed the libdvdcss to get the restricted formats.  That was simply by installing this package…

sudo apt-get install libdvdread4

Then, I ran the script…

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread4/install-css.sh

Finally, I determined that I had to use the /dev/sr0 as the device for playing my DVDs.  Like this:

Opening a DVD in VLC

Next Steps

If you are following along with the complete install, check out my next post about Virtualbox.  Or, you can go to the list of posts in this series (Installing Ubuntu 14.04).

Resources

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