Ubuntu 16.04 — Media Programs

This is a continuation of my notes on installing Ubuntu 16.04. In this post, I install the programs that I use for working with different kinds of media like recording audio or creating videos.

Series Navigation:

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Shutter

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.

The Shutter website has a repository for the latest updates, but the official Ubuntu repository already has the latest version.

First, I change the directory where it saves the screenshots:

Second, I configured it to load automatically hidden only showing the indicator:

Visual

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

sudo apt-get install \
    gimp \
    gimp-data-extras \
    inkscape \
    xournal

For the scanner to work over the network, I had to put in the IP address into /etc/sane.d/net.conf.

Audio

I installed the following audio programs:

• Audacity: sound editing
• MuseScore: sheet music editor
• soundconverter: converting audio between formats
• winff: Front end to ffmpeg

sudo apt-get install audacity

Note: I attempted to install the latest version of MuseScore from the repo. Unfortunately, they haven’t updated the repo to include Xenial.

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mscore-ubuntu/mscore-stable
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install musescore

Video

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

• mplayer – nice general video/music player from the command line
• mplayer-gui
• gnome-mplayer
• vlc – video player
• kdenlive – video editor
• openshot – video editor
• cheese – nice for testing to make sure the webcam works (already installed)
• EasyTAG
• YouTube Downloader — downloads videos from Youtube

sudo apt-get install \
    gnome-mplayer \
    vlc \
    kdenlive \
    openshot \
    youtube-dl

Then, I installed the codecs for videos:

sudo apt-get install \
    libdvdnav4 \
    libdvdread4 \
    gstreamer1.0-plugins-bad \
    gstreamer1.0-plugins-ugly \
    ubuntu-restricted-extras

Resources

• Ubuntu Help: How do I enable restricted codecs to play DVDs?