IPhone Connection Issue in Ubuntu

Recently Ubuntu had problems mounting my IPhone, consequently I was unable to connect the device to my music player or photo manager.

I found the following fix at this site:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1638433&page=2

The fix is for Ubuntu 10.04, but it worked fine on Ubuntu 10.10 which I am using.

1. Disconnect your IPhone from the PC.

2. Open up Synaptic Package Manager (under System->Administration menu)

3. Go to the Repositories (Under the Settings menu in Synaptic)

4. Add this source: ppa:pmcenery/ppa

5. Click Close and then click the Reload button at the top left.

Note: You can ignore the Authentication Warnings.

6. After it is done reloading search for: libimobiledevice1

7. It will give you two results, the second being a dbg file, install both. If you already have libimobiledevice1 installed, right click on it and select to upgrade it.

8. Now after installing, close Synaptic and open up the terminal and type in:

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

9. Reconnect your IPhone and it should now be successfully mounted.

YouTube in Ubuntu

There are several great utilities in linux for downloading and converting YouTube videos. I find myself, however, always falling back on several simple packages, namely youtube-dl, ffmpeg, and winff. They should be installable through any package manager in your preferred Linux distribution. As an Ubuntu user, I have included the Ubuntu specific commands which you can copy and paste into a terminal console and execute.

Installation

Before we can use these packages, we’ll need to do some installing. Firstly, ensure you have the necessary codecs by installing the ubuntu-restricted-extras package:

sudo apt-get install ubuntu-restricted-extras

Next, you will need to install the winff package which is a GUI for the command line video converter, ffmpeg. Winff allows you to easily convert a file to different formats. This command will install both packages:

sudo apt-get install winff

Lastly, it’s time to download youtube-dl. This package is responsible for actually downloading a video from YouTube:

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

After installing, you should update it to the latest version:

sudo youtube-dl -U

Occassionally you may find that youtube-dl stops working, in which case, update it.

Usage

Now that everything is installed, it’s time to get a video. You do this by passing the URL of the video to youtube-dl. For example, this is the link to a video I made on YouTube:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfHOp8hqtOQ

To download it:

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfHOp8hqtOQ

After you have downloaded it, you should be able to open the video with Movie Player. In the above example, the downloaded file is named EfHOp8hqtOQ.flv

If you wish to convert it open WinFF:

winff &

And choose the desired settings:

Hit convert (this will open an ffmpeg console), and wait until it finishes:

Note: If you can’t download a video after updating youtube-dl, check the URL is correct, and remove any YouTube directives.

This URL failed for me:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EfHOp8hqtOQ

But after removing the feature option, it worked fine:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EfHOp8hqtOQ