CD & DVD burning in GNOME

If you want to create an audio CD from some ogg files in GNOME these days, you have several choices:

1. You can fire up a terminal and mess around with oggdec and cdrecord
2. You can use some really scary looking GTK1 application which hasn't been developed for some years
3. You can use K3b, which is great feature-wise, but destroys your nice & sleek Gnome Desktop
   

Neither of these options seems to be appropriate nowadays, so it's nice to see that there's something going on to adress these problems.

Right now, there are three CD Burning apps waiting for you, two of them more usable than the third, but all worth a look.

• GnomeBaker seems to be the most advanced candidate right now. It supports data DVD & CD burning, Audio CD burning, CD multisession and and it integrates well into Gnome; interesing features like Video CD creation and Mixed Mode CDs are in the make
  
• Graveman current features are very similar to the ones of GnomeBaker, at least regarding CD burning. DVD buring is currently not supported. Also, some people might find the wizard-like interface rather 'un-gnomish', others might prefer it.
  
• Coaster is currently the least useful of the three. It supports data CD/DVD burning, which can already be done with nautilus-burn. What makes it interesting however, is the fact that it doesn't use cdrecord, like the two tools previous mentioned, but a new library called 'libburn'. This might turn out as an advantage over the other candidates, because cdrecord is known to cause some problems with certain configurations, and sometimes a bit picky about kernel versions and optical drives.
  

If you are interested in updates on these apps, please leave a comment.

Subtitles in Totem

Heya!

My exams are over and I passed them all, hooray! So I thought: time to watch some movies and relax. I browsed my network beginning at the computer-icon I put in my gnome-panel (which is an application launcher launching "nautilus --no-desktop computer:///" - I put this on my panel after removing the computer icon from my desktop with gconf). I came across one of my brother's SMB movie-shares, right-clicked on the share, chose "connect to server" and the share was on my desktop. I opened the directory and clicked on "Monty python's The Meaning Of Live.avi". The movie started but I wanted the Dutch subtitle which was also in that same share to be shown. This really is easy; Just change the name of the subtitle-file to the same name as the movie but with a .srt extension and totem loads it automagically. Doing this in gnome is even easier/quicker then on any other desktop I know. select the movie-file, press F2, the name of the file without the extension will be selected. Press Ctrl-C to copy the text, select the name of the subtitle (which normally ends in .srt), press F2 to select the name, press Ctrl-V to paste the name of the movie, press enter and you'r done!
So, the movie started and I layed down on my bed to watch it, but from that distance I couldn't read the text very well :|. Next step: enlarging the font of the subtitles; After asking around on #gnome-nl (the IRC channel of the friendly Dutch-Flemish gnome community), I found the totem-configuration file in ~/.gnome2/totem_config. Open this file ith gedit, let it search for "size" and you'll find this lines:
# subtitle size
# { tiny small normal large very large huge }, default: 1
subtitles.separate.subtitle_size:large
There was a # before that last line and the 'large' was 'small' before. I changed it and now I can enjoy the movie ! So what am I waiting for ?

bye!

PS: here's the proof: