WinMerge Alternative in Linux Terminal

WinMerge is a good open source tool to compare text files, but it only runs in Windows platforms. When I need to compare text files in Linux terminal, I use vimdiff (Vim in diff mode). Actually, Emacs also has similar feature. However, I prefer Vim because it's more handy.

To compare two files with vimdiff, you just need to run the vimdiff command with the path of the files you want to compare:

vimdiff file1 file2

Then, you will see something like below:

You can edit the files as a normal Vim editor. However, I would like to highlight some useful commands in diff mode of vim:

]c

Jump to next change

]c

Jump to prev change

do

Update the current change by copying the change of another buffer.

dp

Update change of another buffer by copying the current change of this buffer.

Ctrl-w Ctrl-w

Switch to another buffer

VLC vs MPlayer for DVB playback with hardware decode (vdpau)

Regularly, I have some TV programs been recorded with USB TV tuner. So, I need a program to playback the recorded videos in my Linux box. In Linux world, there are two popular video players -- VLC and MPlayer. I tried both, and here are my comments:

• VLC provides better GUI. Although mplayer also provide GUI frontends, but they didn't works well. Some of the frontends can't even run. One of the frontend "SMPlayer" can run on my box, but it has some bugs which unable to display the subtitle of the recorded TV programs.
• In terms of hardware decode, MPlayer works much more stable than VLC. VLC occasionally has errors on decoding and shows blank screen. 

  

  Decoding Errors of VLC

Finally, I can only use the command line MPlayer. Here is the scripts to playback the videos:

#!/bin/sh
mplayer -vc ffh264vdpau,ffmpeg12vdpau,ffwmv3vdpau,ffvc1vdpau -vo vdpau:deint=3 -framedrop -ao pulse -dr -cache 8192 "$@"

[Testing environment: XUbuntu 16.04, vlc 2.2.2-5, mplayer 2:1.2.1-1ubuntu1, smplayer 15.11.0~ds0-1, libvdpau1 1.1.1-3ubuntu1, vdpau-driver-all 1.1.1-3ubuntu1, Nvidia Linux Driver 367.44]

Fine Tuning X Window Settings of My Desktop (Nvidia, Dual Mon, Xubuntu 16.04)

Recently, I bought a new desktop and two new monitors. I spent some time to get them working nicely. So, I would like to share my story here.

I installed Xubuntu 16.04 to the desktop. The display card is GeForce GTX 950. Then, I downloaded and installed the Nvidia Linux Driver. I run the Nvidia X Server Settings and export a xorg.conf file.

Here was the "Screen" section of xorg.conf file:

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "Stereo" "0"
    Option         "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "DFP-2.8"
    Option         "metamodes" "DP-0.8: nvidia-auto-select +0+503, DP-0.1.8: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0 {rotation=left}"
    Option         "SLI" "Off"
    Option         "MultiGPU" "Off"
    Option         "BaseMosaic" "off"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

You can see the "metamodes" was to setup the screen positions and rotation. Please note that the monitor on left is rotated.

Basically, the Nvidia driver worked, but with some issues:

1. Heavy tearing
2. In text mode (i.e. alt-F1), the text is on the monitor rotated left. 

After some googling on the web, issue 1 can be fixed by adding "ForceCompositionPipeline = On" in the metamodes. So, the "metamodes" becomes:

"DP-0.8: nvidia-auto-select +0+503 {ForceCompositionPipeline = On}, DP-0.1.8: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0 {rotation=left, ForceCompositionPipeline = On}"

However, issue 2 is bit tricky. After some trial-and-error, I found that the sequence of screens declare on the "metamodes"did the trick. The last screen shows the text in text mode. So, I swapped the DP-0.8 and DP-0.1.8 in the "metamodes":

"DP-0.1.8: nvidia-auto-select +1920+0 {rotation=left, ForceCompositionPipeline = On}, DP-0.8: nvidia-auto-select +0+503 {ForceCompositionPipeline = On}"

Now, it works perfectly.