Autarchy of the Private Cave

Note: this post is based on the comment by Simon, who generously shared his experience.

Step-by-step:

• Download the compiled ffmpeg with libmp3lame support (direct download links: older version ffmpeg.with.lame and newer version ffmpeg.2007-10-28.with-libmp3lame-support).
• Rename the downloaded executable file to “ffmpeg” (no extension), upload it to the directory on your server (in this example /home/myusername/).
• Download libmp3lame.so.0.
• Upload libmp3lame.so.0 to the same directory where you placed ffmpeg in.
• Create a php file with the following code (remember to change the paths to your own, where you actually uploaded binaries in previous steps):
  1. <?php
  2. exec("export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/home/myusername/");
  3. echo passthru("/home/myusername/ffmpeg -formats");
  4. ?>
• If you access that PHP file with your browser, you should be able to see a list of formats which are supported by ffmpeg, and if you find “EA libmp3lame” somewhere in the output, then it means you now can Encode Audio in libmp3lame!
• If that doesn’t work for you: LD_LIBRARY_PATH can be a protected variable in PHP (you can check for this by searching for the “safe_mode_protected_env_vars” value in phpinfo() output). The workaround here can be to write your commands to a file from php, then chmod that file with 0755 permissions (rwx-rx-rx), and run the file through exec(). In this way, PHP is not changing the LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but telling the server to run a file, which tells the server to change it. This method worked for the original author of these instructions.

For passing arguments to the PHP wrapper script – check out PHP’s $argv variable (more on this here). If you decided to use shell-script as a wrapper for “export LD_LIBRARY_PATH”, then using $1, $2 etc will allow you to pass parameters to the shell script, e.g. in the example below

you could pass “input file” as first argument, “parameters” as second and “output file” as third to make such a wrapper script work.

Recently, I installed Debian Etch 4.0r1 onto my laptop. However, after the first boot into plain console, computer was dead-frozen after some console usage. I rebooted using the Power button – this time to gdm; and again, after some keyboard input system was hanging dead.

I found the reason at debianhelp.org forums. Basically, it’s the PC speaker module (pcspr) not functioning correctly. I suspect this problem manifests itself only on some types of laptops. The solution is either to somehow reconfigure the pcspkr module, or just disable it. More on how to disable the module below.
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