One Week at Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Today marks one week on joining ICT department at Bibliotheca Alexandrina and I couldn't wish for a better start. I have been wishing to work there for 4 years now, so finally joining BA team is more like a dream come true :)

My first week there was amazing. I meet smart, funny and helpful people. I hear dozens of "Good Morning" and "Good Bye" accompanied with a worm smile everyday. It is only a week since I joined BA, but I feel as if it is a year.

I am working on Wellcome Arabic Manuscripts Cataloging Partnership. It is a partnership with Wellcome Trust, a subdivision of GalaxoWellcome, for making the collection of manuscripts they own available online.

My team leader, and also my only team colleague :D, Younos Abou Al-naga has the brightest character I ever met. He welcomed me on the team way before I officially join it. He makes work sounds very easy. He bears all my stupidity moments without complaining :D I have to thank him for making my start very smooth.

I also had the chance to meet Dr. Nikolai Serikoff, from Wellcome Trust. He is such a wonderful person. I spent a really good time with him. I am looking forward to meet him again.

At last, I enjoy every moment I spend at BA. Hope to be able to achieve the success I wish for there :)

Wish me Luck

[How To] Play Video in .BIN and .CUE file on Ubuntu 8.04

Recently, I downloaded a video as bin/cue files. .BIN and .CUE files are CD Images, similar to .ISO files. The BIN file is basically an entire CD in one file, and the CUE file stores information on the .BIN file that is needed when burning, or mounting to a virtual CD drive. A .cue/.bin image could be anything like a Data CD or a VCD or SVCD.

There are some programs that can play it in bin format as VLC media player on Linux OS and windows media player on Windows OS; but when I tried them, sound was lost of the video.

I searched for a solution of this problem.I found two solutions that worked well with me.

Solution 1: convert .bin file to .avi file 

It takes only two steps:
Step 1: download and install mencoder, it is the converter you are going to use.
To do that, copy and paste the next command into your terminal (Application-->accessories-->Terminal) and then press Enter.

sudo apt-get install mencoder

It will be installed automatically. When it finishes, move to step 2.

Step 2: convert .bin file to .avi file.
Copy and paste the following command into your terminal and then press enter.

mencoder -o MovieNameHere.avi -of avi -ffourcc DX50 -lavcopts vbitrate=900:vhq -ovc lavc -oac mp3lame -vf pp=lb MovieNameHere.bin

This step takes some time depending on the size of your .bin file. For me, it took about 10 minutes to convert a file of size 800 MB.

Solution 2: convert .bin files to .ISO then burn them as normal CD image
You can do this in 3 steps:
Step 1: download and install bchunk. Bchnuck is a CD image format conversion from bin/cue to iso/cd.
copy and paste the next command in your terminal (Application-->accessories-->Terminal) and then press Enter.

sudo aptitude install bchunk

Step 2: convert .bin file to .ISO file
Copy and paste the following command in your terminal and then press enter.

bchunk IMAGE.bin IMAGE.cue IMAGE.iso

check the documentation of this command for more options.

Step 3: Burn the .ISO image to CD.


I found the first solution easier and worked perfectly for me. Hope it can benefit you too.