Quick Start

NeroLINUX Advanced functions •
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4.4.1 Specifying the decoder
This first point splits up into some basic information about the type of data your
decoder plug-in will deliver and what NeroLINUX is to make of it.
First, is the Track Type: It can be one of data or audio and will tell NeroLINUX
which type of track it is to create. The PC flag specifies whether NeroLINUX is to
precache files of this type prior to burning. If your recorder does not support some
way of buffer-underrun protection and is rather fast, it can easily happen that your
computer is unable to decode e.g. an MP3 file quickly enough. Just turn on the
PC flag in this case and everything is alright.
Next, NeroLINUX needs to know which endianness the output of your decoder
has: Unfortunately, this may depend upon your system's endianness, e.g.
mpg123 will output little endian on Intel compatible systems while it will output
big endian on e.g. PowerPC systems. Either way, NeroLINUX has to know
about the endianness, otherwise you will hear nothing but static. Simple
approach: If you hear static while trying to preview your track, change the
endianness in your decoder settings.
Now for the most important thing: you have to specify the name of a command
line tool capable of decoding your file type. Ideally, it should be able to receive its
input through stdin and send its output to stdout. In most cases, it is sufficient if
sending output to stdout is supported. You can specify $filename in this case
which will be replaced by the respective file on your hard drive.
Note, however, that future extensions like burning directly from ftp servers will not
be supported using that scheme. The output produced by your decoder must be
16Bit, Stereo, 44.1 KHz. If your decoder cannot create this type of signal, you can
use a chain of decoders to accomplish that goal by specifying multiple command
line decoders, separated by the '|' (piping character).
4.4.2 Calculating the track size
Calculating the track size is extremely important for on-the-fly recording as
NeroLINUX has to know how big the track is going to be prior to actually
decoding your file. To find out about the track size, NeroLINUX has a few built-in
methods referenced by $filesize, $mp3size and $wavsize. All three of them are
pseudo-variables which change their value according to the track's properties.
Apart from that, NeroLINUX supports calling an external program to detect the
track size and provides basic parsing functionality for arbitrary output. The last
two fields in a decoder entry are responsible for that.
 The first one specifies the command line program whose output is to be
parsed
 The second one specifies the function used to translate the output into a
number representing the length of the track in Bytes.
While the first field may remain blank if you do not need an external tool for track
size calculation, the second field must always contain a function resolving to the
track size in bytes.
If you need to specify an external tool for track size calculation, the first thing you
will have to do is to setup the calling syntax for that program. Enter what you
would type on the command line to retrieve e.g. the playing time of your file with