temporaneità » English

Splitting MPG files with ffmpeg

Carlo — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 08:47:21 +0000

This is just a short reminder for me and a note for you: this one-liner might be helpful if you need to write a little script for splitting a long MPG file in shorter parts without quality loss (this example cuts from 40th minute to 1 hour).


ffmpeg -sameq -ab 256k -vcodec copy -acodec ac3 -ss 00:40:00 -t 01:00:00 -i M2U00014.MPG t2.mpg

This is the output of ffmpeg using a MPG file taken from my camera (low resolution mode).


Input #0, mpeg, from 'M2U00014.MPG':
  Duration: 00:04:30.68, start: 0.111722, bitrate: 3058 kb/s
    Stream #0.0[0x1e0]: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 64:45 DAR 16:9], 9100 kb/s, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc
    Stream #0.1[0x80]: Audio: ac3, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 256 kb/s
Output #0, mpeg, to 't2.mpg':
    Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg2video, yuv420p, 720x576 [PAR 64:45 DAR 16:9], q=2-31, 9100 kb/s, 90k tbn, 25 tbc
    Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 48000 Hz, stereo, s16, 256 kb/s

U10i Aino and CIFS

Carlo — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:16:03 +0000

My Sony Ericsson U10i Aino is able to join a Wi-Fi network and then export its file system using CIFS, so on my Ubuntu side I was able to mount it (and then rsync it, of course) with the following one-liner:

mount.cifs //$PHONE_IP/Memory\ Stick /mnt -o password=fake

genisoimage one-liner

Carlo — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 16:56:13 +0000

This is just a short reminder for me and a note for you: having recently remastered a CentOS, this one-liner might be helpful to properly create the small bootable ISO.

genisoimage -o $(date +'%H%M').iso -b isolinux/isolinux.bin \
-c isolinux/boot.cat -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table ./

I want my money back! :)

Carlo — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 07:27:42 +0000

A few days ago, Slashdot pointed out that the massive computers of the top investment banks failed their World Cup predictions: we are talking about firms like Danske Bank, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and UBS. Now everyone on Earth knows that an octopus correctly predicted ~~six~~ eight matches in a row. Hire that beast or give me back my money. :)

Time Lapse Across America

Carlo — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 09:25:53 +0000

Counting out a well known 3D science fiction movie, though it’s 9 minutes in length, Time Lapse Across America is the most interesting film I’ve seen in the just ended first half of 2010: it’s a coast to coast trip made with pictures taken every 15 seconds. It might recall your last trip in the USA or the road just around the corner… it could make you think about the huge energy needed to literally run our society, or you could simply sit back in their car and relax!

They suggest putting on the full screen option and enjoying it: I’ve also downloaded their mov file. It’s really worth a try.

PHP5 class for bit.ly API

Carlo — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 06:11:41 +0000

Having chosen to convert a bunch of long URLs using bit.ly, I slightly modified and packaged in a simple PHP5 class the code written by David Walsh.

The following is an example of usage of this class:


$mbit = new BitlyWalsh($login, $apiKey);

echo $mbit->getShort($yourLongUrl);
// echo $mbit->getLong($bitlyShortUrl);

You can download here this basic class.

Caring about what?

Carlo — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 08:13:26 +0000

I spent most of the last two days helping my mother after her cataract surgery so only yesterday evening I noticed the statement of our friend Carl-Henric Svanberg: as everyboby knows, he said that “We (BP) care about the small people”.

Was it just a weak sentence of a non mother-tongue speaker? Perhaps, but even though he is a top manager of one of the Supermajors, we should not forget he is the chairman of a British company so he might have been referring to the little people, which suits his greedy company best! :-\

Google Spelling

Carlo — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 13:31:10 +0000

I’ve written a short PHP script that outputs what I call “the Google spelling” :) a 26 words list of the most frequent words/phrases taken from Google Suggest.

You can also pass the language to it, so the today’s (2010-06-07) English list is

amazon
bank of america
craigslist
dictionary
ebay
facebook
gmail
hotmail
imdb
jet blue
kohls
lowes
myspace
netflix
orbitz
pandora
quotes
realtor.com
southwest airlines
target
usps
verizon wireless
walmart
xm radio
youtube
zillow

while the today’s (2010-06-07) Italian list is

alice mail
badoo.com
corriere della sera
dizionario italiano
ebay
facebook
google maps
hotmail
ikea
justin tv
kijiji
libero
meteo
netlog
oroscopo
pagine bianche
quattroruote
ryanair
subito.it
trenitalia
unicredit
virgilio
wikipedia
xscores
youtube
zara

Credits: Rajamanickam Antonimuthu and Brad Dierking.

HP Compaq LA2405wg with Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid

Carlo — Thu, 20 May 2010 11:58:04 +0000

The HP Compaq LA2405wg is a 24” TFT monitor that works at 1900×1200: I use it as the external monitor of my new notebook (ASUS UL30A). Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid doesn’t have a xorg.conf file: it tried to get the correct resolution on the fly but it wasn’t able to guess the right resolution for the HP monitor. The following commands were helpful to set it up properly.


~$ gtf 1920 1200 60 # which output was

1920x1200 @ 60.00 Hz (GTF) hsync: 74.52 kHz; pclk: 193.16 MHz Modeline "1920x1200_60.00"  193.16  1920 2048 2256 2592  1200 1201 1204 1242  -HSync +Vsync

~$ xrandr # to get the output name (which was VGA1 in my case)

~$ xrandr --newmode "1920x1200_60.00"  193.16  1920 2048 2256 2592  1200 1201 1204 1242  -HSync +Vsync

~$ xrandr --addmode VGA1 "1920x1200_60.00"

~$ xrandr --output VGA1 --mode "1920x1200_60.00"

Datepicker’s maxDate and ZendX_JQuery_Form_Element_DatePicker

Carlo — Thu, 13 May 2010 20:31:38 +0000

This is just a short reminder for me and a note for you: it seems that jQuery Datepicker is not able to handle Date object as a value for minDate or maxDate parameters, at least when the jQuery object is called in the constructor of a ZendX_JQuery_Form_Element_DatePicker object: strings like '-1' work fine, though.