Month: October 2005

Making thumbnails for movies with ffmpeg

I am slowly publishing our movie clips to my gallery. Gallery software has an excellent ffmpeg plugin that automatically creates thumbnails for movies so that it is very easy to see what is what. The only shortcoming it has is that it is not possible pick the frame from the clip for the thumbnail. It always takes the first one. Or maybe I just haven’t found out how to work aorund it.

Anyway, the good thing is that Gallery also allows to use custom thumbnails for albums and files. This comes very handy when the clip that you’ve posted starts with a second or two of black screne. Or some other non-sense. All you have to do than is running the following command:

[me@here dir]$ ffmpeg -y -i someclip.avi  \
[me@here dir]> -f singlejpeg -ss 10 -vframes 1 \
[me@here dir]> -s 150x100 -an thumb.jpg

Obviously you’d want to change a few things here. someclip.avi should be the name of you movie clip file that ffmpeg will be processing. thumb.jpg is the name of the file to save the thumbnail in. 10 nearby the -ss option tells ffmpeg how many seconds from the start of the clip you want to skip. If you want to skip a few minutes or hours, or specify a split second, then check ffmpeg manual for the syntax. And the last option that should be interesting for you is the -s which in my example has the value of 150×100 – the size of the image in pixels (X,Y).

Cinderella Man

Cinderella Man (2005)I rented “Cinderella Man” because it was on of the few new movies available on DVD that had a high rating and a known star in it – Russell Crowe.

Directed by: Ron Howard
Genres: Biography, Drama, Sport
Cast: Russell Crowe, Renée Zellweger, Paul Giamatti, Craig Bierko, Paddy Considine, Bruce McGill, David Huband, Connor Price, Ariel Waller, Patrick Louis, Rosemarie DeWitt, Linda Kash, Nicholas Campbell, Gene Pyrz, Chuck Shamata
IMDB raintg: 8.0
My rating: 8.5 [rate 8.5]

Continue reading Cinderella Man

The sweet del.icio.us inbox

This time I am one of the last people to discover the new feature – Delicious inbox. And I will write about here anyway, because new people are born every day and eventually they will grow up old enough to need to know about it. And when they do, there is a chance that they will read about it here and not on every other page on the web.

So, Delicious inbox is a sweet feature that allows you, as a user, to subscribe to bookmarks made by certain other users, or marked by certain tags, or both. From now on, you don’t have to subscribe one billion RSS feeds to find out what’s hot in “photography”, or “parenting”, or what your wife has been bookmarking, or what your sysadmin has learned about Linux. You can get all these in one nice RSS feed from your Delicious inbox.

It’s easy to ignore the rest.

I blew it with the revenge

I had a good opportunity to get a sweet revenge today, but I totally blew it. And now I don’t like myself very much.

As you might know I am working a lot of night shifts these days. That’s all good because I was the one to choose such a schedule. There is one downside though. There are only a couple of guys who are changing me in the morning. And one of these guys can’t ever wake up before 7:00am, when he is supposed to come. So for the last couple of years he was always late. He came anywhere from ten minutes to an hour later. Every time.

Today though there was a different scenario. It happened that he was doing a night shift and I was supposed to come in the morning and change him. I was very glad when I saw this in the schedule. In fact, I got so excited that I sent him an email describing how late I will come and how good that will feel to me and how misarable he feel to actually call me in the morning and beg me to wake up. You can imagine.

And what do I do? Yes, you are right. I totally forget that I am changing him and I set my alarm clock for 6:20. 6:59 I am in the office. When I saw that it was him in the office, I was SO pissed off with myself! How stupid can I be? DAMN IT!

Actually, I almost did The Grand Stupidity today and it was only by luck that I managed to avoid it.

Continue reading I blew it with the revenge