bloggingIT

Steve and I have been working on a YouTube video downloader based in PHP. One of the features that I’ve been adding in is the ability to upload videos of any format and be encoded into a FLV, just like those big YouTube sites.

One of the problems I’ve been having is that the WMV videos race through at over 10 times the speed of the video, and leave the audio playing at normal speed. This, apparently, has to do with WMVs (and any ASF-based video) using a variable frame rate.

To get around this, you simply need to set a frame rate manually with -ofps. So, to convert a video from WMV to Flash video, you’d need a command like this:

mencoder MyVid.wmv -o MyVid.flv -of lavf -oac mp3lame -lameopts abr:br=56 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=flv:vbitrate=400:mbd=2:mv0:trell:v4mv:cbp:last_pred=3 -srate 22050 -ofps 25

This will keep the frame rate to 25 fps. Now, all I need to do is work out how to get the correct frame rate for the whole video…

I’m not big on sending my files over the internet to random websites - but the boys over at Media Convert have done a sterling job to create a 1-stop file conversion site.

I was struggling to find a program that would convert an OpenOffice Draw file (.odg) into something easily read on Windows. Eventually I settled on converting it to a PNG.

The process was painless. Upload the file, wait a few moments, and then download the converion.

The site even does music and video formats, as well as a raft of others.

Rock on.

Today, I had to setup an Oki C5650 on a network, and find out how many pages had passed through it due to an surprisingly quick turnaround in toner. I was struggling to find the default admin password for the web interface as it wasn’t in the online manual.

Knowling that searching the internet is much better than my library abilities, I managed to find the password at Art of Hacking. In true form, there’s a very useful page that has user collected default passwords for thousands of devices. And in true hacking form, it’s called etc/passwd.

I upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron over the weekend. The process was relatively painless, and some of the upgrades made little, but nice, improvements.

Finally, the UPNP media rendering functionality in Rhythmbox is working!

To set this up, you need to access the command line, and install the pyhton-coherence package:

sudo apt-get install python-coherence

Once installed, fire up Rhythmbox, and click on Edit > Plugins.

Once there, tick the box for DLNA/UPnP to enable UPnP.

Click Close and you should see a new shared tab on the left, which will list your network UPnP servers.

It’s somewhat limited in that it doesn’t present you with the various folder views that other media renderers will - but at least you can pick out music from network devices.

Cool.

Well, I’m very excited.

The Beeb have made it possible for Wii users to watch streaming video with the iPlayer.

Right now, UK Wii owners who use the Internet Channel (£3.50 to you squire) can visit the iPlayer website and watch TV right now.

There are also hints that an iPlayer channel for the Wii will be available some time in the future (hopefully for free, but likely to be bundled with the Internet Channel).

This is great for that media convergent home. Ironically, the Wii is the console least likely to be touted as a multimedia center - and yet it’s the first of the current generation of consoles to be able to play the content.

Word is that the Playstation 3 will not be far behind - but Microsoft’s XBox360 will be unlikely to take part unless a deal can be made between MS and BBC.

I think that if the iPlayer Channel does manifest itself - I’ll be spending much more time on the Wii. Potentially, this could knock out a whole load of the Sky+ box’s usefulness along with it.

It seems that this is old news generally, but I found Mario Paint Composer on the Internet yesterday. It was actually due to a YouTube video (why the hell I ended up looking at a Rick Astley song I still don’t know).

Of course, there is not one but two composer programs emulating the features of Mario Paint. The other is Mario Sequencer, which was originally written in Japanese. Luckily the website hosts an English version.

I’ve found that sequencer seems to have better timing, but Composer has a slightly nicer interface.

I was musing on being able to use this in schools as a basic synthesizer for primary kids. It has everything they need, such as tempo and different sounds. Most importantly, the sounds are fun and absurd.

I’m currently working on my Mario Paint version of ‘Faithealer’…