The problem#

I've somehow multiple times ended up with corrupted video files such that they're cut off at some point, apparently due to a copy being interrupted or similar. As a result, I'm a bit paranoid about my video files not being what I expect, so I wanted a way to quickly check the length and view the start and end of many videos.

The solution#

The following script check_video_length.sh, takes any number of video files as arguments, and one-by-one, prints out the length in minutes, and player the first and last 10 seconds of the video (or less if you press q to quit MPlayer sooner):

#!/usr/bin/sh

for video in "$@"
do
    seconds=$(mediainfo "$video" --Output=JSON
              | jq '.media.track[0].Duration' | tr -d '"')
    minutes="$(echo "scale=2; $seconds" / 60 | bc)"

    echo "$video is $minutes minutes long."
    echo "Playing $video from start first 10 seconds..."
    mplayer -osdlevel 3 -endpos 10 "$video" >/dev/null 2>&1 
    echo "Playing $video from 10 seconds before end..."
    mplayer -osdlevel 3 -ss "$(echo "$seconds" - 10\
        | bc)" "$video" >/dev/null 2>&1
    echo
done

The details#

The problem#

Sometimes I have a long video that I only want a shorter section of. Maybe it's a TV show that I want to clip a funny scene out of. Or a video of a concert that I want to clip the individual songs out of so I can put them into my music library. But figuring out exactly where to start and end the clip so there's no weird sounds or flashes due to accidentally including the surrounding video takes some care.

The solution#

In order to determine the right clip location, I wanted an easy way to repeatedly watch and listen to the start or end of a proposed clip and get immediate feedback on adjusting its position frame-by-frame.

find_split is a script that implements this workflow. You give it a video, a proposed frame index to split the video on, a preview context length in number of frames, and whether the preview should be the video before (to the left of) or after (to the right of) the split. It plays the preview window ending or starting at the proposed split and waits for the user to press a key indicating how to move the proposed split and then repeats, starting by playing that preview. Once you've confirmed you've determined the desired frame index, press ` (or just Ctrl+c) to exit. The full keyboard controls are described at the link.

$ ./find_split video.mkv 1000 60 left
Playing video.mkv on left of split at 1000 \(with 60 extra frames\).
Playing video.mkv on left of split at 1060 \(with 60 extra frames\).

The second line appears after typing Shift+h to increase the proposed frame index by 60 after the first clip finishes. That means the second clip played will be from frame 1000 to frame 1060, so about two seconds (60 frames) long starting at approximately 33 seconds into the video. You can continue to adjust the position until you've decided you've determined the correct frame.

Once you have found the start and end frames (here 1060 to 2034), you can save the clip to a file:

$ ./encode_frames video.mkv 1060 2034 clip.mkv av

(Change the av to audio if you only want the audio and not the video.)

The details#

Calculating π the hard way#

In honor of Pi Day, I was going to try to write a script that computed π in shell, but given the lack of floating point support, I decided it would be too messy. If you want to see hard to follow code to generate π, I highly recommend the IOCCC entry westley.c from 1998, the majority of which is an ASCII art circle which calculates its own area and radius in order to estimate π. The hint file suggests looking at the output of

$ cc -E westley.c

The 2012 entry, endoh2 is also a pretty amazing π calculator.

Getting π#

Instead, I will just generate π the shell way: using another program.

$ python -c 'import math; print(math.pi)'
3.14159265359

The goal#

Given a series of images, present them in a video with a blend effect between the images. The frames between the input frames should gradually transition between the previous and next image. This, and other transition effects, could likely be implemented using a slideshow generator, but it can also be done quite easily using a shell script.

The script#

The final script I wrote is blend.sh. The following commands fetch and run it:

$ wget https://gist.githubusercontent.com/dperelman/2b4b86233aa13d13c0ab/raw/91c7988e27288af8aeb25ade11d0cab90355702f/blend.sh
$ chmod +x blend.sh
$ ./blend.sh slideshow.mkv first.png second.jpg third.gif
$ mplayer slideshow.mkv

The input images may be in any format. The extension of slideshow.mkv will be used by FFmpeg to guess the desired video format (H.264 in a Matroska Multimedia Container for .mkv).

The problem#

Yesterday, I proposed using a hash function to choose colors:

ps1_color="32;38;5;$((0x$(hostname | md5sum | cut -f1 -d' ' | tr -d '\n' | tail -c2)))"

I did not discuss two issues with this approach:

1. Colors may be too similar to other colors, such that they are not useful.
2. Some colors may be undesirable altogether, particularly very dark ones may be too similar to a black terminal background color.