VCS 1.11 released

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In this post:

Release notes

Finally a new version of vcs, and it brings a truckload of changes. So many in fact that it will probably break in new and unexpected ways but so far it has been working quite fine.

The major improvement will probably be the tweaks to video duration detection that should get rid of the dreaded "Failed to capture…" on the last capture.

Other new features worth mentioning:

  • Height can be defined as a percentage (-H 25%) or set configuration files (th_height=160)
  • Output filename can now be set manually (-o file)
  • Lots of small cosmetic tweaks, from default font and heading background, to tighter padding or smaller timestamps. And the ability to tweak or disable padding.
  • Support for DVD has been revamped and should work much better now.
  • FreeBSD users are now (mostly) first class citizens for vcs 😉
  • More concise --help output, added --fullhelp for the whole bore
  • Handling of non-latin filenames makes a lot more sense now
  • And last but not least, the usual lot of bugfixes, better detection of video features, better aspect ratio detection, new codec names, etc.

On a more mundane note, no longer both MPlayer and FFmpeg are required, either one will do (although both will render best results), bc is no longer required.

Also, I'm providing an rpm package too this time around.

And finally this version will work on bash 2.05b, in case you're using some tight system like DSL.

In case you wonder how the hell did I count to make 1.11 follow 1.0.100a, I just remembered I should bump the version when new features are added, and re-counted versions. Lame I know but at least numbering should make more sense now.

Important I forgot to add warnings about this: If you're using a configuration file, there's been some renamings: DEFAULT_NUMCAPS is now numcaps, DEFAULT_INTERVAL is now interval and DEFAULT_COLS is now cols.

Edit: 1.11.1 fixes this: warns about their usage and accepts them for now.

A note for everyone (but specially for porn aficionados)

Please, if at all possible link directly whenever you discuss vcs. I know many communities prefer to use link redirections to keep referrer hidden but knowing how people is using or what they're saying about vcs helps me in improving and fixing it.

I know full well such a script caters to pr0n uploaders and I'm not offended, no need to hide 😉

Conversely, if you know of any discussion about vcs feel free to let me know so that I can jump in or steal get ideas from it.

BTS and Documentation

Finally, in case you didn't notice, the documentation site has received a lot of love and now is much more useful, and I've also opened a bug tracker in case you prefer it to e-mail.

Documentation: http://p.outlyer.net/dox/vcs
BTS: http://b.outlyer.net/

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3 thoughts on “VCS 1.11 released”

  1. John

    After upgrading to VCS 1.11 I receive the following error messages in Ubuntu Karmic:

    convert: unable to read font `DejaVu-Sans-Book' @ annotate.c/RenderType/1075.

    Changing lines 267 and 268 to read:

    declare font_tstamps=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf # Used for timestamps over the thumbnails
    declare font_heading=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf # Used for the meta info heading

    fixed this.

    1. Toni

      Hi John, and thanks for using the script 🙂 Here're a couple notes regarding your issue:

      First of all, editing the script is usually not required. In this case, you can achieve the same result by creating a file named either /etc/vcs.conf or ~/.vcs.conf and adding to it:

      font_tstamps=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf
      font_heading=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf

      Or even tighter:
      font_tstamps=/usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf
      font_heading=$font_tstamps

      Second… I'm surprised Karmic's ImageMagick recognizes DejaVu with a different name than Debian Sid, but anyway, you can get its actual name with
      $ convert -list font | grep -B 5 /usr/share/fonts/truetype/ttf-dejavu/DejaVuSans.ttf | head -1 in case you prefer to use a symbolic name instead of a path.

      I know it's annoying since it gets printed a lot of times but ImageMagick falls back to some other font. Nonetheless I might add some workaround if every OS turns out to name fonts differently. Thanks for the report.

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