VCS 1.11.1 released

• • English, Video Contact Sheet

Here's a very small bugfix release, nothing too fancy this time around:

– A name for the FLV1 codec (used in older flash videos)

– Warnings about the DEFAULT_* configuration variables accidentally removed in the previous release (and temporarily accept them)

– A check of ImageMagick's version that should work in all systems

Also new there's a PKGBUILD file for packaging for Arch.

vcs 1.11.1
http://p.outlyer.net/vcs/files/vcs-1.11.1.gz
deb, rpm, etc.
as usual at http://p.outlyer.net/vcs/

numcaps in configuration

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After a user report I noticed I should clarify: If you add, e.g. numcaps=10 to your configuration file you're changing the default number of captures but the default mode of operation is to capture at fixed intervals so to actually use this value you also have to add timecode_from=$TC_NUMCAPS to your configuration, which the changes the mode of operation to a fixed number of captures. E.g.:

$ cat ~/.vcs.conf
numcaps=20
timecode_from=$TC_NUMCAPS
cols=5

VCS 1.11 released

• • 3 Comments • English, Linux, Video Contact Sheet

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/

Refreshed mp3plot's Debian Sid packages

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I've just refreshed the Debian Sid packages for mp3plot with the newer dependencies. They're just re-built packages, nothing else changed.

The new packages can, as always, be found at mp3plot's site.

Also, I missed this one but FreeBSD's included version got up-to-date a mere ten days after the last release.

Documentation wiki is live

• • Leave a Comment • English, mp3plot, nautilus-follow-symlink, Projects, Video Contact Sheet

I've finally open access to the documentation wiki for vcs (and also mp3plot and nautilus-follow-symlink). It's far from complete, with a lot of stuff to add, but I'm moving there all documentation progressively so there's the place to look for help.

I started using MediaWiki but later scaled back to DokuWiki.

mp3plot 0.6.0 released

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mp3plot 0.6.0 is out. It started as a bugfix release for a nasty bug when dealing with free-format or broken files (reported by Tricky Trix, thanks pal 🙂 ) and eventually led me to (finally) implement support for "MP1" (MPEG-1 Layer I), "MP2" (MPEG-1 Layer II) and all three layers of MPEG-2. Such files can be found sometimes as disguised mp3s so this should be useful.

Also some other fixes including longstanding (brown paper bag) bugs. There's no doubt more of them in there, so report if you find something weird.

So in short previous versions should be ditched in favour of this one 😛

nautilus-follow-symlink 1.1 released

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There's a refreshed version of nautilus-follow-symlink. Nothing new (after all there's little to be added), but I'm finally letting GNOME set the icon instead of force-feeding it, so it should, hopefully, display an icon matching the user-chosen theme. And it should also be friendlier to build.


nautilus-follow-symlink popup menu for symbolic links

VCS working on FreeBSD

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As I wrote on the last update, I've been working on making vcs work on FreeBSD (and hopefully other non-GNU systems), there were quite a few problems that made it unusable outside GNU variants, but it's already working. Sort of:

FreeBSD Preview (small)

There's still some wrong details:
Like FreeBSD Heading Detail instead of Linux Heading Detail

or FreeBSD "Polaroid" mode sample instead of Linux "Polaroid" mode sample

But that's definitely better than not running at all 😛

The other major problem is I've no clue how the size of removable media should be retrieved (in a portable way). That's required when working with a real DVD (i.e. not a DVD ISO). The previous version used a method I disliked (fdisk -s) and that most probably would fail on everything but GNU. SO if you know of a right way of do so, drop me a line 🙂

Anyway, I'll publish this version RSN, even with this ugly bits and will look on how to fix that stuff later on.

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