August, 2008

Miscellaneous — No Comments
27
Aug 08

Don’t worry (and be happier!)

After upgrading KVM, today I was greeted by it with the following message:

vmport: unknown command 13

Do not worry about it, KVM is not going nuts and it is still using your virtualization extensions. That’s why one wants to have a recent 64-bit machine. For the rest of stuff, my old (32-bit) iBook was even better. If you do not believe me, just try to build a big C++ application with less than 2GB of RAM and GCC 4… and enjoy watching the OOM killer act.

In short: things are nicer after a week of holidays, warning are still just warnings and Bash can be moulded nearly to whatever task one may want :D

Recipes — No Comments
6
Aug 08

Recipe: Add indexes to your AVI videos

Those days I have been using xvidcap to make nice screencasts, and my xvidcap build generates adding indexes to generated AVI files, so they are not seekable. Fortunately we can (ab)use mencoder to add indexes to them without re-encoding our nice videos. Change to the directory containing your videos and just cook the following shell recipe:

$ for i in *.avi ; do
   mv "$i" "$i.orig" && \\
   mencoder "$i.orig" -forceidx -oac copy -ovc copy -o "$i" && \\
   rm "$i.orig"
done

If you have a lot of video files you can take your time to enjoy a cup of coffee in the meanwhile. On command completion you will have indexed (and seekable!) video files.